Professor Richard Hall

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Social sustainability, mass intellectuality and
the idea of the University
Professor Richard Hall _at_hallymk1
rhall1_at_dmu.ac.uk richard-hall.org Building
Sustainable Societies. 30 June 2014.
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Three statements on the University and the
secular crisis. ONE. Our labour as students and
staff is folded inside a systemic, historical
crisis of capitalism. This secular crisis demands
a courageous political return. TWO. Historical,
socialised value is being accumulated by
associations of capitals acting transnationally
through commodification, financialisation and
coercion. This is a material reality, and we are
told that there is no alternative. THREE. The
University is a central site of struggle over our
social reproduction. What is to be done?
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A note on value as compulsion c.f. see below
for values
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Value emerges as a form of sociability (as
capital) from the unity of three circuits. It is
formed of moments of the circulation of money, of
production, and of commodities. If we combine
all three forms, all premises of the process
appear as its result, as a premise produced by it
itself. Every element appears as a point of
departure, of transit, and of return. The total
process presents itself as the unity of the
processes of production and circulation. The
process of production becomes the mediator of the
process of circulation and vice versa. All three
circuits have the following in common The
self-expansion of value as the determining
purpose, as the compelling motive. (Marx, K.
1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.)
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Accumulated value, and the power that accompanies
it, means that other forms of human or humane
value in the production of commodities are
marginalised. Value recalibrates the world, and
the duality of the means of production and the
product itself needs to be addressed in terms of
value, or an alternative form of
sociability. The difficulty of living in a
society dominated by value necessarily leads to
the creation of all sorts of ideologies to
explain the suffering caused by such a society
and that enable the subjects of labour to project
onto others the qualities that they are forced to
expel from themselves (e.g., laziness,
emotions). Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History
of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism. 25(2) 11
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because labor is determined as a necessary means
of individual reproduction in capitalist society,
wage laborers remain dependent on capitals
growth, even when the consequences of their
labor, ecological and otherwise, are detrimental
to themselves and to others. The tension between
the exigencies of the commodity form and
ecological requirements becomes more severe as
productivity increases and, particularly during
economic crises and periods of high unemployment,
poses a severe dilemma. This dilemma and the
tension in which it is rooted are immanent to
capitalism their ultimate resolution will be
hindered so long as value remains the determining
form of social wealth. Postone, M. 1996. Time,
Labor and Social Domination A Reinterpretation
of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge Cambridge
University Press, p. 313.
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Some context the University restructured for
value
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UUK. 2013. Strategic Plan, 2013-18, p. 4.
http//bit.ly/1o3Lpir
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IPPR BAU http//bit.ly/19fiLpt
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Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on
small business and enterprise http//bit.ly/1l5iY
3Z
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Without radical changes to how universities were
financed however it was going to be difficult to
change their behaviour. Now there is an
opportunity to use our funding changes to push a
real cultural change back towards teaching
(emphasis added, p. 47) Willetts, D. 2013.
Robbins Revisited Bigger and Better Higher
Education. London Social Market Foundation.
http//bit.ly/1mhl2By See also the use of
secondary legislation student debt and
university funding leveraging finance capital
and the bond markets student number controls
core and marginal numbers deregulation
monetisation of the student loan book student
loans and credit default swaps/derivatives
internationalisation MOOC-boosterism learning
analytics/data lean/MSP methods zero-hour
contracts, casualization and outsourcing the
entrepreneurial turn corporate partnershipsetc..
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Zerohedge. 2014. Student Loans Hit Record 1.08
Trillion. http//bit.ly/1i7Kklu
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Zerohedge. 2014. Europes Peak Youth
Unemployment. http//bit.ly/1hTwba3
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• Debt is a way of life.
• "Anyone put off... university by fear of... debt
  doesnt deserve to be at university in the first
  place.
• Michael Gove, quoted at Next Left
  http//bit.ly/foMuBQ

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TUC. 2009 http//bit.ly/iivVTO
TUC. 2009 http//bit.ly/iivVTO
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• The University and the secular crisis

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• it is impossible to understand the role of the
  University without developing a critique of its
  relationships to a transnational capitalist class
• restructuring the University for hegemony
• issues of governance, regulation and funding
  transformed for value
• (pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global
  Capitalism Production, Class, and State in a
  Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP)

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• Networks of power and affinity, that enable the
  re-production of geographies of social
  relationships.
• Networks form shifting assemblages of activity
  and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power.
• Transnational activist networks consisting of
• academics and think tanks
• policy-makers and administrators
• finance capital, private equity funds, credit
  ratings agencies
• media corporations and publishers
• philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in
  corporate social responsibility etc.
• aim to regulate the state for enterprise and the
  market.
• Ball, S. 2012. Global Education Inc.
• BUT c.f. Neary, 2012 and Davies, 2011, critique
  network governance.

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neither the cyclical business downturns nor the
upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist
counter-measures (local and international), have
resolved the underlying problems of the system...
to lay the basis for a renewal of stable
accumulation. the continuing threat to the
existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic
forces and trends which are inherent in its
social structure and which persist through short
term fluctuations and major restructurings. Cleav
er, H. 1993. Theses on Secular Crisis in
Capitalism The Insurpassability of Class
Antagonisms. http//bit.ly/10ASDy4
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were looking at both a gigantic wealth transfer
from the poor towards the rich and a huge bubble
that allows that to happen, and that will make
the poor even poorer when it bursts. Which seems
inevitable, because debt by itself cannot create
value. And if Im right, what were seeing is
not the incredible resiliency of the markets, and
no real increase in asset value, but an increase
in the threat to the social cohesion of our
communities, cities and nations. Ilargi. 2013.
How do we define value? The Automatic Earth.
http//bit.ly/1pyfUgN
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1. Organisational change is the result of social
   forces in struggle and the need to overcome the
   temporal and spatial barriers to accumulation
2. Secular control the power of transnational
   capitalism over the objective material reality of
   life, and which is reinforced technologically and
   pedagogically
3. To argue for emancipation through organisational
   innovation is to fetishise externalities, and to
   misunderstand how innovation is shaped by the
   clash of social forces and the desire of capital
   to escape the barriers imposed by labour

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Defence or refusal? Who pushes back?
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the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies
in the autonomous organisations that exist within
and between both the factory and the
community, with a focus on the forms of labour
and the exertion of working class power at the
level of the social factory, politically
recomposing the division between factory and
community. Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital
Politically, University of Texas Press Austin,
TX, p. 161. Available at http//libcom.org/files/
cleaver-reading_capital_politically.pdf
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Defence or refusal? A note on the University as
anxiety machine
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value is totalitarian in the sense that it
aspires to turn everything into a commodity. But
it will never be able to because such a society
would be completely unliveable (there would no
longer, for example, be friendship, love, the
bringing up of children, etc.). The necessity
for value to expand pushes it towards destroying
the entire concrete world and at every level,
economic, environmental, social and
cultural. The critique of value does not only
foresee an economic crisis of unprecedented
dimensions but also the end of an entire
civilisation. Even so, human life has not
always been based on value, money and labour,
even if it seems that some kind of fetishism has
existed everywhere. Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a
History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism,
Nature, Socialism. 25(2) 12
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Culturally acceptable self-harming acts or
activities Turp, M. 2001. Hidden Self-Harm
Narratives from Psychotherapy. London Jessica
Kingsley On becoming for ourselves against the
abstract destruction of our concrete
selves Vygotsky, The Shorter Life, quoted in A.
Blunden (1997), Vygotsky and the Dialectical
Method. http//bit.ly/1rCIVsv The sale of labor
power has the effect of scrubbing all the
concrete manifestations of labor from our
consciousness. It does this by validating the
reduction of our capacities to just another
commodity in the market. Jehu, The Real
Movement. http//therealmovement.wordpress.com/
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Mass Intellectuality and the idea of the
University
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the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of
the general productive forces of the social
brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed
to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more specifically of fixed capital
machinery. Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London
Penguin.
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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 The University
of Utopia. 2014. Anti-Curriculum A course of
action. http//www.universityofutopia.org/sharing
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The idea of student as producer encourages the
development of collaborative relations between
student and academic for the production of
knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect
to the project of refashioning in fundamental
ways the nature of the university, then further
attention needs to be paid to the framework by
which the student as producer contributes towards
mass intellectuality. This requires academics
and students to do more than simply redesign
their curricula, but go further and redesign the
organizing principle, (i.e. private property and
wage labour), through which academic knowledge is
currently being produced. Neary, M. and Winn, J.
2009. The Student as Producer. In, The future of
higher education policy, pedagogy and the
student experience. Continuum, London, p. 137.
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We need a new global alliance between the new
open movements, the ecological movements, and
the traditional social justice and emancipatory
movements, in order to create a grand alliance
of the commons. Bauwens, M., and Iacomella, F.
2013. Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization
Centred Around the Sustenance of the Commons.
http//bit.ly/Rolqqb
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Good Living The five revolutions democratic
ethical economic social Latin American
dignity To build a fraternal and co-operative
coexistence. The transformation of higher
education and the transfer of knowledge in
science, technology and innovation. The
Republic of Ecuador. National Development Plan
National Plan for Good Living 2009-2013 Building
a Plurinational and Intercultural State.
http//bit.ly/GQJi0M
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Education is crucial to reinforce and diversify
individual and social capabilities and
potentialities, and to foster participative and
critical citizens. Education remains one of the
best ways of consolidating a democratic society
that contributes to the eradication of economic,
political, social and cultural inequalities. From
a strategic perspective, it is essential to
develop various forms of knowledge with high
added value, as well as technical and
technological research and innovation. The
combination of ancestral forms of knowledge with
state-of-the-art technology can reverse the
current development model and contribute to the
transition towards a model of accumulation based
on bio-knowledge. The Republic of Ecuador.
National Development Plan National Plan for Good
Living 2009-2013 Building a Plurinational and
Intercultural State. http//bit.ly/GQJi0M
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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.
Pace Willetts, a real cultural change back
towards teaching.
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the possibilities for associational networks
a little more of a politicised relation to truth
in affairs of education, knowledge and academic
practice
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counter-hegemony rooted in radical subjectivity
through the production of new forms of critical
knowledge in everyday life spaces for the
refusal of the violence of abstraction occupation
of the idea of the public alternatives to the
ideological and material conditions of
domination the creation of democratic, open,
worker co-operatives an abundance of love,
rather than a scarcity of value
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Is this possible inside the University? If not,
how can we become the University rather than go
to university? What is to be kept? What is to
be abolished? What is to be done?
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Licensing
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