Labour and Academics: From absence of "Springtime" to beyond

There have been continuous debates on the problems of education in recent times. From opposing privatization of education to opposing fee hikes that shall make studying impossible for the ‘poor’. Loans for higher education offered by banks seem to be solving problems related to finances relating to education. Today, the ‘business friendliness’ that education in capitalism has acquired has led to, and will be leading to, a set of consequences that is continuously becoming alien and subversive to human needs.

The most important of these consequences is what I call Taylorisation of education which is very similar to the Taylorisation of production in the late 19th century. In the process of Taylorised production, a continuous labour process that should ultimately lead to the production of a commodity was broken down into discretised fragments, the integration of which resulted in the same commodity. Today’s education “system” (and it is a proper “system” operating within the social factory) is similarly in the process of discretisation ad infinitum. The analogy needs to be grasped to see how higher education has become an integral part of the capitalism. Harry Braverman, in his Labor and Monopoly Capital, gives a lucid explanation of how Taylorisation contributed to growth of capitalism. He gives three basic contributions of Taylorisation. The first, the discretisation of the labour process creates small fragments each of which requires a more functional uniqueness. The lengthier labour process carried by the labourer requires a time for shift of function which disappears with discretisation of the labour process that requires a set of functionally unique labour(power). Second, the smaller the labour process becomes, the easier it becomes for the labourer to acquire dexterity over it. Third, with the discretisation of the labour process, the workers tend to lose understanding of, and control over, the total labour process that leads to the appearance of the commodity as a fetish. The first two result in reduction of labour time for the completion of a task and hence a larger bulk of use-values can be produced in a smaller time. The third is the pivot of dominating workers.

‘Scientific’ managers of the globalised economy might very well reject Taylorism as full of flaws but students and teachers do feel its presence in their everyday labour processes and hence in their articulations of the world. It is noteworthy that the disciplines of institutionalized education develop/discretise in accordance to the development/discretisation of the labour processes taking place in the industries. The confrontation between the ‘academics’, and its interiorisation by the working class, is necessary for becoming available in the market as labour-power to be sold. This perpetuates as a subverting practice that claims an undisputed or even sort of holy name – education. But the term education, here needs to be deconstructed, a task that Istvan Meszaros(2006:110) pictorially “illustrate(s) [with] the positions of Ethics, Political Economy, and the “abstractly material” Natural Sciences in relation to the alienated and reified social relations of production” as follows:

M = abstract concept of “man”

P = Private property

L= Wage labour and worker

N= Nature

AN = Alienated nature

I = “Industry”

AI = “Alienated industry” or alienated productive activity

What is necessary to be added to the diagram, if deconstructing education for radical political purposes is to be achieved, is a multilayering/multilining of the (P)—(AN)—(AI) and (L)—(AN)—(AI) relations. The process (of multilining), the appearance of disciplines as P, AN, AI and L are continuously transformed as the requirements of the social factory keep on developing. This is the subversion that capitalist education (or banking education to borrow a term from Paulo Freirie) enforces through its cannonisation/discretisation in its institutions that has to produce labour-powers. The subversion is double edged. Through the discretisation of labour-processes and hence their understanding, there is a continuous violent fetishisation of use-values. Hence, an establishment of a bourgeois theory and practice of passive consumption is made possible. It is to be noted that consumers can not be equated to an elite class but as the possessor of a certain value (that is not capital) for consumption/reproduction of labour-power. Lebowitz(2003:161-170) explains, what he calls, socially developed needs and shows, though implicitly, how these shall be perpetually be created. These again enter into the factory, and hence into academics, where the labour processes comprise of practice of (pre)production. The cycle is not problematic in itself. What is problematic is their subsumption by capital, where the division of labour is coerced to enhance production and circulation for the production extraction of more and more surplus value.

The bourgeois educational institutions are sites of struggle of labour against capitalist social relations because of the enforcement of (Taylorised) academics-as-work. Hence, it is a site of political praxis and demands radical intervention. The political praxis has to be academically counter-academic and anti-bourgeois domination. These are taking place today and these throw some light on our blurred road to socialism if understood in context of the critique of capitalism.

To site an example is the recent protests in London where those engaging with academics as work, students and teachers, came down to the streets in numbers that London had not seen in over a decade. What sparked the movement was the decision of the ruling classes to remove philosophy from certain university syllabi and cuts in higher education. One might question about the role of “labour” in the movement. Certainly it is not apparent at the phenomenological level. The removal of philosophy, or any discipline, is articulated as the removal of a domain of activity for the masses because academics is not only a passive object of consumption, it is also “done actively” (something that Althusser tried to explicate). At the same time, cuts in education hints at exclusion of a section of the masses from doing this activity. London, in this “springtime”, did challenge capital at one of its attempts of domination. The question, however, is how long will labour be able to subvert capital.  If the movement remains at the “guerrilla” level of anti-capital, that is, not allowing removal of disciplines or not allowing cuts, the spontaneous development of capitalist social relations shall ultimately lead to “withering away” of certain disciplines resulting in the same domination by capital. The challenge to capital has, therefore, to be at the logical level. The ‘collective worker’ has to see how a control over academics is also a control over the whole working class and its activities.

As cited above, capital’s domination over labour can be, if one wishes, indirect through the controlling of labour processes of academic disciplines. In India, the scenario is somewhat different. Here, capital attempts to dominate (re)production of labour-power by a direct control over the education system. “Discipline and punish” are its major weapons. We can find that in institutions(of “natural science”(including technology) and  of ethics) where there is the semester systems with examinations in every month, 75% compulsory attendance failing which students are not allowed to sit for exams(scarcity of jobs requires students to obey) and recently the placing of the Education Tribunal Bill (Prasanta Chakravarty and Brinda Bose(2011)). The Orwellian blaming, that has crept into much of radical political practices today, serves its purpose only to progressively disturb the masses and maybe, very soon, India has its own springtime. But in the absence of understanding its ‘glocal’ location as labour, the springtime will soon fizzle.

There was no urgency before for the engagement in radical politics in their location for those associated with academics (teachers, students and non-teaching staff) as it is today. There is a need to fight the petty bourgeois tendency to leave academics, romanticize and enter into other domains of struggle. Bourgeois visions of the (wo)man of the future can be seen in some sci-fi movies where (wo)man appears as a robotic mass of flesh and blood and it shall become true if academics is not rescued from its capitalist discretisation and domination. Only those who are in this concrete labour process can understand and rescue it

.

Notes:

1. Meszaros, Istvan, Marx’s theory of Alienation, Aakar books, New Delhi

2. Lebowitz, Micheal A., Beyond Capital: Marx’s political economy of the working class, Palgrave macmillan, New York

3. Chakravarty, Prashant and Brinda Bose, in The Hindu, http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thehindu.com%2Fopinion%2Flead%2Farticle1588491.ece&h=a40b4 

Technical Students' Politics in Orissa: Problems and Prospects

Technical Universities(which include about a hundred colleges in private sector and only three in public sector) in Orissa are not allowed to have any official students’ Unions. There were, and still are, long debates on whether students should “enter” politics or not among the bourgeois intellectuals and politicians. This, ridiculous notion of “entering” politics is popular among the masses in front of whom, the State, through its Ideological Apparatuses, has been able to pose politics as something external to the very being of the masses, creating an impasse for many issues to be interiorised and keeping in-tact the politics of re-presentation.

The months of January and February are months of ‘festivals’ in Universities. Students organize and participate in cultural events. What is seen there clearly, is a domination of bourgeois hegemony. Capital articulates dissent so as to atomise individuals lending them the spirit of capitalism – competition. Consciousness of class is, through various means, attempted to be de-limited. The less articulated finds its expression in the totality of cultural formation in these Universities which include alcoholism and dope.

‘Primitive accumulation of capital’ at the moment of reproduction of labour-power is the subsumption of labour by capital at these concrete instances. Labour’s cry against this subsumption cannot be articulated by the morality of the working class at other subaltern locations but this cry is being commodified and sold at other loci of capital’s extraction of surplus value. (Several companies fund these Jan-Feb events in order to get advertised and consumerise the University more and more). The media also does the dual task – extraction of surplus value from the cry of labour and fragmenting labour into sociological antagonists.

There have been, but, attempts by groups to form associations in these Universities and these attempts crop up every now and then. There have been the Technical Students’ Federation by students of Biju Pattanayak University of Technology and most recently, students of Siksha ‘o’ Anusandhan University tried to associate (with leaders of former movement against the Government’s declaration to withdraw deemed University status taking the lead) and had their elections. In the light of re-presentative democratic politics, these can be seen as being infiltrated by political parties and individual aspirations of leaders of the movements – something that the bourgeois Ideology has as its problematic; but to see through the prism of politics of class, these are spontaneous anti-capitalist outbursts of labour. These

“engender(s) splendid shoots of idealism, comradely solidarity and self-sacrifice but at the same time individual struggle for existence[…]and the corrupting influence of the bourgeois parties do not permit these splendid shoots to develop fully. For all that, in spite of his remaining philistinely egoistic, and without exceeding in ‘human’ worth the average representative of the bourgeois classes, the average worker knows from experience that his simplest and natural desires can be satisfied only on the ruins of the capitalist system. ”[1]

[1] Trotsky, Leon. The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Aakar Books, 2005, New Delhi, Pp. 76. 

'Elite' Students: a view from within

Institute of Technical Education and Research is an engineering college based in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. It is one of those colleges, which in popular communist theoretical discourse in Orissa, known to be ‘elitist’. Students pay from around Rs.1,10,000 to Rs.1,65,000 as their per annum tuition fees. Of course they are from an ‘elite background’. In a recent interaction with students they come up and say: “We want a job for a good living though we are not interested in technology. The most fertile labour-market welcomes B.Tech pass outs. We can pursue our interests after we are stable.” This, of course, is ‘consumerism’. One student says, “My father works in a bank and I have taken loans so that I can complete my B.Tech and take a job. I love literature but that, I can keep, as a hobby to be pursued later.” ‘Petty bourgeois tendency’ of course.

What would Marx say! Maybe this:

“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”[1] 

And this he would, probably, say to the students and maybe 'staff.'

Notes: 

1. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Pp. 112, Progress Publishers, Moscow