Rise Up! Common Knowledge Against Financial Capitalism
Call for Rise Up!
24th-25th-26th of March, 2011
Common Knowledge Against Financial Capitalism
We, the student and precarious workers of Europe and all around the world met in Paris over the weekend of the 11th-13th of February, 2011 to discuss and organize a common network based on our common struggles. Our name is Knowledge Liberation Front, and we’re your crisis!
In fact, over the last few years our movement has assumed Europe as the space of conflicts against the corporatization of the university and precariousness. This meeting in Paris and the revolutionary movements across the Mediterranean allow us to take an important step towards a new Europe against austerity, starting from the revolts in Maghreb.
We are a generation who lives precariousness as a permanent condition: the university is no longer an elevator of upward social mobility but rather a factory of precariousness. Nor is the university a closed community: our struggles for a new welfare, against precarity and for the free circulation of knowledge and people don’t stop at its gates.
Our common network is based on our struggles against the Bologna Process and against the education cuts Europe is using as a response to the crisis.
Since the state and private interests collaborate in the corporatization process of the university, our struggles don’t have the aim of defending the status quo. Governments bail out banks and cut education. We want to make our own university – a university that lives in our experiences of autonomous education, alternative research and free schools. It is a free university, run by students, precarious workers and migrants, a university without borders.
We have created and improved our common claims: free access to the university against increasing fees and costs of education, new welfare and common rights against debt and the financialization of our lives, and for an education based on cooperation against competition and hierarchies.
So we, Knowledge Liberation Front, call for common and transnational days of action on the 24th-25th-26th of March, 2011: against banks, debt system and austerity measures, for free education and free circulation of people and knowledge.
Make actions, make autonomy, make our university:
make capitalism history!
Fighting and cooperating, this is our Common!
The Social Science Centre
The Social Science Centre provides an opportunity for students and academics to have a very special co-operative experience of higher education. All courses are taught and assessed at the same level as similar courses in mainstream universities in the UK. The courses are taught by experienced academics, including professors and lecturers with national and international reputations based on the quality of their scholarship in the social sciences.
One of the unique features of the Centre is that it is run as a ‘not-for-profit’ workers’ co-operative. The Centre is managed on democratic, non-hierarchical principles with all students and staff having an equal involvement in how the Centre operates.
Harrier and Jaguar: A Report on the Power of the Powerless
This time they were ready. An army of occupation with battle lines drawn, diagonally and in parallel, across Parliament Square. With clear lines of sight, the trap was set around the House of Commons, waiting for the enemy to arrive.
The Police knew they were coming. They could follow the progress of the movement of resistance as it made its way through the West End of London. Their advance was given away by TV and Police helicopters circling above in the clear blue winter sky.
I caught up with the march at Trafalgar Square.
Reimagine the university
Opening Education Beyond the Property Relation: From Commons to Communism
A paper for the Open Education 2010 conference. Comments and criticism are encouraged. Thank you.
Introduction
The opening of education beyond the property relation is distinguished by two terms that are often used interchangeably, yet retain subtle differences: Open Education and Open Educational Resources.
Open Education refers to recent efforts by individuals and organisations across the world to use the Internet to share knowledge, ideas, teaching practices, infrastructure, tools and resources, inside and outside formal educational settings. Through collaboration and experimentation, new pedagogies and curricula are emerging. Although the term Open Education has been used since the 1960s, the current dominant use of the term refers to co-ordinated efforts during the past decade to exploit the growing availability of personal computers and increasingly ubiquitous high speed networks.
Open Educational Resources (OER) refers to both the worldwide community effort to create an educational commons and the actual “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute” (Wikipedia). Typically, those resources are made available under a Creative Commons license and include both learning resources and tools by which those resources are created, managed and disseminated. As both a means of protecting and liberating research, teaching and learning materials, OER relies heavily on the use of open licenses, all of which are in one way or another derived from the General Public License (GPL) and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) licenses first created in 1989. Since the 1990s, software has been created and distributed using such licenses and it is widely acknowledged that Creative Commons was inspired by, and drew experience from, the use of open licenses in the world of software.
In just ten years, a relatively small number of educators have created a discernible movement that has attracted millions of pounds from philanthropic and state funding. This movement, growing out of hundreds of universities, colleges, schools and other organisations, has produced tens of thousands of educational resources, often entire course materials, that can be accessed by anyone with access to the Internet. Today, there are international consortia, conferences, NGOs and government reports that promote the opening up of education, to which Open Education and OERs are central.
Open Education is a pragmatic response by educators and researchers to the growth of the Internet, using a widespread technology to undertake what its advocates see as both a public good and to exploit an opportunity to effect educational reform. The question remains open as to whether Open Education and OER constitute a revolution in teaching and learning, as their proponents claim (Cape Town Open Education Declaration).
OpenEd 2010 conference paper accepted
Opening Education beyond the property relation: from commons to communism.
We contend that Marx’s mature theory against capitalist work provides the substantial intellectual basis on which to theorise Open Education as a revolutionary practice.
On Thinking Theoretically
Empirical and Real
When discussing universities in the UK there is a tendency to focus on the institutional forms in which they appear: the University of Leeds, the University of Oxford, the University of Brighton, the Open University, etc. Universities as institutions, empirical and real, defined by the functions they fulfil. These functions are broadly, the production of knowledge through research, teaching students to obtain qualifications to equip them for the world of work. And all of this is to contribute to the well being of a rational society.
Issues
Having established the institutionalised forms in which universities appear it is then possible to consider their current predicament: too few/ too many students, the reduction of public funding tied to a more regulatory relation with the state, and associated with that an increasing managerialist culture based on practices of the private sector, e.g. performance indicators, quality audits and students as consumers.
Divided: ‘silly clubs’
The division of universities into discrete institutions is compounded by the way in which universities attempt to deal with this situation. Divided into different interest groups, ‘silly clubs’ as Sir Peter Scott recently referred to them. This culture of competition is further exacerbated by HEFCE, inviting universities to think more clearly about their unique selling points so as to be better able to sell their own vision and mission and brand of higher education.
Consequences
The consequences of all of this is crisis in the everyday life of the university: First, redundancies, intensification of work, strikes and unrest, decline in academic autonomy and independence, lack of public awareness or interest, not to mention student unemployment, poverty and debt. Secondly a crisis in the idea of the university – we talk of HE rather than the university, with no real sense of the meaning and purpose of the university
Academic Freedom: a functionalist ideal
In this dysfunctional world the functionalist ideal of HE is no longer sustainable. A recourse to functionalist justifications for academic work, e.g. academic freedom, is no longer tenable. It is not that academic freedom is not an ideal worth defending, it is, but it no longer an ideal that provides any real defence for academics, or legitimation for what we do, or how even we should go about doing it.
University as Social Form: against functionalism
There is another way of thinking about universities, not as institutional forms, with a specific function, but as social forms, or determinate abstraction. No less empirical and no less real than the University of Leeds, etc, but a reality that is in need of further elaboration if we are to understand their real nature and how that nature might be transformed.
As a social form the university is the limit of what we know about ourselves as a society, knowledge at the level of society, with the capacity to expand what we know: as science – natural and social, humanities, arts and culture: and to do this exponentially, limited only by our own capacity and our need to know.
Marx discusses the issue of the social expansion of knowing in the Grundrisse. He uses the expressions: social brain, the general powers of the human head, general social knowledge and the general intellect. Marx is theorising the knowledge society in advance of the knowledge society.
In capitalist society the general intellect has been appropriated by the expansive process of capitalist production, and turned against the individuals, academics and students, who produced that knowledge. The logic of the expansive process of capitalist production is used as the justification for the continuing destruction of the social, cultural, natural, animal, human world.
In capitalist society, the main manifestation of this form of appropriation is the university and the system of knowledge creation it supports.
Re-appropriation: Learning Landscapes, Student as Producer and Pedagogy of Excess
What do we do as critical social theorists? Defend what we have already created and, if the issue is to reclaim knowledge at the level of society for the social individuals that created it, we must dissolve the contemporary entrepreneurial university and reconstitute the university in another more progressive form.
This reconstituted university should be based not on academic freedom: freedom for academics, but on mass intellectuality (Negri et al): knowledge production is something that anyone can do (to paraphrase the students in Paris in 1968). How do we do this?
Firstly, a fundamental reappraisal of the learning landscapes of higher education based on the concept of the idea of the university.
Secondly, reconstitute the relationship between student and academics – not as student as consumer, but as student as producer: students working in collaboration with academics as part of the academic project of the university.
Thirdly, base this on a pedagogy of excess – not students acting as students but as revealers of a general crisis, raising the protest to the level of society, in excess of where their student education might have been expected to take them, and us.
All of this is our responsibility as academics and students to create the framework for a critical and intellectual debate.
Bearing in mind, there are no happy endings.
