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!

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.

Read more…

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.

Read more

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).

Read the paper in full…

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.

Read more …

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.

First published on The University of Utopia

150 character abstract:

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.

500 word outline:

Open Education, and specifically the OER movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and the increasing privatisation of the public education system. In this paper we examine this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education to the test of critical political economy. We acknowledge the OER movement’s revolutionary potential but outline the inherent limitations of its current focus on the commons (property relations) rather than the social relations of capitalist production (wage work, the Company) and because of this, argue that it will only achieve limited, rather than revolutionary, impact.

In the first part of the paper, we suggest how, despite the widespread use of open licenses, the universal claims for Open Education remain fettered by the social relations out of which OER are derived. Notwithstanding open licensing, OER is attempting to subvert the commodification of knowledge (private property) only to reinforce the commodification of the teacher through a currency of attribution and an emphasis on technology (wage relation), and provide a further opportunity to commodify the reputation of the university brand (the Company).

In the second part of the paper, we show how Marxism has similarly sought to address the enclosure of property through the notion of commons. The significance of the concept of the commons is that it attempts to undermine capitalist property relations through an awareness and development of the notion of collective ownership and what we have in common (e.g. Dyer-Witheford 2007, Hardt 2008). While this critique does attempt to confront the limits of private property it fails to provide a real alternative to the commodification of knowledge and in the end does not get beyond the enclosure of existing property relations. (Clarke 1991)

In the final part of the paper, we offer a framework for openness based not simply on a radical understanding of private property, but rather on the social relations out of which the property relation is derived: the productive relations of capitalist work. We propose that Marx’s original theory of communism is the most adequate critical social theory on which to build a really open society in which “each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge” (Cape Town Open Education Declaration 2007). We find encouragement for our approach in the original hacker ethic (Himanen 2001), which produced not only a fundamental challenge to the logic of ownership and private property (Weber 2005) but also a model of social relations that offers an alternative to capitalist work (Benkler 2006). However, the potential for Open Source production remains unfulfilled as its emancipatory social practice is not matched by an emancipatory social theory. We contend that Marx’s mature theory against capitalist work provides the substantial intellectual basis on which to re-theorise revolutionary pedagogical practice.

This paper will be of interest to teachers who, through Open Education, seek to find a way to connect their own radical pedagogy with revolutionary social theory, and so intellectualise the actualities of teaching (Mclean 2006).

References

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.

Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007) http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/

Clarke, S. (1991) Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber. 2nd Ed. MacMillan.

Dyer-Witheford, N. (2007) Commonism. Turbulence 1. http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/

Hardt, M. (2008) The Commons in Communism. http://seminaire.samizdat.net/The-Common-in-Communism.html

Himanen, P. (2001) The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Secker & Warburg.

Mclean, M. (2006) Pedagogy and the University. Critical Theory and Practice. Continuum.

Weber, S. (2005) The Success of Open Source. Harvard University Press.

We do not need education without needing a world that is being destroyed.

Our emphasis is on education: within the reality of our social relations, confined by the struggle of daily life, against the hierarchical relations between institutions, academics and students.

We share our work in education so that one day we might become free through education. It can feel like a hopeless act of hope yet as a conscious act of anti-alienation, sharing can be emancipatory.

We have been objectified as Teachers and Learners. These are illusory concepts. Sharing is to resist the commodification of our lives and escape the measures of Capital, its controls of ‘quality’ and its life-support machine of ‘efficiency’.

Sharing brings curricula to life as a flow of ideas, an unstoppable, irrepressible mass intellectuality that recognises no disciplines and responds to every act of discipline.

The institutionalisation of sharing is the absorption of sharing into the alienating processes of the institution. As a flight for freedom, it is in vain. The Crisis remains.

The locus of struggle is not exchange but production. In the sphere of production, sharing as a revolutionary act becomes a recognition of what is common. There is nothing revolutionary about acts of exchange.

Sharing our work in this way is an act of communal production. There is no exchange, no gift, simply a flow of contributions to the commons. Every factory, every street, every village, every school is a potential commune, a site of communal production, seeking to dissolve the question of needs.

Existing borders are irrelevant when we recall the humanity in sharing, the joy of giving and receiving, the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists, and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.

The desire for communism is a productive desire that finds nothing lacking. We express this desire by sharing, understood as a social force, or a curricula of action against a world that is being destroyed.

To share is to critique the present state of things. The conditions of this critique result from the premises now in existence. Sharing is the negation of our negation.

Inside and Outside the University

Common sense, mass intellectuality and the general intellect

COMMON SENSE

As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised labels of academics and students and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we are able to operate in and against the university. We offer our work as an act of solidarity with those who wish to engage with our ideas. In offering our work as a free gift we recognise the limitations of giving. Reduced from being to having we are now reduced to giving: alienated acts of generosity (i.e. Charity) based on a recognition of the needs of others and an assumption of their incapacity to fulfil those needs (i.e Anomie). No. Our concept of sharing requires further elaboration. Not having, or giving, but doing. In other words our concept of sharing is based on a recognition of what we all have in common, the basis of which is our ability to do. In the Worker-State (i.e. Capitalism), in which all activity is regulated by wage work, doing is reduced to acquiring what has been done by others through the exchange of money (i.e. Poverty). We refer to this understanding of Crisis (i.e. the Violence of Abstraction) as common sense. Common sense is not a network or a matrix, it is not physical or virtual, but a pedagogy or way of knowing, that is elaborated in the lessons learned from the history of class struggle. Common sense is the basis of our intellectual not-working (i.e. Doing).

MASS INTELLECTUALITY

As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of widening participation, and engage with teaching, learning and research only so far as we are able to dissolve the institutional boundaries of the university. Not mass education or education for the masses but mass intellectuality. Mass education is based on the assumption that people are stupid and must be made not-stupid (i.e. Educated). Mass intellectuality recognises that education maintains the population in a condition of stupidity (i.e. Intelligence Quotient) regulated through examinations and other forms of humiliations (i.e. Grades and Assessments). Mass intellectuality is based on our common ability to do, based on our needs and capacities and what needs to be done. What needs to be done raises doing from the level of the individual to the level of society. In the society of doing, based on what needs to be done, my own needs are subsumed with the needs of others and I become invisible (i.e. Free).

GENERAL INTELLECT

As intellectual workers we prefer to share our work with others inside and outside of the university. As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance). In the society of abundance the university as an institutional form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect). It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the global emergencies with which we are all confronted.

Printed leaflet version