Political Economy

Academia in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Or, the Journal System, Redeemed

/ Pablo K / 10 Comments

It took at least 200 years for the novel to emerge as an expressive form after the invention of the printing press.

So said Bob Stein in an interesting roundtable on the digital university from back in April 2010. His point being that the radical transformations in human knowledge and communication practices wrought by the internet remain in their infancy. Our learning curves may be steeper but we haven’t yet begun to grapple with what the collapsing of old forms of social space means. We tweak and vary the models that we’re used to, but are generally cloistered in the paradigms of print.

When it comes to the university, and to the journal system, this has a particular resonance. Academics find themselves in a strange and contradictory position. They are highly valued for their research outputs in the sense that this is what determines their reputation and secures their jobs (although this is increasingly the value of the faux-market and the half-assed quality metric). This academic authority, won by publications, is also, to some extent, what makes students want to work with them and what makes them attractive as experts for government, media and civil society. They are also highly valued in a straight-forward economic sense by private publishing houses, who generate profit from the ability to sell on the product of their labour (books and articles) at virtually no direct remuneration, either for the authors or for those peer reviewers who guarantee a work’s intellectual quality. And yet all (OK, most) also agree that virtually nobody reads this work and that peer review is hugely time-consuming, despite being very complicated in its effects. When conjoined with the mass noise of information overload and the extension and commercialisation of higher education over the last decades, our practices of research, dissemination and quality control begin to take on a ludicrous hue. As Clifford Lynch nicely puts it, “peer review is becoming a bottomless pit for human effort”.

This is an attempt to explore in more detail what the potentialities and limits are for academic journals in the age of digital reproduction. Once we bracket out the sedimented control of current publishers, and think of the liveliness of intellectual exchange encountered through blogs and other social media, a certain hope bubbles up. Why not see opportunity here? Perhaps the time is indeed ripe for the rebirth of the university press, as Martin Weller argues:

the almost wholesale shift to online journals has now seen a realignment with university skills and functions. We do run websites and universities are the places people look to for information (or better, they do it through syndicated repositories). The experience the higher education sector has built up through OER, software development and website maintenance, now aligns nicely with the skills we’ve always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. Universities are the ideal place now for journals to reside.

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Precarity Everywhere

/ N / 7 Comments

A recent piece by Michael Bérubé highlights one of the invisible problems of higher education in America (and elsewhere) – namely, the rise of the adjunct as the hegemonic form of the modern day academic. This is in both a qualitative way (with flexibility and monetization becoming some of the prime measures for every academic), but also in a quantitative way (Bérubé cites data that shows more than 2 out of every 3 faculty members are now contingent workers).

While American political discourse often portrays academics as highly-paid, impossible-to-fire liberals, the data in fact shows virtually the opposite (though admittedly academics are likely disproportionately “liberals”). Increasingly the expectation of graduate students leaving university is that:

(a) an academic position will be incredibly difficult to find (I have numerous anecdotes of friends applying for hundreds of jobs and only getting 3-5 interviews, let alone job offers)

(b) when a job is found, it will be contract work

(c) when a job is found, it will involve the workload of a full professor

(d) when a job is found, it will pay 20-75% of a full professor’s salary

(e) in a year (perhaps longer depending on the contract), this process will be repeated

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‘You, Decorous Bureaucrats Of Angelic Leagues’: A Brief Review of ‘I Melt The Glass With My Forehead’ (2012)

/ Pablo K / Leave a comment

I’ve just seen Martin McQuillan and Joanna Callaghan‘s ‘I Melt The Glass With My Forehead’: A Film About £9,000 Tuition Fees, How We Got Them, and What To Do About It.[1] It does pretty much what it says on the tin, charting the issues talking-heads style. Readers not already deeply involved in the UK higher education system and its various problems will find it particularly enlightening, and the parade of would-be-Ministers making promises soon to be broken is worth the anger-energy alone.

Two things struck me. The first was LSE Public Policy Professor Nick Barr, who, despite making a lonely case for some of the fee changes, nevertheless foregrounded a few crucial issues. Most obviously neglected by higher education activists, there’s the importance of pre-university education, which remains much more important in determining entry, ‘success’ and social mobility than any fee/loan/tax increase. Moreover, as we’ve seen before, there’s the uncomfortable truth that the Browne proposals were more redistributive than the old system, although the Government’s decision to cap fees removed this potential. Linking these dimensions is the fundamental tension of contemporary higher education, which is of matching mass participation with high quality. On Barr’s account, this cannot happen from general taxation alone without something giving. Of course, this only remains a challenge of public policy under certain comparatively narrow parameters, and, as Howard Hotson reminds us, the system being ‘reformed’ for its own good was actually the best in the world when viewed as the combination of overall quality and parity across institutions (and if you haven’t yet read Hotson on the Ivy League, do).

Second, and relatedly, the focus of our reflections seems already to have congealed around fees, and fees alone. Even on the narrow topic of student finances, the question of living costs is almost totally absent. A few voices from another age mention it, but there seems no place in our moral calculus for considering the differential between those who must support themselves and those who have the supporting done for them. But there’s also something evidently arbitrary in discussing fees without a whisper about the REF, or the impact agenda, or the generalised role of the university as a producer of public goods (and I don’t just mean Ancient Norse) in an age of austere retrenchment. Notwithstanding the manifold critiques of Browne and Willetts (charlatanism being primary among them, at least for McQuillan and Callaghan), all this misses the critical perspective provided by Andrew McGettigan, placing the fees SNAFU within a wider ecology of political economy and long-term transformation. We learn just this week of the next stage of this process at London Met, where all in-house admin is being offered for private bidding and where 229 ‘posts’ (read: jobs) are to be abolished across seven faculties (this coming after the closure of 70% of undergraduate courses).

This all matters because the public discussion of the future university is increasing, even amidst our wholesale crisis of economy. In typical academic style, it’s coming too late for the bait-and-switch, but if the renewal of energy around the idea of a public university is to mean anything, it cannot be a mere retreat. Barr’s argument that teaching grant must be restored in the next Parliament seems both commonsensical and strangely unimaginable, but there are other stagnant pits of the old to avoid alongside the risks of the new.

[1] The title is borrowed from a banner at an anti-fees demo, quoting a 1915 poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky mentioned by Dan Hancox in the film. I borrowed ‘You, Decorous Bureaucrats Of Angelic Leagues’ from the same place. It seemed somehow more appropriate.

Colouring Lessons: Race Is A Structure Of Oppression, And Is Alive And Well

/ Robbie Shilliam / 2 Comments

Race is a structure of oppression. So long as the structure remains, so does race. However, while there is plenty of talk about ethnicity and social cohesion, pathological cultures, and broken communities, race is usually mentioned only in its disavowal. And racism? Few would profess to that habit; most would comfortably label racism as a reactionary attitude. But to what imaginary golden mean? It is a privilege to believe that racism is a reaction rather than a catalysing agent of oppression. Meanwhile, all of us are variously implicated in this structure of oppression called race.

Even on the left, race is seen to be somewhat passé, and happily so now that the next world crisis in capital accumulation has arrived and we can all finally re-focus on the real thing: class. But what is the difference between race and class? Is it the difference between superstructure and base? Race does involve identification, both in order to oppress and in order to redeem. Yet in this respect, it is no more or less an identity than class. With the exception of Black Marxism, what the left has historically been unable or unwilling to consider is that, as a structure of oppression, race runs deeper than class.

Marx’s masterful hermeneutic shift from contract to class involved leaving behind the realm of exchange – wherein all things were of equivalent value and all transactions were equitable – and entering into the realm of production – wherein value was consistently expropriated and relations were exploitative. Nevertheless, in the colonial world, Marxism was more often used as a weapon for struggle and less so as a faith to guide contemplation. One reason for this engagement is that class exploitation never quite explained the reality of oppression experienced under the colonial exigencies of the world market.

In truth, Marx did not shift his hermeneutic far enough from liberalism and its obsession with civil society. Continue reading →

Affect! Biopolitics! Technology! Ecology!: A Call for Papers

/ Pablo K / 1 Comment

A brief pre-holiday announcement of the next Millennium annual conference, to be convened on the theme of Materialism and World Politics. Full details below the fold. The range of suggested topics looks both fascinating and much-needed, and I am assured by well-placed sources that there will also be some stellar speakers, for those who are tempted by such things. As always, papers submitted in the wake of the conference which survive the rigours of peer review will be published in a resulting special issue (Vol. 41, No. 3). Also, don’t forget about the Northedge Essay Competition (deadline 30 January 2012).

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Who’s Afraid Of Economic Models?

/ Guest Authors / 1 Comment

A guest post by Nathan Coombs, a doctoral student in Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway. Nathan’s work focuses on the relationship between metaphysics and political ideology. Nathan is the author of ‘The Political Theology of Red Toryism’, published in the Journal of Political Ideologies, 16(1), February 2011, as well as a number of other papers. He is an also an Editor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, an open-access peer-reviewed academic journal which should be a stimulus to us all. Images by Pablo.

If there is a point of unity for strong (non-Keynesian) critics of neoclassical economics it is their shared rejection of modelling. This is not to say such authors shun all use of abstraction, idealisation, and quantisation in favour of just qualitative, empirical efforts at explanation. Rather, modelling is held out as a practice whereby mathematical attempts to grasp economic laws become unhinged from reality; where abstraction begets abstraction for its own sake. For example, in his famous methodological treatise, Economics and Reality, Tony Lawson firmly demarcates the form of abstraction he recommends for economics from the practice of modelling – placing stress on the point where: “it seems vital that I indicate why the procedure to which I refer does not at all reduce to the activities of the ‘modelling’ project in question.” (Lawson 1997, 227)

For different reasons converging to the same end, advocates of the most active strand of Marxian economics, working from the Temporal Single System Interpretation (or TSSI), are equally averse to modelling, associating it with simultaneous, equilibrium interpretations of Marx’s labour theory of value, diverging from the correct representation of the theory. Inside the pages of Andrew Kliman’s recent book, Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital”, the word ‘model’ only occurs negatively in association with what he argues are flawed abstractions of the theory from Okishio’s theorem through much political economy in the 20th century (Kliman 2007, 44, 48, 66, 101, 176). The idea that Marx’s Capital might itself be considered a theoretical model of the economy is out of the question.

What explains this resistance to modelling for critics of the status quo in economics?

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Has the Left given up on Economics?

/ N / 43 Comments

With the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression continuing to slowly unfold, one of the most surprising consequences has been a non-event: the dearth of high-quality economic theorizing in leftist groups. [1] This is in spite of the opportunity the crisis presents for alternative economies, and in spite of the economic conundrum that developed economies find themselves in: too indebted for stimulus and too weak for austerity. This differend between austerity and stimulus indexes the insufficiency of either and yet few have taken up the necessity of thinking proper alternatives.

The leftist response to the economic crisis has instead been mostly been to focus on piecemeal reactions against government policies. The student movement arose as a response to tuition fee and EMA changes; the right to protest movement arose as a response to heavy-handed police treatment; and leftist parties have suggested a mere moderation of existing government policies. The project to bring about a fully different economic system has been shirked in favour of smaller-scale protests. There is widespread critique, but little construction.

Admittedly, the left is not entirely devoid of high-level economic theorizing. Rather, the more specific problem is that those few who do such work are a relatively tiny minority and are typically marginalized within the leftist scene. The attention and effort of the leading intellects of leftism (at least in the UK) are on social issues, race issues, rights issues, and identity issues. All important, to be sure, but there is no equivalent attention paid to economic issues.

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Atrocity Porn, the Resource Curse and Badvocacy in ‘Unwatchable’ (2011)

/ Pablo K / 2 Comments

Lest it need saying, *trigger warning*.

Unwatchable lasts just over 6 minutes, but is intended to linger far longer. A project of Save The Congo, it was apparently turned down by larger charities on the grounds that it was too extreme. Deploying liberal doses of slo-mo and orchestral overture, it shows an armed assault on a whiter-than-white (and blonder-than-blonde) family somewhere in rural England. The teenage daughter is gang-raped on the kitchen table while her father is forced to watch, and her parents are eventually mutilated and killed on their front lawn while the soldiers laugh and film them on mobile phones. At one point we see a soldier cowering to avoid the scenes wrought by his comrades. The youngest daughter is killed trying to escape. In other words, a BBFC 18-rated piece of atrocity porn doubling as a viral advocacy campaign.

A small clickable box sits screen top-right throughout. It reads: ‘Make It Stop’. The tagline: ‘Warning: this film contains sexualised violence you and your mobile phone manufacturer may find disturbing’. The pay off being that this is really about the DRC, but that it will take this happening to white people for you to notice. Yes, this is another campaign about the resource curse and another entry in the catalogue of rape atrocity ratcheting, now with the obligatory twitter hashtag (#bloodminerals) and a petition demanding: a) that EU companies be forced into transparent supply chains for coltan and the like; and b) that ‘swift and severe’ action be taken against any party responsible for violence.

Kate at Wronging Rights picks up on the incoherence of Save the Congo’s accompanying claims:

W…T…F…? Rape is cheaper and much more effective than guns or bullets??? No.  Rape is not a “cheap” coercive strategy.  It’s time-consuming and it exposes the perpetrators to injury and potential STD infection. Armed groups absolutely use it anyway, but not because it’s cheaper than bullets.

And, [i]f armed groups were to raid a village and force the population to leave by shooting at them, NGOs could be alerted and the UN would have to react??  This is surely news to the scores of NGOs, both local and international, who have worked tirelessly to document and publicize the use of rape as a weapon of war throughout the last decade and a half of conflict in the region.

Look, I realize that grassroots activism often plays a fundamental role in political change, and has been particularly important to the history of the human rights movement, but seriously, this “the news made me sad / I can haz NGO?” nonsense has got to stop.  Time to invoke Amanda’s “Love Actually Test” on a wider scale, I think.

Bizarre and untenable as such ideas may be (say what?), the key points of Save the Congo’s analysis are ones now commonly repeated as part of the general ‘weapon of war’ narrative. Continue reading →

Commodification, the Academic Journal Racket and the Digital Commons

/ Pablo K / 8 Comments

David, my erstwhile ‘parasitic overlord’ from when I was co-editing Millennium, points me to some posts by Kent Anderson of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, who defends the industry on a number of grounds from Monbiot’s polemic against the journal racket. The comments threads on both pieces are populated by academics who agree with Monbiot and by publishing industry colleagues who agree with Anderson (and who alternate between dismissing and being personally offended by the original Monbiot column). The core counter-argument is that this anti-corporate, out of touch, ‘wannabe-academic’ day dreaming is old hat, and stands up no better now than it did when it was demolished at some unspecified point in the past.

Most crucially, Monbiot’s central exhibit (that companies consistently make 30-40% margins on the distribution of work already paid for by the public purse) is almost entirely passed over. Anderson coyly suggests that maybe publisher margins are that high, but maybe they’re not. Despite working rather closer to the heart of matters financial than do the rest of us, he provides no settling of accounts either way. In any case, however much it costs, and however much publishers make, it’s good value, apparently by definitional fiat. Since libraries keep paying the money, and since academics keep submitting papers, it is ‘idealism’ (remember that?) to complain about the current balance of power.

This is the familiar circular logic of neoliberal reason: privatised arrangements are beneficial because they will make the system more efficient and less costly. But if the rate of profit does not fall in line with the expectations of open competition, then it must mean that the rates charged are true equilibrium prices. Nevertheless, complainants citing high margins are referred to the benefits of privatised arrangements and assured that competition will bring prices down. Even though £200 million each year, or 10% of all research funding distributed by HEFCE (the academic funding council for England), ends up being spent on journal and database access by academic libraries. [1]

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On the Abstraction of Contemporary Crisis

/ N / 19 Comments

On the Abstraction of Contemporary Crisis
Or, Why Today Feels Different From the 1930s

One of the oddities of the ongoing economic crisis is its apparent separation from everyday life.[1] Consumers still consume, luxury items are still produced. Starbucks is still filled with coffee drinkers, and Apple still sells its overpriced goods. Scanning the media, one finds its coverage devoid of lengthy soup lines or surges in tent cities. While most have had to cut back on their indebtedness, there hasn’t been a collapse on the scale of the Great Depression. This is in spite of some measures suggesting the current crisis is as deep in some ways.


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