Greek Universities in danger

In the last few years, a wave of ‘reforms’ within the European Union and throughout the world has subjected Higher Education to the logic of the market. Higher Education has increasingly been transformed from a public good and a civil right to a commodity for the wealthy. The self-government of Universities and the autonomy of academic processes are also being eroded. The processes of knowledge production and acquisition, as well as the working conditions of the academic community, are now governed by the principles of the private sector, from which Universities are obliged to seek funds.

 

Read more and sign the petition here.

Talking Shop 5: Debt.

The next talking shop will focus on the idea of debt and will take place on Monday 11 July at 7pm in Seomra Spraoi

The two suggested texts, which should provide a starting point for discusion, are David Graebers ‘Debt: The First Five Thousand Years’ and the recent Documentary by Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou called ‘Debtocracy’.

The Graeber text gives a breif history of debt from an anthropological point of view, conecting its inception to a history of slavery and state sanctioned violence.  The documentary focuses on Greece’s particular crisis in the context of the recent history of IMF and World Bank intervention. Particular highlights are an explanation of the concept of ‘odious debt’ and Equador’s unorthodox handling of their sovereign debt in 2006. 

David Graeber, ‘Debt: The First Five Thousand Years’: 
http://www.metamute.
org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years

Debtocracy: 
http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=qKpxPo-lInk

Launch of the Campaign for the Old City Arts Building- Take back the city!

Saturday June 11th, 6pm at Seomra Spraoi.

Campaign launch with talks by campaign members and Sandy Fitzgerald, former director of Dublin City Arts. Followed by Food and Party. 3 euro suggested donation after 10pm.

Join us on June 11th for the launch of the Campaign for the Old City Arts Building (COCAB). Our aim is to take back the Old City Arts building, 23-25 Mosse St (near Tara dart station) which has been abandoned for nearly a decade and is now part of the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA). We want the building to be opened up for use as an educational and cultural space, managed collectively by anyone who wants to take part, independent of private or state institutions. We also want to broaden this by demanding that the NAMA legislation be changed so that all disused NAMA buildings can be used by the citizens for social and cultural projects, social housing or (in the case of undeveloped land) community gardens. It is clear that the politics of ‘elected representatives’ has completely failed in the context of the crisis- only people power and direct action can bring real change.

NAMA, which is the largest property owner in Europe, has been a key part of the state’s strategy for managing the crisis, a strategy which has unashamedly prioritized the financial system and property speculators above all else.

The crisis is also being used as a pre-text for destroying public services. Any public service that promotes equality has been attacked with increasing intensity over the last two years. Sectors such as the university and community development have seen their funding cut, and at the same time are being strangled by bureaucratic control. The message is clear- the state only values narrowly defined economic activity, in other words, it only values what investors value.

With unbelievable cynicism we are told that the state simply does not have the resources to fund public services- that equality is a luxury we can’t afford. Yet the state’s lack of resources is a direct result of pumping our collective wealth into the bailout of the banks, the speculators and the financial system. The irrationality of this is revealed when we consider that while the state claims to have no money for public services it has effectively bought an empire of empty buildings. That is one resource the state does have.

But NAMA has been set up on the basis of the same narrow economic objectives that define the state’s overall strategy. First of all, NAMA has bought the toxic debts (at inflated prices) rather than the buildings themselves. The vast majority of these debts will never be paid yet the speculators who own them still have a say in what happens to those buildings, while the citizens do not. In fact, NAMA is not subject to the Freedom of Information act and as such we’re not even able to access basic information about an agency which has gobbled up billions of euro of public money. Likewise, NAMA is limited to a few options in terms of the buildings it controls, each more irrational than the next and subject to the agreement of the developer in question. It can destroy a building, sell at a much reduced price or hold onto the building in the hope that we will return to the insanity of the property boom.

This is a con. We don’t want to see public resources bailing out speculators and we don’t want to see a return to property speculation. Dublin has been used as a casino for long enough- it’s time it became a city. NAMA buildings should belong to everyone.

There is no justification for maintaining empty publicly owned buildings while the state slashes public services. We want to use the old Dublin City Arts building for independent educational and cultural projects open to everyone. In particular, we believe that because the university is being undermined, we need a space where education is based on equality and open to all, where teaching, learning and research can become a force for change, and where the bureaucracy, competition and corporatisation of the university are replaced by a collective, participative and empowering educational process. The project will be run collectively and democratically by anyone who wants to participate and will provide space for any projects who want to organize educational or cultural activities. We are especially hopeful that the space will be a resource for those excluded from education and from the city in general.

The NAMA legislation was made by the Dáil- but what the Dáil does the people can undo.

The ‘reality’ of ideology and the struggle for the university

One of Trinity’s Provostial (presidential) candidates, Colm Kearney, hits the nail on the head in his manifesto when he says:

“Our current situation is thus:

• We face a projected deficit of €80-100 million by 2015.
• The government provides 90% of College’s funding, and will not change its funding model to suit Trinity College.

Once we accept this reality, we can put in place the appropriate response.”

This is the central idea that governs the present crisis of the university, the idea that reality is fixed and unchangeable and consists in one thing: the withdrawal of state funding and the consequent budget deficit. Don’t think about it, just accept. Everything else is secondary when faced with this ‘reality’. If we don’t ‘accept this reality’ we are naive dreamers. If we do, we can get to work and start coming up with all manner of ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’ solutions.

The question of the university thus becomes one about whether or not we accept this reality. In this context, several points become central.

1. Reality is political and never ‘objective’. In the present situation, the absence of public money doesn’t reflect an objective situation but rather a specific set of readily identifiable priorities: the state has decided to prioritize the financial system, international investors and property speculators above all else. It has put our future, and the future of all our public services, down as collateral on an insane loan to do this.
2. Money is not some kind of natural resource like water, and humans are not naturally subjected to its comings and goings, its rainy seasons and droughts. Money is made by humans, it develops value through the subjective meaning we attach to it and it reflects social relations. Money above all else expresses the domination of capital. Today the clearest example of this is the international credit ratings agencies. When a state cuts the minimum wage its credit rating is likely improve. If we increase minimum wage, hey presto, it costs more money for us to borrow, or , in other words, our money is worth less. Whenever equality and freedom are attacked the markets read this as a positive sign that government’s are taking the ‘tough decisions’. This is a power relation. What we lack, in dealing with it, is not money but politics. The problem is not the absence of money, but the absence of anything but money.

‘Accepting this reality’ (as described by Kearney) means accepting the domination of capital. It is to accept that the State is undermining every independent and egalitarian element of our society (health care, community development, citizenship, worker’s rights and a long etc.) It is ultimately to accept that the university is subordinated to the economy.

The pragmatism we are encouraged to take up, as if it were some kind of call to arms, is simply servility. The pragmatic abandoning of all principle and ideology is today’s paramount principle and ideology. No one actually believes in capitalism, no one is willing to defend it. It’s just a reality that we have to accept.

The response today has to be a ‘ya basta’ (enough!)- a pure and simple refusal to accept the ‘reality’ we are presented    with. From an aggressive negation of this ‘reality’ can begin to emerge not just a belief but a material and subjective alternative, a movement in which economics is subordinated to living knowledge and to equality.

This is the challenge that confronts the student movement and anyone concerned with education today: to negate the fatalism of the pragmatist and to create the alternative within a movement, within a living network which gives value to the generation and sharing of knowledge. This means taking over teaching and learning, reappropriating them as free and equal activities. The university is not their’s to destroy- it’s time to take it back.

 

Mick O’Broin

The Provisional University and FEE on the Telly

Dublin City Community Television have made a short programme on the commercialisation of education, featuring activists from the Provisional University and Free Education for Everyone.

Watch online

University and the ruins of the present

Reading the manifestos of the candidates for Provost (President) in Trinity College you could be forgiven for thinking that we really had reached the end of history. Nowhere in their over-inflated promises is there any hope that the university has a future beyond the market, an endless competition for funding, private finance, international students, ‘top’ academics and ‘brand recognition’. They write of hiring ‘development officers’ in New York, Beijing and London to generate funds from ‘philanthropists’ while at the same time supporting the re-introduction of fees and cuts to teaching staff. They all accept the government’s decision to cut funding for public institutions because the banks and bondholders are considered more important than free and equal education. This consensus is mounting all around us and it makes no sense.

But there is resistance.

Below is an eloquent article from friends in America who remind us that: “there is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

Read the article

Occupation and Solidarity

Here is a statement from the students who yesterday occupied a building in UCL. The occupation is in solidarity with lecturers and other university staff who are the latest subject of attack in the ongoing subordination of the university to the neoliberal consensus.

‘In solidarity with striking lecturers and support staff students from UCL have occupied the Registry – the main administrative wing of the university. As students, we do not have the power to withdraw our labour in solidarity with staff, and so we have decided to occupy in order to fight the current attack on our lecturers’ pay, pensions and conditions. Management may not value the staff at UCL, but we students do.

This is, however, a much broader fight. We are still committed to a fully publicly funded education system and to resisting the privatisation of higher education. Lecturers are suffering this attack because of ideological reforms to the higher education system, implemented under the pretext of a financial crisis that they did not cause. The students and lecturers are what make this university, not the financial managers. We refuse to be divided from our lecturers and treated as disgruntled consumers. The true divide is with management and the ideological destruction of higher education they are complicit in.

We stand with our lecturers. We urge all students to join us in occupation in solidarity with their lecturers. Their fight is our fight.

We are all in this together!’

The university-factory?

The relationship between the university and capitalism is the key to the politics of 3^rd level education. But the nature of this relationship is far from clear. We are perhaps familiar with the argument that neo-liberalism has eroded the idea of ‘the public’ while advancing the logic of the market in all directions. As far as the university goes this usually means two things. First, 3^rd level education has become a commodity more than a right. This takes the form of increasing registration fees, the threatened reintroduction of full fees, but also the corporate logic which pervades university management structures and treats students as ‘consumers’. Secondly, and related to the last point, the management of the university today resembles that of a business, with output target’s, measurements of productivity, proliferating bureaucratic control, and an emphasis on competition both within the university and in the global academic rat race.

Taken as a whole, this amounts to a general subordination of the university to capitalist production. However, there is another analysis, more dominant particularly in Italy, which conceptualizes the relationship between the university and capitalism differently. This perspective, associated with writers like Antonio Negri, Andrea Fumagali, Christan Marazzi and Maurizio Lazarato, argues that the university is directly a site of capitalist production.

The argument here involves a historical analysis of the development of European capitalism which sees fordist productiongiving way to post-fordist or immaterial production. In response to the power of the workers movement as well as the new social movements around 1968, capitalist production shifted from the centrality of mass manufacturing or industrial production to immaterial production, i.e. services, information, culture, desire, communication etc. In this context knowledge is no longer something separate from work or exploitation. Much of this analysis derives from an interpretation of a passage from Marx’ Grundrisse, usually referred to as the ‘fragment on machines’. This passage argues that within capitalist production the role of knowledge, primarily but not exclusively scientific knowledge, is steadily increasing. As such Marx predicts that what he calls the ‘general intellect’, the overall and collective social knowledge, will increasingly emerge as a ‘direct force of production’.

One of the interesting things about this analysis, especially as developed by Italian Autonomist politics, is the argument that capitalist production has extended outside the workplace across the entire social space. Under this form of capitalism the nature of exploitation changes in important ways. Most significantly, production no longer takes place within a factory controlled by the capital. Production can take place wherever people share knowledge, transmit information, generate ideas and so on (the internet being the paradigmatic example). Rather than the disappearance of the factory, it is perhaps better to understand this as the emergence of the ‘social factory’, in which the basic fabric of social life becomes productive in itself. This production is then ‘captured’ by capital.

In some instances it seems like the establishment have been quicker to grasp this shift in production than the radical left has. Mary Coughlin, former Minster for Enterprise Trade and Employment, talks of ‘the capacity to capture and transform…ideas…into commercial reality” while Brian Cowen celebrates the progress made in “capturing, protecting and commercialising ideas and know-how”. As Hardt and Negri argue in their latest book, Commonwealth, this type of capitalism resembles what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’ or ‘accumulation by expropriation’. In other words, capital pillages collective immaterial wealth. Just as the enclosure of common lands in the 18^th century was a form of capitalist accumulation, today capital ‘encloses’ knowledge, innovation, creativity and so on. Patenting and copyright are the clearest example here. When a company patents a scientific innovation, the centuries of collective human experience and learning that underpin that innovation are appropriated and privatised.

This has implications both for how we understand the transformations taking place in the university and in terms of how we understand the struggle against them. First of all, if knowledge becomes a direct force of production this means that the neo-liberal managerialism mentioned above is more about controlling production than eroding public services. The neo-liberal attack on the university is not just a symptom of anti-working class politics, but an element of a transformation in the form of capitalist production.

The second implication of this analysis relates to struggles at the university. These struggles are no longer about defending public services but direct struggles against capitalist production, analogous to the factory based struggles of the 20the century. Reappropriating the university becomes a 21^st century version of taking control of the means of production. Moreover, the traditional distinction between ‘workers’ and ‘students’ looses relevance: if the university is a factory than students are workers, in the sense that they are figures of production, they are part of the productive web of contemporary capitalism.

The two analyses described here are the dominant ones in terms of the radical university movements in Europe, and they have relatively different prominence in different countries. Whereas UK groups or our own Free Education for Everyone are more likely to talk about defending public services and education as a right, Italian and Spanish movements are more likely to talk about occupying the university as a ‘strike’ against ‘cognitive capitalism’. Organisations like the UniNomada in Spain, Bartelby in Bologna or the transnational collective edu-factory are promoters of the second analysis. Most of the student movement in the UK seems to be more oriented towards the first. Indeed, on February 13^th-15^th student movements from around the world met in Paris to talk about organising a European wide student movement against austerity, and some of the differences between the various analytical perspectives were evident. That said, it would be wrong to treat this as some kind of ideological schism.

Whatever your take, the relationship between the university and capitalism, as well as the relationship between knowledge and production, will continue to be definitive issues.

 

Mick O’Broin

Neoliberal consensus strikes again

In yesterday’s Irish Times there was a review of a report by 17 leading business and public figures. The report, entitled ‘Blueprint for Ireland’s recovery’, claims that Ireland must become the most competitive euro zone country by 2016.

In what has become a familiar argument the report proposes that every Government department should have an advisory board from outside the public service to work with the minister, and a council of economic advisers, drawn mostly from the ranks of expert business leaders.

Included in the report’s proposals is the recommendation that the third level sector be rationalised. This is to ensure that Ireland has a single university of world standing.

One of the contributors is Dermot Desmond. This comes after his ‘manifesto’ on political reform. With such weak and ineffective political leadership it is n surprise that such successful ‘captains of industry’ get their say aired in our national media. More troubling is the ‘common sense’ that their arguments appeal to. When the only consensus is on the needs and demands of the economy it is not impossible to imagine that their nightmare vision will be realised. Ireland has no alternative: having exposed ourselves to the worst excesses of neoliberalism  it seems we must continue down that path in order to save ourselves. They end the report with the claim that ‘without a thriving economy it is impossible for Ireland to create an equal and fair society.’

Unless we start demonstrating alternatives to this empty idea of the public good we will find this kind of opinion gaining more and more ground.

Universities and the New Manegerialism

Here’s another article by Kathleen Lynch (UCD). This one looks at some of the perverse effects of new managerialism in higher education and looks at some of the implications in terms of gender.

It provides useful information on the managerial structures which are being used to control research in universities but also on the subjective and structural effects of these measures. Kathleen argues that the way this interacts with gender is an important, if not typically addressed, element of this process.