the alienated academic: the
struggle for autonomy inside
the university
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org

How do we connect critique to a political
horizon that works to abolish rather than
fetishise academic labour?

Categorical critique: an attempt to explain what is happening at a level that cuts
through (i.e. intersects) the differences in professional experience, in order to
find what is common among us.
The hopelessness of labour: to mistake the manifestations for the cause of our
problems breeds helplessness and hopelessness.
An intersectional synthesis: connecting contemporary Marxism with the
literature of feminism, (de)colonialism, identity politics, in the context of
contemporary changes in English HE.
What is to be done? A workers’ enquiry into the class composition of academic
labourers; solidarity and the social strike; defining compelling imaginaries for a
post-work society, and how to get there.

living a feminist life:
•does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct;
•although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better
in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world);
•how to create relationships with others that are more equal;
•how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less
supported by social systems;
•how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete,
histories that have become as solid as walls.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 1.

Awakenings
Part 1: the terrain of academic labour
Crisis / Alienation
Part 2:the terrain of academic alienation
Knowledge / Profession / Weltschmerz /
Identity
Part 3: the terrain for overcoming alienation
Indignation / Autonomy

Awakenings

whether academics are awake to their role
in the reproduction of systems of alienating
oppression…
whether those who labour in academia are
able to imagine that another world is
possible. (p. 4)

autonomy does not mean the
absence of accountability
where markets are
dysfunctional, we should be
prepared to intervene
University means University for
lender and purchaser

•our country’s future depends more than ever on the success of our
HEIs;
•we will not forget the underlying values of HE… joy and value of
knowledge pursued for its own sake; pursuit of the good, the true
and the beautiful;
•uncompromising in our protection of students’ interests… insist on
value for money for the student [and] also for the taxpayer.
Barber, Foreward, in DfE, 2017, pp. 8-9.

Effective competition compels providers to focus on students’
needs and aspirations, drives up outcomes that students care
about, puts downward pressure on costs, leads to more
efficient allocation of resources between providers, and
catalyses innovation.
The higher education sector in England is well suited to market
mechanisms driving continuous improvement.
DfE, 2017, pp. 43-5.

• authoritarian managerialism: autonomy and accountability;
corporativism
• human capital theory
• markets and money: cognitive dissonance
• discourses of productivity, excellence, entrepreneurship and
impact
• proletarianisation accelerated through imposed competition
Against self-mediation (wilfulness)
academic, professional service staff and student ill-being, precarity,
overwork, quitting, debt

Part 1: the terrain of academic
labour, Crisis / Alienation

Crisis infects academic life, whilst enabling the system of capital to be
presented as a natural, transhistorical solution that requires an
ongoing process of structural reform. (p. 37)
Whilst it is important to critique the conditions and relations of
production inside the University, and to recognise the differential
levels of exploitation experienced intersectionally, it is also crucial to
look at how social reproduction underscores these conditions and
experiences. [p. 60]

Alienated labour as the key to understanding the ways in which capitalist
society mediates our activity, with a focus on their overcoming.
grounded in a conscious and qualitative lack of agency or autonomy, where
ongoing, systemic exploitation and dispossession are the norm…
reproduced by the individual who has to submit through a lack of power-
over her own social reproduction (p. 74)
Incorporates Hegel (self-externalization or renunciation; estrangement in the
Spirit’s becoming other than itself in the realm of objectivity; sublation);
Feuerbach (projection of own essence onto an imaginary); Lukács
(reification – labour activity dominates through external autonomous laws).

Alienation erupts from the disconnection between political
economy and human richness. Its realisation is driven by
estrangement and loss catalysed by what it takes to produce
an individual life in capitalist society.
It is driven by the divorce of self from those processes of
production. Moreover, alienation erupts from the enforced,
disciplinary disconnection between ways of explaining and
making the world. (p. 69)

aufhebung, is a positive transcendence grounded in
human self-mediation. Our indignation at the world as
it is, and our struggles for something different, are
less an ontological manifestation of labour as a
transhistorical thing, and rather a historically-specific
eruption in response to alienated labour inside
capitalist social relations. (p. 76)

The institutional mediations of the University force the
academic to becomes complicit in protecting her
labour-power, and seeking to enhance its value in the
market. This lack of subjective power catalyses further
fragmentation between individuals, including
intersectional injustices as subgroups are dominated
and othered. (p. 90)

Part 2: the terrain of academic
alienation, Knowledge / Profession /
Weltschmerz / Identity

The power-to explain the world… consistently runs up against
narratives of power-over the world that are structured through
private property, commodity exchange and the division of
labour…
As a result, academic knowledge remains grounded in
hegemonic power relations, and has a limited or partial
explanatory power. (p. 102)

a critique of the development of academic knowledge
identifies opportunities for pushing back against the alienating
rhetoric of capitalist work:
•against pedagogies of consumption and commodification;
•from the recognition that a critique of knowledge helps to
shape the reality and history of labour-in-capitalism. (p. 126)

The labourer consumes herself as she materialises her
product, and in return she internalises the objective character
of her product.
it becomes increasingly important for the academic to enrich
her human capital, in order to maintain her status (p. 137)
[This] marginalises or silences those who are unable to
recalibrate their practice against discourses of excellence and
impact, and whose labour-power is not permanently
accessible to capital, for instance because they are carers,
mothers, disabled or in working poverty. (p. 154)

Weltschmerz, or a world weariness that lies beyond anxiety, anguish or
ennui, reflects a deeper sense of hopelessness about the academic
project.
such despair is connected to a loss of autonomy that is itself rooted in
the inability to escape from capital’s domination.
the cultural terrain upon which capital works reinforces within us a
sense that we are not productive enough, and that this is sinful.
reflects not only their loss of self in their work, but also constant self-
judgement through internalised performance management. (pp. 161-2)

At issue is how to place transformation of the mode of
production at the heart of the matter, rather than amplifying
hopelessness.
engagement in survival programmes as a precursor to
dismantling the mode of production, are crucial for academics.
Academic privilege and hegemonic, alienating academic norms
need to be checked by learning from alternative life
experiences. (p. 181)

a constructive reimagining that forces us to reconsider how persistent
crises of value consistently degrade community relations, in order to
overcome those relations and define a new anti-productive
environment (p. 188)
[Against hegemonic] masculine performance inside the University…
that transmits self-harming activities throughout the academic
peloton. (p. 195)
How is it possible to move beyond separation, divorce, false binaries,
and social estrangement, in order to define an alternative form of
social metabolic control? (pp. 204-5)

Part 3: the terrain for overcoming alienation
Indignation / Autonomy

to open-out the categories of struggle, such that praxis can be seen as
an opening-out of subjectivity.
to situate struggle through narratives of indignation, which themselves
explode from exploitation (p. 215)
Specific struggles for change and radical experiment enable us to
question if it is possible to rupture alienated labour in the University, or
whether a focus upon dignity in overcoming alienation and
estrangement from production, society and the self is impossible from
inside institutions. (p. 223)

how to contribute to the development of a different consciousness,
alongside antagonism towards exploitation across a wide terrain,
without imposing theoretical or methodological closure upon those
already made marginal (p. 227)
The struggle for dignity is the struggle for a new form of revolutionary
pedagogy at the level of society. (p. 230)
The practice of revolutionary education is to teach how to question our
indignation and to learn how to move towards dignity, as a struggle for
autonomy. (p. 235)

we deceive ourselves if we believe that the structures which
exist in order to reproduce capitalist social relations can be
used as a means to overcome its alienating organisation of
work.
intellectual work, as opposed to academic labour, must be
recombined at the level of society in ensuring that knowledge
is socialised, and that productive technologies are collectively
controlled, such that socially-necessary goods and services
form a realm of abundance beyond self-sufficiency. (p. 244)

alienation is not about the revelation of a transhistorical
human essence with an absolute conception, rather
overcoming alienation is a process that reveals a diversity
of human richness grounded in the association of self-
mediating producers of life (p. 257)
There is a need to join in solidarity [inside-and-] beyond
the University (p. 260)

The struggle for academic dignity is therefore a struggle against
academic labour and a struggle for love.
The struggle for autonomy inside the University is the real struggle
against the University. (p. 262)
This is the struggle to question the conditions and contours of our
social life. It is a movement of hearts against the present state of
things; most importantly it is a movement of hearts against
enclosure and foreclosure. (p. 263)

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