Slides for my presentation at the CAPPE, Neoliberalism and Everyday Life conference on 4 September 2014 http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/cappe/conferences/conferences/annual-conference-neoliberalism-and-everyday-life

1. Technology and co-operative practice
against the neoliberal university
Professor Richard Hall
@hallymk1 rhall1@dmu.ac.uk
richard-hall.org
Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, 4 September 2014

2. 1. Technology reveals an entrepreneurial reconfiguring of
the idea of the University.
2. Technology is a crack through which we might analyse
the interests that drive value production and
accumulation, and their relation to power.
3. What is to be done? A re-imagination based on mass
intellectuality and open co-operativism.

3. It took both time and experience before the workpeople
learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment
by capital and to direct their attacks, not against the material
instruments of production, but against the mode in which they
are used.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 554.
Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the
process of production by which he sustains his life, and
thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social
relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 493.

4. 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.
The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose,
as the compelling motive.”
Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.
Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it,
means that other forms of human or humane value in the
production of commodities are marginalised.
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism. 25(2): 11

5. Technology and education: an export/industrial strategy
Across the higher education system, institutions are using
technology in innovative ways.
Yet conventional universities no longer hold all the cards on
how the higher education market develops.
Although MOOCs are still at a relatively early stage, they are
evolving fast and may have the potential to tackle some
particular challenges – such as an apparent mismatch between
the supply and demand for high-level computer skills.
Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London:
Social Market Foundation, p. 69. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By

6. If we want a model of more inclusive growth, where more
people earn more – at the top of the hourglass, then we need
a higher education system that helps to build better jobs and
equips people with the skills for high skilled, high value-added,
non-routine jobs.
It reminded me of something blunter that Paul Hofheinz,
President of the Lisbon Council said to me...: “if we want to
live better than others, then we will have to be better than
others.”
So our goal is bold and simple: to build a bigger knowledge
economy
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second
Machine Age. London: Social Market Foundation, pp. 27, 29.

8. Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on small business and enterprise:
http://bit.ly/1l5iY3Z

9. Entrepreneurial activity enacted through new combinations of
technologies and practices to inject novelty into the circuits of
capitalism.
Entrepreneurship operates through counter-acting norms and
can never be stabilised.
Competitive success rooted in a new productive environment
that accommodates power: first in expanding the time-scale for
returns; second in expanding the arena for competition.
Vision and desire (poker) trump scientific calculation, and drive
innovation and co-operation.
Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 52-3.

10. Technology and education: a transnational framework
Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to
manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public
sector to capital accumulation.
Lipman, P. 2009: http://bit.ly/qDl6sV
Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an
unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way
remuneration is allocated across labor and capital.... Mature
economies will suffer most as they don't have the population growth
to increase autonomous demand nor powerful enough labor unions
or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in what continues to be a
global economy.
Gartner. 2013. Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for
2014 and Beyond. http://gtnr.it/17RLm2v

11. CB Insights. 2014. Ed Tech Sees Early
Stage Deals Getting Bigger.
http://bit.ly/1niJ96s

12. transnational activist
networks/associations of
capitals

13. At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve
that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning [at
no extra total cost], we think about four things:
being more global; being more mobile; thinking holistically; being
absolutely obsessed with learning outcomes
“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex
standalone products and services to participating in more open,
interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around learners”
monetisation at scale; more data; demographic/intergenerational
shifts
Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp

14. Bain and Company (2012): rents/commodification; labour arbitrage;
investment and profits.
• seize opportunities to use exportable services to increase
revenues and profits [MOOCs]
• upgrade low-tech products into premium consumer goods and
services [curriculum; learning analytics]
• services bound by physical geography made portable [mobile]
• leading universities in the advanced economies can
accelerate the training of home-grown specialists in emerging
economies
• by importing the talent of highly-skilled professionals from
companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging
markets will not need to wait a generation for their own
education systems to produce a skilled workforce

15. The interrelationship between profitability and investment.
Technological innovations as responses to:
• lower levels of profitability;
• increasing global consumption; and
• making previously marginal sectors of the economy explicitly
productive.
Technological innovation:
• a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value produced
in society to the total capital invested;
• a redistribution of surplus value from businesses that produce
commodities or services like universities to those that market
them or that lend money to make academic labour productive;
• revolutionising the means of production.

16. it is impossible to understand the role of the University
without developing a critique of its relationships to a
transnational capitalist class
pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and
State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP.

17. 1. Networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of
‘geographies of social relationships’.
2. Networks form shifting assemblages of activity and
relationships that reinforce hegemonic power.
3. Transnational activist networks consisting of:
i. academics and think tanks;
ii. policy-makers and administrators;
iii. finance capital and private equity funds;
iv. media corporations and publishers;
v. 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. London: Routledge.

18. 1. Technological 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 technological innovation
is to fetishise technology and to misunderstand how
technology is shaped by the clash of social forces and the
desire of capital to escape the barriers imposed by labour

19. How might the notion of political decision-making or action be
harnessed in ways that broaden the horizon of political
possibility?
Does this lead to stagnation or reconfiguration? Do planning,
debt and data subsume the future to incentivised utility-maximisation?
Individual agency and collective institutions need to be
criticized and invented simultaneously, to overcome neoliberal
narratives.
Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 195-201.
Counter-hegemony or entrepreneurial concordat?

20. Mass Intellectuality and
Open Co-operativism

21. 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.

22. Public liberation of knowledge, practices and skills
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://bit.ly/1qgEq8C

23. Where might technology be co-opted to enable this liberation?
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. http://bit.ly/Y3w2Pf

24. 1. A false idea of material abundance (growth, accumulation,
debt).
2. A false idea of immaterial scarcity (Trans-Pacific Partnership,
Transatlantic Trade and Investments Partnership).
3. The pseudo-abundance that destroys the biosphere, and the
contrived scarcity that keeps innovation artificially scarce.
we need a 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. & Iacomella, F. 2013. Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization
Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons. http://bit.ly/Rolqqb

25. Technology and collective, public work
Collective work is one of the cements of autonomy, whose
fruits usually spill into hospitals, clinics, primary and
secondary education, in strengthening the municipalities
and the good government juntas. Not much that has been
constructed would be possible without the collective work,
of men, women, boys, girls and the elderly.
Zibechi, R. 2013. Autonomous Zapatista Education: The Little Schools of
Below. http://bit.ly/19XfrAF

27. ‘a little more of a
politicised relation to
truth in affairs of
education, knowledge
and academic practice’

28. Open co-operativism and ‘possibilities for associational networks’:
• democratic governance and regulation of transnational
worker co-operatives
• connect to the circuits of p2p production and distribution
• pedagogic moments reflect the open, democratic,
autonomous, social focus of co-operatives
• a framework for the common ownership of products, assets
and commodities
• reclamation of public environments for the globalised,
socialised dissemination of knowledge (e.g. copyfarleft)
• connecting a global set of educational commons rooted in
critical pedagogy
• conversion, dissolution or creation: transitional and
pedagogic

29. to trigger and coordinate a global participatory process and
immediate national application for the change of productive matrix
towards a society of open and common knowledge in Ecuador
resulting in 10 base documents for legislation and state policies
(synchronized with the organic social code for the knowledge
economy) as well as useful for the production networks of
knowledge that already exist in Ecuador.
The conceptual, philosophical and economic process and the
historical and socio-cognitive context framework, the
organizational principles governing the process, collaborative and
communicative digital tools and advance planning of the whole
process.
FLOK Society. 2014. General Framework Document to implement the
Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living (2009). http://bit.ly/1pYHW7w

30. Inside the University, can educational technology
be (ref)used politically to recompose the realities of
global struggles for emancipation, rather than for
value?
Is there a co-operative crack through which “mass
intellectuality” might be liberated or emerge?

31. Affinities on The New Cooperativism: http://bit.ly/187iT8R
De Peuter and Dyer Witheford on Commoning:
http://bit.ly/Ve2cE9
Draft report on the contribution of cooperatives to overcoming the
crisis: http://bit.ly/1gyzDtk
Lebowitz on Co-Management in Venezuela: http://bit.ly/1awBnOF
Winn on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1ufM9TO
Bauwens on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1pgXWMZ
Hall on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1qgxPuK

32. Licensing
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non-
Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license
See:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/