Capital in Higher Education: A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector 9783031384400, 9783031384417

Citation preview

MARXISM AND EDUCATION

Capital in Higher Education A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector

Krystian Szadkowski

Marxism and Education Series Editor

Richard Hall Education and Technology De Montfort University Leicester, UK

This international series assumes the ongoing relevance of Marx’s contributions to critical social analysis, and encourages the development of the full-range of engagement with Marxist traditions both in and for education. It celebrates scholarship and analysis across intersections, geographies, histories and sectors, with a focus upon how the dynamics of capitalism and developments in political economy impact formal and informal education. As a result, it aims for critique that can describe and analyse how education informs resistances to capitalist social relations, and how those might be abolished or transcended. The series proceeds in a spirit of openness and dialogue within and between various conceptions of Marxism and education. However, the series also brings those conceptions, and analyses that are informed by Marxist scholarship, into dialogue with their critics and other anti-capitalist traditions. The essential feature of the series is that Marxist modes of critique and Marxist frameworks provide living methodologies, which form inspirational resources for renewing both educational practices and research. In this way, the series develops socially-useful knowledge that can support action inside and against existing structures, policies and processes of education, by rethinking their relationship to society. The series is dedicated to the realization of positive human potentialities through education and with Marx.

Krystian Szadkowski

Capital in Higher Education A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector

Krystian Szadkowski Faculty of Philosophy Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Poland

Marxism and Education ISBN 978-3-031-38440-0    ISBN 978-3-031-38441-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Cseh Ioan / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Анастасия - with love and gratitude.

Marxism and Education Series Editor’s Foreword In, Against and Beyond Capital in Higher Education

Much higher education research (HER) is stuck, lacking the conceptual tools to provide explanatory power for the fixes that we are in: as individuals and in communities; as students and teachers; as workers and consumers. Much of this research picks up on material and historical changes in the governance, regulation and funding of education, and concomitant impacts upon the structures, cultures and practices of our educational institutions. In this, much liberal scholarship, and also that which might be housed under the umbrella of Critical University Studies, remains attached to unpicking and describing the symptoms or characteristics of innovation, inside a capitalist landscape that remains unchallenged. This is even worse for those engaged in empiricist forms of HER, for whom the University sector tends to remain a unique construction inside capitalist social relations. Thus, the tendency is for HER to render us unable to escape from the condition grasped in Fredric Jameson’s (1994) aphorism that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. At the end of history, inside a transnational educational infrastructure, governed in large part by the dictates of finance capital, it is possible to reflect upon and critique what it means to be inside the institutions of academic capitalism and even to be against those institutions. However, for some time it has appeared impossible to be beyond the capitalist order, realised through institutions of higher learning mediated by the market, commodity

vii

viii 

MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

exchange, divisions of labour and private property (Hall, 2018). At the end of history, the normative assumptions of essentialist and empiricist HER, the reformist framings of liberal analyses and more critical analyses that highlight issues of social justice reinforce a view that higher education is foreclosed upon within a transhistorical system of social reproduction. Such analyses contain limited explanatory power and offer no ability to unpick the capitalist foundations of our ongoing, educational and pedagogic estrangement from our work, ourselves and our world. They remind us of long-standing criticisms of the University as a hegemonic space for the reproduction of power. Reflecting upon May 1968, Camarades (quoted in Feenberg, 1999, p. 24) noted that in France, the University has become more and more an essential terrain: the intensification of the repressive reality of the University, its increasing role in the process of social reproduction, its active participation in maintaining the established order (cf. the social sciences in particular), the role of science and research in economic development, all require the institution of a right to permanent contestation in the University, its goals, its ideology, the content of its ‘products’.

Contestation is grounded inside the repressive realities of social order, instantiated for-value. This is the normative and reductionist terrain for much of what passes for studies in higher education. Moreover, such work tends to offer no engagement with the ontological implications and agentic limitations of our estrangement. In this, increasingly, it feels that the University offers no way in which we can usefully engage with the global emergencies that confront us (Hall, 2021). Such institutions are in dialectical relation with a global system of capitalist reproduction that feels all-consuming and that makes imagining other worlds appear impossible. Moreover, such institutions are constantly being reproduced as networks or associations of capitals, or regimes of accumulation, akin to a joint-stock company (Marx, 1894/1991). Thus, the corporate University in the global North increasingly works in partnership with finance capital, educational publishers and consultancies, technology corporations, policymakers and so on, designed for-value or for the extraction of rents (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2022), or for militarisation and securitisation (Hoofd, 2017). Yet, it is crucial that we begin the process of imagining how to dismantle the institutions that practically and culturally stitch us into an

  MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD 

ix

inhuman and inhumane universe. It is crucial that the work undertaken in (the name of) these institutions recognises the exploitation, expropriation and extraction at the heart of the capitalocene (Moore, 2015). These are amplified through the knowledge production and transfer emanating from institutions in the North and which are then experienced (suffered) differentially across communities (Ahmed, 2017; The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), 2021; Chuǎng, 2019; Mbembe, 2021). Through our physical and emotional responses, we might centre our recognition and refusal of this by exploring how estrangement and alienation have been normalised in the time and activity of our lives (Wendling, 2009). How have we alighted upon a competitive infrastructure that subsumes our existence for the production of surpluses? How might we struggle against such an apparently universal infrastructure rather than waiting for it to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions (Tronti, 2019)? This project requires a critical methodology that can ground the everyday realities of intellectual work against the institutional processes that kettle it for impact, knowledge exchange, spillover and entrepreneurship, in the name of a bourgeois construction of value. Here, it is important that academics understand how to read the institution, as its discourses frame academic teaching, scholarship, research, public engagement and so on around value-for-money. This is especially the case in the global North, where accelerated financialisation and privatisation have developed in dialectical relation in order to extract value from rents and the commodification of services and to impose forms of structural adjustment through competition (Meyerhoff, 2019). The imperative of value-for-money, therefore, becomes a normalised discourse or technique of recalibration, with an apparently innocent social justification, which points towards the ongoing structural adjustment of academic life (Kornbluh, 2020). Yet, as Szadkowski’s crucial work on Capital in Higher Education demonstrates, the construction and power of terms like value-for-money are situated against the political economy of the sector. For many, this situation remains a mystery, which Szadkowski seeks to uncover through a powerful critique that centres Marx’s dialectical methodology, grounded in our particular, material history. The unfolding, material process of history is deeply entwined in our ways of knowing, doing and being in the world that people may

x 

MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. (Marx, 1852)

Szadkowski seeks to help us understand these circumstances and their ontological ramifications for us. At the heart of this work is a desire to understand the unfolding relations between academic labour and capital in the reproduction both of the University and of socially useful knowledge. In this, Capital in Higher Education demonstrates how the connections between, first, the alleged autonomy of knowledge production, second, the quantification of outputs and impact and, third, the accelerated accumulation of the abundance of intellectual artefacts by educational publishers contribute to a terrain for the extraction of surplus-value that is dehumanising. At the core of this is a deep methodological and ontological engagement with the material history of value theory, in an attempt to unpick how academic labour is conditioned and constructed for the measurement and commodification of knowledge. Understanding how value and markets erupt through processes of subsumption in a competitive, global environment that is itself stitched into a wider social terrain for valorising academic knowledge enables cultures of measure and measuring and prestige to be analysed. This is important because the value that can be materialised by measuring and commodified academic outputs, as a form of private property, is reinforced through a prestige economy that is mediated against an academic division of labour. Through the market, such outputs and measurements of prestige are brought into relation such that they might be compared. This matters socially because the University works for capital through the methodological discipline of its subjects to condition social reproduction and knowing. Marx (1857/1993, p. 308) notes: All the progress of civilisation, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production… In the productive powers of labour itself – such as results from science, inventions, divisions and combinations of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery etc., enriches not the worker, but rather capital; hence only magnifies again the power dominating over labour.

  MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD 

xi

Understanding this power, in relation to Marx’s analysis of productive and unproductive labour (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009), lies the heart of Szadkowski’s utilisation of Marx’s methodology, both as a movement of becoming and as an ontological revelation. This works to peel back the layers of academic life: first, from the production of knowledge and its co-­ option by academic publishers inside their infrastructures for extracting rent; second, to the experience of academic labour as it is subsumed inside a prestige economy, shaped by financialisation and commodification; third, to the urgent, systemic desire for surplus(-value, labour and time); and fourth, to uncover value-production as a social relation at the heart of this process. The point of this is not simply to reveal the dehumanisation that erupts from the contradictions of the value-form, but to stress how antagonism feeds the potential for class struggle (Dunayevskaya, 1991, 2002). At issue here is demonstrating the agency at the heart of academic struggles against what the University has become (Carpenter & Mojab, 2011). It centres on a dialectical movement of becoming that seeks to abolish the present state of things (Marx & Engels, 1846/1998), where human potential energy can be repurposed as kinetic agency. For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. (Engels, 1886)

Following the activist, intellectual positions of Rosa Luxemburg, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri and others, Capital in Higher Education works out the movement of contradiction in knowledge production and how that offers the potential for negation, abolition and sublation through Commoning. Expressed objectively, the goal lies in tracing, through analysis of new empirical materials, the emergence of reality in which an earlier established contradiction finds its relative resolution in a new objective form of its realisation. (Ilyenkov, 1979/1982)

The revelation of Commoning as a movement of mutuality and dignity in being, doing and knowing in the world demonstrates the deep, ontological rift at the heart of intellectual work in the global North. As that work

xii 

MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

is predicated upon individual prestige rather than commonality, mutuality or collectivity, it can only deepen our estrangements in and from the world. By revealing such an ontological rift, Capital in Higher Education offers us a way of analysing academic experiences that are in the system and that might be against its alienating realities. It is important that in seeking to analyse the being and doing of academic labour inside capitalist institutions, Szadkowski centres his thinking against that of autonomist Marxist theorists and activists, who seek to recover a deep, humane kernel, able to refuse the vampiric nature and realities of capital (Marx, 1867/2004). Here, we must reiterate that an active desire to understand the potentialities for class struggle in higher education sits at the heart of Capital in Higher Education. By unpacking the core of the relationship between capital, academic labour and higher education, Szadkowski argues that we might understand how class struggle in the University is situated against the reproduction of labour in the totality of capitalist reproduction. Thus, he offers an important antidote to work that either is a neoclassical description of academic capitalism or analyses it as an abstract system or space to be refined and finessed. Moreover, it explicitly pushes against analyses that see academia, the University or higher education as somehow exceptional and outside of the dictates of productivity or the need to be productive in society. In this, Szadkowski aims to give us the conceptual tools to understand how to reclaim the humanity of our collective experience inside these intellectual spaces. This recognises that such institutions and their cultures and practices might be shaped by antagonism and contradiction, but the reality is that their actors (academics, professional services staff and students) too often refuse concrete struggle. In engaging with this tension, Szadkowski does not take a dogmatic or doctrinaire approach; rather, he develops an unfolding methodology that is dynamic and historically conditioned against concrete, material realities (Lukács, 1968). It is a method that situates an understanding of the value of higher education and academic labour against the movement of capitalist reproduction. It gives higher education workers the tools to feel and move with these contradictions and to see this moving dynamic as the unfolding self-production of human being, doing and knowing (Marx, 1844/1974). Capital in Higher Education highlights how, whilst he had limited things to say directly about education, Marx’s critical method helps us to rethink the purpose of higher education in a world beset by global

  MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD 

xiii

emergencies. Here, Marx (1857/1993) offers us a way of thinking about recovering the general intellect, or knowledge at the level of society, which has been stolen from us. Instead, he offers us a mode of thinking about our ways of being and doing, and especially of knowing the world, as a form of abundance held in common. As noted above, one of Szadkowski’s fundamental points is to remind us of the relationality of our Commons and to think about Commoning as a generative potentiality or potential energy. As a result, we are offered an alternative ontological model or way of rethinking our relationship to the things we make, our processes of making, the human and non-human world, and ourselves. This is deeply revolutionary and refuses the catastrophic reduction of an educational life to a war of position between individuals in a global market. In developing this methodology, Szadkowski brings us into deep conversation with a range of Marx’s work, not least, the Poverty of Philosophy (1847/1976), Theories of Surplus Value (1863/1969), The Grundrisse (1857/1993), Capital (1867/2004) and The German Ideology (with Engels, 1846/1998). Crucially, this enables him to show how Marx’s work offers us a way of unravelling the contradictions of capitalism in order to see how the impact, environment and outputs of higher education are being woven into industrial capital and weaponised against producers. It helps us to understand how capital uses knowledge reproduction to generate value, in relation to its creation of markets, measurement and prestige, on a global, academic terrain. Thus, Capital in Higher Education builds this through a careful reading of Marx and how, for instance, the movement of processes like subsumption, through formal, real, hybrid and ideal, enables us to push against existing, ossified traditions, which are unable to move beyond being in-and-against academic alienation. In this, it offers concrete examples that unfold the entangled ways in which knowledge production as productive capacity is enclosed and commodified. For instance, it lays bare the ways in which the technologies of extraction of educational publishers, imposed across global terrains of knowledge production and emanating from the global North, recalibrate academic life for-value. Such specificity demonstrates how Capital in Higher Education is not a thing, but a social relation, which shapes and is reshaped as a productive network. Through such an analysis, it becomes possible to engage with Marx and Engels’ (1846/1998) analysis of the triple movement of struggle: in–against–beyond. It becomes possible to see how the transition against capital, in order to move beyond its alienating realities, is seeded

xiv 

MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

through the Common and Commoning. Being in-and-against enables us to reveal capital’s ability to externalise as value the internal logics of knowledge production and to condition those logics for further valorisation. Being in-and-against, with this level of critical analysis, enables us to imagine a new ontology of Commoning, in relation to concrete examples that reveal the entangled processes of value production–circulation–distribution that exploit, expropriate and extract academic knowledge (Fraser, 2016). This enables us to imagine a new ontological horizon that stands against the flows of value through higher education. This is a potential starting point for class struggle in the University. Thus, the arguments presented by Szadkowski demonstrate the value of Marx’s methodological critique, as a scientific method, for understanding how academic labour is situated against capital’s desire valorisation as a social relation that dehumanises and destroys. Capital in Higher Education demonstrates how, inside a prestige economy, governed by ideal subsumption, and that is conditioned against a measured, competitive environment, class struggle must erupt from an understanding of the roots of antagonism. This antagonism, revealed in the co-option of knowledge production, rots the heart of what is regarded as meaningful academic work. By revealing alternative possibilities for socially useful knowledge beyond the market, we might work for the abolition of academic labour and its transcendence through myriad forms of mass intellectuality that might address the global crises that confront us. These include respect for ways of knowing that are intersectional, intercommunal and intergenerational and predicated upon indigeneity and decoloniality. Here, finally we might engage with Capital in Higher Education in its totality, as A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector that is science and higher education. It is a way of understanding how value shapes the forms of the University and its content in relation to knowledge and academic labour. Here, the emerging, explanatory category of the Common, shaped by humane values of mutuality, courage, faith, justice and dignity, offers us the possibility that the doing, being and knowing of Commoning might help us imagine other worlds. As a result, academics-in-struggle might usefully remember that they must make these worlds with others— most importantly, their professional services colleagues and students. This struggle is the revelation that we are many-sided individuals and communities, rather than simply workers demonstrating value-for-money. As we reveal that capitalist institutions like universities are associations of capitals, or transnational activist networks rather than single institutions,

  MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD 

xv

which are conditioned competitively to extract value, profit, service, rent and labour across a global terrain, it is important that we see the full humanity of those who labour inside-and-against them. This matters because, as Szadkowski emphasises, the Commons is also inscribed socially beyond academia, in other ways of knowing the world. We know the world in multiple ways and can reimagine it in multiple ways, including those that transcend the alienating structures inside which we are housed for-value. This holds us to the reality that for communism to be the real movement that abolishes the present state of things (Marx & Engels, 1846/1998), it must be predicated upon collective struggle. Leicester, UK

Richard Hall

References Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press. APIB. (2021). The Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil. [@:] https:// apiboficial.org/sobre/?lang=en Camarades, Action, no. 1, 7 Mai 1968. In A.  Feenberg (1999). Questioning Technology. Routledge. Carpenter, S., & Mojab, S. (2011). Epilogue: Living Revolution, Learning Revolution, Teaching Revolution. In S.  Carpenter & S.  Mojab (Eds.), Educating from Marx: Race, Gender, and Learning (pp.  211–225). Palgrave Macmillan Chuǎng. (2019). Red Dust: The Transition to Capitalism in China. Chuǎng, 2. [@:] http://chuangcn.org/journal/two/red-­dust/ De Angelis, M., & Harvie, D. (2009). ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race. How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism, 7(3), 3–30. Dunayevskaya, R. (1991). Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao. Aakar Books. Dunayevskaya, R. (2002). The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx. Lexington Books. Engels, F. (1886). Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. [@:] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-­ feuerbach/index.htm Fraser, N. (2016). Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalisms: A Reply to Michael Dawson. Critical History Studies, 3(1), 163–78. Hall, R. (2018). The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University. Palgrave Macmillan.

xvi 

MARXISM AND EDUCATION SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Hall, R. (2021). The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History. Mayfly Books. Hoofd, I. (2017). Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The Disintegration of University Teaching and Research. Palgrave Macmillan. Ilyenkov, E. (1979/1982). Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism. Reflections on Lenin’s book: ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’. New Park Publications. Jameson, F. (1994). The Seeds of Time. Columbia University Press. Kornbluh, A. (2020). Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. The Chronicle of Higher Education. [@:] https://www.chronicle.com/article/ Academe-­s-­Coronavirus-­Shock/248238 Lukács, G. (1968). History and Class Consciousness. Merlin Press. Marx, K. (1844/1974). Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1847/1976). Poverty of Philosophy. In K. Marx & F. Engels, Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 06: Marx and Engels: 1845–1848 (pp.  102–212). Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1852). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marxists Internet Archive. [@:] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-­ brumaire/ch01.htm Marx, K. (1857/1993). Grundrisse: Outline of the Critique of Political Economy. Penguin. Marx, K. (1867/2004). Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin. Marx, K. (1863/1969). Theories of Surplus Value: Part 1–3. Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1894/1991). Capital, Volume 3: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1846/1998). The German Ideology. Prometheus University Press. Mbembe, A. (2021). Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization. Columbia University Press. Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. University of Minnesota Press. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso. Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2022). Conceptualizing capitalist transformations of universities: Marx’s relevance for higher education research. Critique, 50(1), 185–203. Tronti, M. (2019). Workers and Capital. Verso. Wendling, A.  E. (2009). Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. Palgrave Macmillan.

Acknowledgements

My path to writing this book began in 2009 when, as a committed, left-­ leaning student at a peripheral university in Poland, I downloaded the book by The Edu-Factory Collective, Toward a Global Autonomous University. This is where it all started. I did not expect at the time that higher education, whose problems I felt but did not yet fully understand, would become the object of my activism and theoretical practice for the next 14  years. Little did I know that fate would give me a chance to become part of an international movement and throw me into so many inspiring places related to student and labour struggles: from the protests in the streets of London and the occupation of SOAS to the congress of student movements in Paris or the Indignados protests in Brussels, the visit of the Knowledge Liberation Front to Tunisia, to the congress of the Solidarity Academy in Koceli, Turkey—not to mention all the smaller and larger protests in Poland. Likewise, I did not realise at the time that the not-so-easy task of familiarising myself with Marx’s works and the long tradition of Marxism would be accompanied over the years by a set of questions about what characterises the capitalist relationship in higher education and how to bring about its effective rupture. Capital in Higher Education results from many years of work and equally long philosophical reflection (I am a philosopher by training and profession). Although it grows directly from my earlier Polish-language book published in 2015, Uniwersytet jako dobro wspólne. Podstawy krytycznych badań nad szkolnictwem wyższym [University as the common. Foundations of critical higher education research], it substantially xvii

xviii 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

develops and consolidates, rather than repeats, its findings, shifting attention to how academic labour in higher education functions and the conditions of possibility for its capitalist subsumption. Unfortunately, it is a characteristic of the hierarchical, capitalist mode of knowledge production in contemporary science and higher education that work produced in languages other than English (especially in those smaller, marginal languages) has neither relevance nor value from the point of view of capitalist circuits of knowledge valorisation. In writing this book, I have received an incredible amount of help and cordiality from people near and far, from those who have stayed with me to this day and those who have gone on their way. Without them, this task would have been impossible to accomplish. At this point, I want to thank them for their attention, help, discussions and teachings. In the first instance, thanks are due to Richard Hall, who believed in my project and supported me at every stage of its (long) completion. His warmth, helpfulness and, at times, firmness kept the will to fight in me. Above all, I am grateful for the insightfulness of his comments, which helped me to illuminate many elements of my argument. In order to write Capital in Higher Education, I had to incur a lot of intellectual debt. The book was written at the intersection of two areas (Marxism and higher education research) which representatives rarely discuss with each other and in which I have been actively working over the last decade—willingly or unwillingly developing a rather hybrid scholarly identity. I am grateful to all those who, through numerous meetings, seminars, discussions or exchanges of correspondence and texts, have helped me understand the rich tradition of Marxism. Above all, I would like to thank: Joanna Bednarek, Luis Martinez Andrade, Harry Cleaver, Anna Curcio, Andrea Fumagalli, Richard Hall, Michael Hardt, Mariya Ivancheva, Mateusz Janik, Piotr Juskowiak, Jerzy Kochan, Krzysztof Król, Jakub Krzeski, Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski, Piotr Laskowski, Michał Kozłowski, Gabriel Klimont, Ewa Majewska, Mikołaj Ratajczak, Łukasz Moll, Mike Neary, Matteo Pasquinelli, Anna Piekarska, Michał Pospiszyl, Paul Rekret, Gigi Roggero, Jan Sowa, Maciej Szlinder, Joss Winn and Felipe Ziotti Narita. Likewise, my conversations, meetings, consultations, seminars, participation in joint projects and research with representatives of the higher education research field have proved fundamental to my ability to understand the specifics of the sector and the discussions taking place in the field

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

xix

over the years. I want to express special gratitude to Dominik Antonowicz, Melina Arnikoivu, Ronald Barnett, Søren S. Bengtsen, Jelena Brankovic, Aline Courtois, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Andrew G. Gibson, Julian Hamann, Hugo Horta, Daniel Kontowski, Emanuel Kulczycki, Marek Kwiek, Simon Marginson, Giulio Marini, Charles Mathies, David Mills, Rikke Toft Nørgård, Tim Seidenschnur, Hans Schildermans, Lili Yang, Sue Wright, Xin Xu and Filip Vostal. I owe a specific intellectual debt to Adam Chmielewski, who early enough suggested that I should pay particular attention to the role of prestige in capitalist subsumption of academic labour. His comments opened my eyes in 2014 and made me combine all the pieces. I am hugely indebted to the people from my closest surrounding who have read the various chapters of the book and shared their comments: Lynne Bowker, Piotr Juskowiak, Stanisław Krawczyk, Emanuel Kulczycki, Andrew G. Gibson, David Mills, Aleksandra Swatek and Zehra Taşkın. I am particularly grateful to Richard Hall, Franciszek Krawczyk and Jakub Krzeski, who read the manuscript from cover to cover at successive stages of editing and allowed me to gain a readers’ perspective on the argument as a whole. I also cannot express the enormity of my gratitude to Lynne Bowker, who has generously edited the final manuscript’s language. I would also like to thank the editors at Palgrave Macmillan Education, especially Milana Vernikova and Vinnoth Kuppan, for their patience and support with this project, as well as the anonymous reviewers for all comments used to improve this book. Excerpts from the following previously published texts have been used in this book (in Chaps. 4, 6 and 9): Szadkowski, K. (2016a). Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption (s) of Academic Labour under Capital. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, (28), 1–17. Szadkowski, K. (2016b). Socially Necessary Impact/Time: Notes on the Acceleration of Academic Labor, Metrics and the Transnational Association of Capitals. Teorie Ve ̌dy/Theory of Science, 38 (1), 53–85. Szadkowski, K. (2019). An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Unproductive Academic Labour. TripleC, 17(1), 111–131.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Everydayness of Capitalist Subsumption  1 1.2 Necessary Reduction  4 1.3 Why Marx?  6 1.4 Aim of This Book  8 1.4.1 Approach  8 1.4.2 Contribution 10 1.5 Overview of Chapters 14 References 18 2 Method 21 2.1 Introduction 21 2.2 Crass Empiricism of Higher Education Research 23 2.3 Capitalist Transformations and the Form of Knowledge 27 2.4 Marx’s Ontological Grounding and Critique as a Movement 29 2.4.1 Movement as Critique 33 2.5 Against “Negative Critique” 35 2.5.1 Postonian Ontology… 36 2.5.2 … and Its Realisation in the Negative Critique of Academic Labour 38 2.6 Ontological Foundations of Critique of Political Economy 41

xxi

xxii 

Contents

2.7 Applied Metaphysics of Political Economy and the Critique 43 2.8 Political Reading of Marx 47 2.9 Conclusion 52 References 56 3 Markets 61 3.1 Introduction 61 3.2 Marketisation of Higher Education and Its Reflection in Theory 63 3.3 Neoclassical Economics of Higher Education 67 3.4 Academic Capitalism 69 3.5 Exceptionalism in Political Economy of Higher Education 72 3.6 Conclusion 75 References 78 4 Capital 81 4.1 Introduction 81 4.2 Marx and Capital in Das Kapital  84 4.3 Process of Production of Capital in Higher Education 86 4.4 Metamorphoses of Capital and Its Circuits in Higher Education 88 4.5 Capital’s Factions and Capture of Surplus Value in Higher Education 91 4.6 Conclusion 94 References 97 5 Subsumption101 5.1 Introduction101 5.1.1 Four Levels102 5.2 Formal Subsumption104 5.3 Real Subsumption106 5.4 Mutual Relations Between Formal and Real Subsumption108 5.5 Hybrid Subsumption112 5.6 Ideal Subsumption114 5.7 Conclusion117 References120

 Contents 

xxiii

6 Measure125 6.1 Introduction125 6.2 Measuring Academic Labour: Historical Overview127 6.2.1 Taylorism in Higher Education128 6.2.2 Quantification of Eminence and Early Bibliometrics130 6.2.3 Russian and Soviet Influences131 6.2.4 Atomism of Early Scientometrics133 6.2.5 Science Citation Index: Visualising Relations in Science135 6.2.6 Path Not Taken: Scientometrics and the Common of Science136 6.2.7 Journal Impact Factor: Culmination Point138 6.2.8 Summary139 6.3 Autonomist Marxism and Academic Labour Beyond Measure140 6.4 Measurement Apparatuses in Higher Education144 6.5 Standardisation and Synchronisation of Academic Labour149 6.6 Valuation and Valorisation of Academic Labour152 6.7 Conclusion158 References160 7 Prestige165 7.1 Introduction165 7.2 Marx and the Internal Articulation of Science Dynamics168 7.3 Mertonians and the Invention of Citation-Based Prestige170 7.3.1 Merton and the Reward System in Science173 7.3.2 Mertionian Experimentators and Equating Prestige with Quality176 7.3.3 Prestige, Referencing and the Common177 7.4 Contemporary “Prestige Economy”178 7.5 Conclusion181 References182

xxiv 

Contents

8 Knowledge185 8.1 Introduction185 8.2 Contradictions of Cognitive Capitalism187 8.3 Communism of Capital191 8.4 Development of Open Access in Science and Higher Education193 8.5 Three Areas of Capitalist Openness196 8.5.1 Oligopoly of Academic Publishers Move to Capitalist Open Access196 8.5.2 From Sellers to Data-Providers199 8.5.3 AI-Generated Research and Nooscope201 8.6 Beyond Exceptionalism202 8.7 Beyond Dispossession: Capitalist Open Access and Exploitation204 8.7.1 Dispossession Without Private Property Form?205 8.7.2 Profiting from Openness208 8.8 Conclusion213 References216 9 P  roductive and Unproductive Academic Labour221 9.1 Introduction221 9.2 Marxist Debate on Productive and Unproductive Labour224 9.3 Marx on Productive and Unproductive Labour226 9.4 Two-Sided Perspective on Productive/Unproductive Labour229 9.5 Directly Productive Academic Labour232 9.6 Social Productivity of Academic Labour235 9.7 Academic Production of the Common238 References239 10 Beyond Capital243 10.1 Introduction243 10.2 The Common or the Commons?244 10.3 The Future Is Now246 10.4 The Common In, Against and Beyond the Capitalist University248 10.4.1 Diachronic Perspective248 10.4.2 Common Ontology of Higher Education249

 Contents 

xxv

10.4.3 The Common As a Legacy of Past Struggles249 10.4.4 Synchronic Perspective251 10.4.5 Common Institutional Form251 10.4.6 Multitude of Common Struggles252 10.4.7 Higher Education Commons Beyond the University Walls253 10.5 The Common and Its Limitations255 10.6 Conclusion257 References259 Index263

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1   Everydayness of Capitalist Subsumption Mary darted towards Torrington Square, where her PhD supervisor was awaiting her arrival. As she passed the Birkbeck building, she entered the bustling square in front of School of Oriental and African Studies, with bicycles locked up haphazardly. The familiar line of students eagerly sought their free lunch from the Hare Krishna stall, adding to the animated scene. Cleaners, asserting their demands for permanent contracts, picketed the main entrance, their chants echoing throughout the square. On such days, it was the protestors’ camaraderie and spirited joy that buoyed Mary’s spirits. The weight of her student loan bore heavily upon her, but her immediate worry was her professor’s availability. His presence at the office surprised her, given the Institute’s ongoing strike over pensions. A University and College Union picket had been set up outside, but she couldn’t afford to care. This was her one opportunity. As she crossed the picket line, discomfort seeped in. The critical gazes of her lecturers and peers pierced through her. The poster displaying the university’s ranking over the years, a perennial fixture, caught her eye. She understood the staff’s disdain for such comparisons, yet the management persisted, likely hoping to attract potential candidates who happened to visit. Their influx—or rather, their tuition—offered a lifeline to the university, steeped in debt and scrutinized by credit rating agencies.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_1

1

2 

K. SZADKOWSKI

“To hell with them all,” Mary muttered under her breath, ascending to the upper floor. She maneuvered through the damp corridor, her footsteps sinking into the grubby carpet. The door to her professor’s office was ajar. He sat, hunched over his desk, engrossed in his writing. “Sit down. You have five minutes. Speak,” he commanded, his attention strained by the upcoming REF evaluation. He lacked any 4-star articles and was banking on a manuscript from Priya, a post-doc in their group, to save him from embarrassment. Resigned, Mary sank into her chair and began to speak. Another day at the university had commenced. Although all the characters featured in this story are fictional, the story itself is accurate. Our universities are made up of Marys and Priyas, along with the daily struggles, stresses or absurdities of evaluations and comparisons. Our daily practices do not resonate with our critical knowledge of university reality, and every day, despite frequent acts of organised resistance, we recreate and reinforce the oppressive reality. Even though the scene is set in the United Kingdom (UK), one of the most marketised systems of higher education, to some extent, it could take place anywhere where profit and efficiency are placed above all else, and where human life, development and knowledge are calculated solely in terms of time and money. The characters evoked in our story—Mary, her supervisor, the management, the protesting cleaning staff and Priya—despite the frequent tensions that may arise between them, are united by the fact that they live and work in higher education structured by capital flows. Put differently, their work and lives are subsumed under capital. In one way or another, their daily activities are linked by processes of valorisation of specific factions of capital. Let us take a closer look at these relations. Higher education in the UK or the United States (US) thrives on massive debt. Every year, both the undergraduate and graduate students entering university, as well as the universities themselves, take out gigantic loans. The former do it to be able to undertake an education in a system with huge tuition fees, while the latter do it to expand and to create the infrastructure needed to accommodate the next batch of international students. In 2021, student debt in the US alone was $1.757 trillion (Hanson, 2023). Debt is the domain of financial capital. It is interest-bearing credit that finances the development of production under capitalism. Regardless of the success of the educational efforts of the participants in the system, the capital poured into these activities valorises smoothly. Financial capital, too, develops through the financialisation of the future of academics; that

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

is, the placement of collective pension funds on financial markets. The need to address the rising costs of servicing the funds while facing successive eruptions of crises in capitalism and falling profits, worries the management. Subjected to a constant process of audits that determine both the cost of current loans and the possibility of taking out further loans, these senior administrators introduce measures that rob academics of their present and their future. However, the power of capital in higher education continues beyond there. The ability to attract more international students and expand the university’s financial base has recently depended on its position in global university rankings—indicators of quantified reputation. These, in turn, are predominantly based on publication performance indicators, as are national evaluation procedures. Thus, what we refer to in this book as measurement apparatuses, of which rankings will be a key element, contribute to the need to think of higher education and science together. This is necessary because the former is measured, valorised and hierarchised almost exclusively through the prism of achievements in the latter (i.e., through the outcome of efforts to contribute to  the development of knowledge). This is a paradoxical situation that has led not only to perspiration appearing on the forehead of Mary’s supervisor, but also to a sort of global synchronicity that intertwines evaluation and academic labour. As a result, the unrelenting emphasis on efficiency and the increasingly difficult conditions for meeting the exacting criteria are linked to the fact that more and more academics worldwide are attempting to place their research results in a growing but limited number of journals. The academic success not only of the supervisor but also of both Mary and Priya progressively depend on the success of these efforts. Academic labour’s usefulness is increasingly assessed against publication performance. And performance in the REF increasingly correlates with the number of publications in journals that have a calculated high-impact factor. These high-­ impact journals are overwhelmingly controlled by the academic publishing oligopoly, a faction of merchant capital that includes major publishers like Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis. Finally, the day-to-day production reality of the sector is also not particularly friendly. Although, for the most part, higher education institutions, especially those seen as successful and ranked among the most “prestigious” in the world, are not-for-profit, their actions towards their employees resemble those of productive capital. The progressive precarisation of employment relations at every level, which place core research

4 

K. SZADKOWSKI

responsibilities on short-term post-docs and essential didactics on teaching assistants, are strategies from the repertoire of labour-management capital. So too are the processes of automating teaching work or speeding it up through the inclusion of digital technologies. Capital has imperceptibly crept into the pores of the entire life of higher education. In this book, I elucidate the mechanisms by which it effectively entwines its relations.

1.2  Necessary Reduction To unravel the intricate relationship between capital and academic labour in higher education, a closer examination is necessary, even if it involves an idealised reduction. This is required due to the progressive reduction of academic labour in the evaluation and hierarchisation of universities, in which measurement apparatuses focus almost solely on the labour involved in knowledge production as measured by publications. By placing bibliometric indicators and the assessment of publications at the forefront of all stakeholder activities in global higher education, measurement apparatuses make it imperative to understand this aspect of the process of capital’s tightening grip on universities. Grasping the relationship established between capital and labour within this context is key. Recognizing the complexity of the global academic landscape, encompassing diverse geographies and political dynamics, Capital in Higher Education offers a theoretical perspective that captures the entanglement of academic labour with capital on a global scale. The book aims to encompass both public and private sector academic labour, spanning from the centre to the peripheries of the global system. While it addresses a broader scope, a significant portion of the book is nonetheless dedicated to unpacking the relationship between academic labour and the merchant capital faction present in the academic publishing sector and its supporting infrastructure. This analytical reduction is accompanied by three underlying assumptions. First, the autonomous basis of the existence and development of academic labour consists of peculiar communication practices (Clark, 2006). Academics conduct research and communicate their results to reach a specific group of specialists or the broadest possible audience. Furthermore, academic labour in this context seems to be rewarded mainly with something other than just financial currency, namely academic recognition and prestige within the community of peers (Bourdieu, 1984; Blackmore & Kandiko, 2011). It is true that academics nearly always need support from

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

public institutions, sometimes relying on other sources of income or help from patrons, families or social networks. Having the basic needs and costs of their activity met (access to books and articles, research equipment and laboratories, unrestricted opportunities to exchange ideas, freedom of movement and participation in conferences, etc.), they can engage in the production and dissemination of knowledge without claiming additional remuneration for their labour outputs. This idealised vision of scientific communication practice is only a part of a more complex picture. Secondly, since the end of the nineteenth century, efforts have been made to capture and quantify extremely heterogeneous forms of scholarly communication, not only to control them (Godin, 2007) but also to exercise constant supervision over their development, growth and effectiveness. Furthermore, these efforts have overlapped with the growing role of the state in the regulation and supervision of science and higher education systems (Neave, 2012; Krzeski, 2022) and the growth of the importance of scholarly communication practices in the organisation of the system at the national level. However, the crucial moment in intensifying the efforts to increase academic employees’ research productivity was the establishment of the first university ranking with a truly global reach in 2003: the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) or the so-called Shanghai Ranking (Hazelkorn, 2011; Wilbers & Brankovic, 2021). This event contributed on an unprecedented scale to the promotion of competition between and within higher education institutions (Shore & Wright, 2015) and to the general acceleration of academic labour (Vostal, 2016). The role of the metricisation of academic labour and quantification of prestige in this process was crucial. Thirdly, we are dealing with the intertwined acceleration of capital accumulation by large academic publishing companies, which as a result of a dynamic consolidation process, have grown to the position of a stable oligopoly (Larivière et al., 2015). The process is accompanied by strengthening the position of various suppliers of metrics for measuring and evaluating scientific publications (Wilsdon et  al., 2015). RELX, a global company, combines both functions. On the one hand, it is an academic publisher (Elsevier) offering a wide range of academic journals. On the other hand, it produces a database of such journals, indexing their interlinked citations outputs (Scopus) and providing metrics, indicators and metadata for its products, as well as being a general data supplier of global rankings or implementers of evaluation practices. It seems that in its relationship with global academic labour, RELX is one of the most important

6 

K. SZADKOWSKI

beneficiaries of competition, having transformed the struggle to extend the frontiers of human knowledge, which was taking place between individual researchers and research teams, into a competition between universities or entire countries. This competition is now more concerned with the position in a peculiar “academic arms race” (Münch, 2014) instrumentalised by particular capitalist companies. The three assumptions outlined above are intertwined into one problem node that forms the focal point of interest for this book: the mutual relationship between academic labour (understood narrowly as research and publishing activity) and capital. Investigating it allows us to grasp the core logic of the way that the capitalist system of higher education functions globally. In fact, the privileging of and emphasis placed on the publishing aspect of academic labour by academic institutions worldwide contribute to the deepening divisions within the academic community. These divisions manifest through a distinction between precarious teaching staff and those researchers leading large projects or institutes, who in turn employ equally precarious post-docs and PhD students. Moreover, the pursuit of higher rankings has become a driving force behind justifying detrimental anti-worker policies at both public and private universities. Simultaneously, this pursuit fuels universities’ engagement in investments that are financed by accumulating further debt. The prestige and position of universities, seen through the lens of rankings, emerge as pivotal factors in unravelling the intricate relationship between higher education and capital. Before we set out to explore these relationships further, we must confront a fundamental question.

1.3   Why Marx? In this book I approach the problem of capital in higher education from a particular theoretical perspective—that of Marxian and Marxist theory and philosophy. A common question faced by anyone applying Marxian thought to analyses of the higher education sector is the most straightforward and seemingly naïve: why Marx? Why today? Why precisely this nineteenth-­century theorist, who had nothing to do with contemporary knowledge-based capitalist production in any way? Are there no contemporary theorists, also owing perhaps something to Marx, but at least less detached from the realities of the higher education and science sector? For not only did Marx himself devote practically no space at all in his works to higher education or science, but his reality, in which he learned and

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

created, is so far removed from everything that surrounds us currently. Moreover, we now have enough different theories describing the situation of contemporary capitalism. Should we really go for a dusty nineteenth century theory? Questions like these deserve honest answers. This insistence on Marx and his classic works may not seem the most obvious move for building the tools for analysing capitalist production developed in higher education today. Firstly, much work is required to translate the system of categories and thinking into issues even vaguely adjacent to the sector’s reality. Secondly, some elements of the Marxian system may need to be revised to understand the sector’s dynamics. However, it seems that the primary task of contemporary Marxism is to be faithful to Marx’s method and to follow it wherever both the expansion of capital and the struggles that undermine it lead us. Such places certainly include the contemporary science and higher education sector. To address why Marx is crucial, one can draw upon the insights of Antonio Negri (2017), who, together with other representatives of Autonomist Marxism, will reappear often in the pages of this book. Firstly, no one has explored better than Marx the fundamental principles on which capital and its expansion are based. His categories capture—with varying degrees of success and effect—the fundamental aspects of the relationship that capital seeks to reproduce in different sectors of our reality. By keeping the emerging conduct and patterns that Marx uncovered about industrial capitalism at the front of our minds, we can clearly trace the contours of the emerging capitalist order in the sector of interest. Despite long-standing critiques of the expansion of capitalist relations, we are still in the early stages of transforming the academic domain into a reality that is subordinate to capital. Secondly, the reason I draw on Marx is political and concerns the question of antagonism. Marx breaks completely with any consensual view of the development of social processes and traces the contradictions and resulting antagonism in the reality he studies. For him, the relations analysed are a battleground where two opposing forces clash. Thirdly, by feeding his theory with a positively graspable ontological way of understanding living energy (i.e., wealth or, as I call it in this work, the common), Marx allowed the class point of view to be anchored in its autonomy. In other words, Marxian theory allows us not only to grasp the conflict traversing socio-economic reality, but also is able to contour its two sides (capital and the common), and therefore gives us the conditions of possibility for formulating an autonomous class

8 

K. SZADKOWSKI

viewpoint. All this finally translates into the fourth reason that it is worth using Marx: an autonomous class viewpoint translates into the possibility of formulating a theory that would be able to plug into emancipatory practice and, by reinforcing it, enable a movement leading beyond capital.

1.4  Aim of This Book Capital in Higher Education aims to offer a coherent set of analytical tools that can surpass the limitations of the dominant approaches in researching higher education and can be fruitfully utilised in further research, while also contributing to the transformation of the sector. On the one hand, the theoretical proposal contained in the book allows us to go beyond the liberal mainstream in higher education research, which envisages relations within the sector as being non-antagonistic and market-mediated, as well as naturalising competition for prestige as the medium of such relations. On the other hand, it transcends the classical and vulgar Marxist perspectives based on economic determinism. While it sees academic labour as non-specific and articulated in the face of capital in the same way as labour in other production sectors, it emphasises the fact that capitalist subsumption always occurs first through adaptation, and then through transformation of a given productive reality. Therefore, it is always a meeting between two ontologically distinct beings that become something different in the course of the process. By presenting the entanglement of capital and labour through a dialectical lens, this book provides a way to break a conceptual and political deadlock which characterises most reflections on the recent transformations of higher education. 1.4.1  Approach The book consists of a methodological proposal for a critique of the political economy of higher education. While much has been written on higher education from a Marxist perspective, only a few studies approach higher education as a capitalist sector of production per se (e.g., Leher & Accioly, 2016; Rikap & Harari-Kermadec, 2020; Ivancheva & Garvey, 2022; Preston, 2022; Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2022). In other words, Capital in Higher Education stems from the fact that we still lack proposals approaching the entire landscape of higher education as a coherent productive network of different actors that is exploited in its systematic totality. Furthermore, most Marxist studies fail to address the sector’s specificities

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

that determine the modes in which capital subsumes the academic labour under its imperative of valorisation. In contrast, this book offers a systematic, sectoral and specificities-sensitive Marxist approach that helps us grapple with higher education’s antagonistic dynamic in all its complexity. Far from being a plea for economic exceptionalism or counterweighting the arguments of the sector’s alleged uniqueness with the universalistic claims on the all-prevailing law of value, the argumentation contained here forms a specific proposal in Marxist research on higher education. It develops argumentation at the intersection of mainstream higher education research and the contemporary debates in Marxist theories—a junction rarely visited by scholars (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2022). Thus, it combines the conclusions of empirical investigations on how the current higher education systems function with the contemporary Marxist scholarship discussing the emergence of cognitive capitalism, mechanisms of capitalist subsumption of immaterial, cognitive or affective labour, processes of becoming rent of profit or capitalist exploitation of the general intellect. Moreover, it offers a non-deterministic Marxist analytical framework that pays due attention to the internal regulation mechanisms of higher education and science and their role in the possibility of the emergence of capitalist apparatuses extracting value from academic labour (Szadkowski, 2019). Hence, it escapes a narrow framing of higher education that sees it as just another field where the law of value prevailed, and the industrial modes of exploitation reproduced themselves. At the same time, it remains faithful to a Marxian method of critique of political economy, as it relies on historical and political ontology, and understands the critique as movement and a praxis. Furthermore, Capital in Higher Education proposes a treatment of the higher education sector as a productive sector of the capitalist economy per se and thus sees academic labour as productive labour in the very Marxian sense. In particular, this view aims to understand academic labour as an interlinked network of productive activities performed at a system scale (either national or global). One of the consequences of such an approach is a joint treatment of science and higher education. Understanding the mechanisms of capitalist subsumption requires such an integrative approach. This would allow for the analysis of the interplay between the two primary activities performed by labour in higher education systems, which are prerequisites for its further inclusion into capitalist mechanisms of measure, namely valuation and valorisation.

10 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Finally, the approach is characterised by sharing a political perspective based on the understanding of the embedding of higher education within the broader social network of antagonistic relations traversing the capitalist economy at large. Therefore, the political stake of the analysis in this book can be seen as allowing productive academic subjects to build alliances transgressing the narrow, sectoral reality of production. The end of the capitalist subsumption of academic labour cannot be detached from the end of capitalism itself. Thus, no matter that the book itself can be categorised as a methodological proposal of the critique of political economy, it understands its distinctive task as offering a clear map of internal contradictions of capital in higher education, which may be utilised and instrumentalised by struggling subjects in order to end its rule over the sector. 1.4.2  Contribution Marxist theoreticians who aimed to analyse the economic transformations that have occurred in the higher education and science sector from the 1970s onwards (e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Cleaver, 2006; Levidow, 2002; Harvie, 2006) have not offered a systematic and coherent analytical framework that would allow for an understanding of its specificity. Such authors appear to have focused on the low-hanging fruit, either expressed by the massive wave of student protests (i.e., critique of the university as a factory) or by the surface phenomena of the general course of the development of the capitalist organisation of science in the West (i.e., commercialisation, privatisation of knowledge, acceleration of patenting). However, many phenomena in the sector escaped analytical lenses, including the state-imposed abstraction, commensuration and measurement of academic labour, or parallel development of capitalist organisation of scholarly communication by the oligopoly of merchant capitals from the sphere of academic publishing. Various Marxist authors tried to tackle newly emerging issues using the weapon-like metaphors coined in the 1970s, such as privatising knowledge or imposition of the factory-style proletarianisation of academic labour (Bousquet, 2008; Raunig, 2013). Others, especially authors from a general Autonomist Marxist tendency (Roggero, 2011; Hall, 2015), have taken a more systematic path. Marxist critique of the political economy of the sector may offer not only more precise analytical tools that would allow understanding of the existing sources of the processes that traverse the sector but also methods that

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

would help to shed light on the embeddedness of the sector in the broad horizon of the antagonistic relationships. For the above reasons, Capital in Higher Education is informed by the following observations, which have contributed to its construction. First, liberal conceptions of the economic transformations of the higher education and science sector, prevalent in the mainstream discussions on the sector, naturalise the relationships of competition, private property and the market. Simultaneously, they contribute to the depoliticisation of the analytical perspective they offer. Marxist theories, in general, are free from these limitations. Starting from recognising the antagonistic relation between capital and labour, they not only offer an alternative analytical framework but also allow a political alternative to develop. Therefore, Marxist theories represent a logical starting point for exploring capital in higher education. Nonetheless, they are treated here with some critical reservations. Second, Marxist theory and its representatives in the field of reflection on higher education have yet to pay due attention to the sector’s specificities and what they mean for the different modes of capitalist subsumption of academic labour. Most of the approaches developed from within Marxist theory, especially from the tradition of “the value-form” analysis, are haunted by a pure economic determinism and offer a homogenising view on the productive reality of the sector (Neary, 2020; Arboledas-Lérida, 2020). By homogenising view, I mean sharing a conviction that capital expands to other sectors just by the imposition of the law of value, the medium of which is empty and homogenous time, which is socially necessary to produce a specific commodity. Just as the factory clock was a reference point for the organisation of a dual strategy of surplus value production, it is now used as a benchmark for managing exploitation of academic labour. Contrary to such a view, Capital in Higher Education relies on the assumption that the essential feature of capital and its expansion is a process of abstraction that is already in a dialectical relationship with the concrete reality of production, which it is abstracting. For this reason, the concrete mode of articulation of subsumed labour is always significant. Therefore, it is assumed that control, disciplining and value-­ extraction in the sphere of knowledge production may be done through a different medium of abstraction (i.e., intensity of relationships established by a given knowledge artefact, as seen through the prism of specific quantitative indicators).

12 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Third, some mainstream higher education researchers such as Marginson (2016) and Münch (2014) have taken a different approach by analysing transformations of broader political economy of higher education focused on sectoral and cultural specificity of its internal articulation, which makes them doubt the possibility of transforming the sector in line with capitalist determinants. Nonetheless, the presumption of the exceptionality of the sector of science and higher education, which in the book I will call exceptionalism, usually led them astray. It encouraged them to reject any possibility of subsumption of higher education under capital in the Marxian sense. This is a mistake. Capital needs to be understood as a dynamic and flexible power that conducts the movement of its expansion by constantly mutating and transforming the surrounding reality that becomes an object of its subsumption. It both adapts to and transforms the subsumed reality in a mutual relationship. This mutuality is seen, for example, in the relation of measuring academic labour and valorising its outputs, where the capitalist tendency to abstract meets and transforms the autonomous system of academic valuation. Unlike the case of industrial manual labour, capital could not rely solely on abstracting and measuring the time of academic labour. No matter how cruel management attempts to squeeze academics in their workplace may seem, they are only a consequence of the deeper transformative processes of labour subsumption that are going on at the universities globally. In order to subordinate the mechanisms of valuation in higher education on a system-wide scale, capital has been forced to hijack a complex system of internal mechanisms of status and prestige distribution that is composed of multiple layers, from citations and journal indexes through national evaluation exercises to global rankings of universities. Furthermore, the internal mode of organisation of a given sector of production (its internal integrity, modes of articulation, history, the path of its development) conditions the degree of difficulty (hard/easy) for its penetration by capital. Academic labour organisation and its productive reality predate that of capital by hundreds of years, through which it accumulated not only different habits and patterns that need to be considered when approaching its capitalist subsumption but also its autonomous internal system of valuation of knowledge. Its dynamics coincide with status and prestige distribution mechanisms that form the internal information and signalling system in science and higher education. As I argue in this book, this has a decisive importance in the context of the subsumption of academic labour and in itself is an object of manipulation and

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

instrumentalisation by capital and its agents. Massive acquisitions of academic journals run by scholarly societies that started in the 1970s and 1980s and continue today gave birth to an association of oligopolist publishing capital as a substantial faction of a merchant capital that dominates academic labour worldwide (Larivière et al., 2015; Fyfe et al., 2017). This process went hand in hand with transforming the initially curiosity-driven (then profit-oriented) system of indexing journals and tracking citations developed at the Institute for Scientific Information by Eugene Garfield. Something that started as a tool for librarians and academics quickly became the template and source of various metrics and indicators used for measuring and controlling academic labour. Finally, combining control over the system of indexing and measuring with substantial control over the academic outlets (as well as over various platforms, from references managers, online profiles of academics, teaching infrastructure, etc.) creates perfect conditions for capitalist domination over the entire academic field and labour within it. It goes without saying that reductive global university rankings in producing league tables of universities (and therefore, value scales in global higher education) rely predominantly on the data delivered by the leading capitalist indexes of journals like Web of Science by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus by RELX. No matter that companies like RELX are not running their own global university rankings, large capital controls substantial portions of the communication infrastructure through which the process of valuation in global science and higher education is taking place. Explaining, developing and taking these processes seriously in the further critique of the political economy of science and higher education plays a vital role in generating a useful resource for understanding the modern dynamics of the sector. Last but not least, an account of the science and higher education sector that sees it as a capitalist production sector per se (and therefore, sees academic labour as productive in the Marxian sense), and not only as something subordinated to the needs of other sectors of the capitalist economy (such as military, pharmaceutical industry or labour market demands for labour power), is analytically valid. Furthermore, it opens up a potential for the mobilisation of academics as workers who are productive for capital. Therefore, it strengthens solidarity and feelings of common interests across the working class.

14 

K. SZADKOWSKI

1.5  Overview of Chapters Capital in Higher Education is a coherent theoretical proposal, and chapters were designed to rely on each other and expand the argument step by step. While this introduction sets out the underlying assumptions, Chap. 2 forms the methodological core of the book. It presents the Marxian method of critique of political economy as a mode of analysis of transformations of labour and production in higher education. It exposes the crass empiricism of contemporary higher education research, and further contrasts the approach with the other Marxist accounts, especially that of immanent critique, emphasising both the ontological sensitivity and the importance of the class viewpoint for developing the theory of capital in higher education. Moreover, it offers a threefold idea of critique, as developed by Marx and Engels (1968) in The German Ideology. In other words, it explains critique as a triple movement of “in-against-beyond” and locates the proposal in one of the moments of this movement. The purpose of Chap. 3 is to present a general critique of the approaches to economic relations within higher education. It begins by discussing how the progressive marketisation  processes in higher education have coincided with the expansion of neoclassical economics as the dominant framework within higher education research. Then it explores three distinct approaches: neoclassical economics of higher education, the theory of academic capitalism, and exceptionalism. The objective is to unveil the political ineffectiveness of marketisation critique and highlight the market perspective’s shortcomings in explaining capitalist processes that subordinate academic labour to capital. The chapter argues that both academic capitalism theory and exceptionalism inadvertently reinforce neoclassical viewpoints on higher education, focusing on exchange relations and the market rather than the production relations entangling academic labour and capital. Despite the authors’ intentions, these approaches fail to provide a solid foundation for a genuine critique of capitalist transformations within higher education. Chapter 4 employs the Marxian conception of capital to propose a framework for understanding political-economic relations in higher education. In contrast to the existing Marxist literature that primarily focuses on capturing capital as totality and emphasising its all-encompassing nature, this approach also places the emphasis on both the moments within this totality and the historical conditions that allow them the emerge. By examining the cycle of industrial capital in higher education

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

and the specific factions of capital operating within it through the lens of Marx’s subsequent volumes of Das Kapital, a more nuanced analysis is achieved. This approach allows for analytical precision in illustrating the real-world processes of capitalist production within the sector while also allowing for articulation of how capital subsumes academic labour. This perspective is not taken to deepen our understanding of the inevitability of this subsumption, but rather to explore the possibility of breaking this relationship. Chapter 5 is a point of culmination of this part, as the Marxian concept of subsumption offers a lens through which one can see the interrelation between capital and academic labour in its specificity, thereby understanding the resulting process of transformation. In doing so, the chapter offers a way to go beyond the limitations of the two main approaches to the political economy of higher education discussed in this book: the reductive Marxist approaches on the one side, and the higher education exceptionalisms on the other. This chapter deploys an orthodox Marxist reading of the subsumption of academic labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx’s concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se. The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Measurement forms the foundation upon which capitalist control over academic labour is established. Chapter 6 starts with an exploration of the historical conceptualization of measuring and comparing the efficiency of academic labour, to formulate an argument about the specific operation of Marx’s law of value in this domain. Although measures based on direct labour time and socially necessary labour time estimated in relation to it are incompatible with academic labour, it remains subject to constant measurement rather than simply laying beyond measure, as some Autonomist Marxists used to claim. Capital expands its influence by employing measurement methods developed within the field, particularly bibliometric measures, to assert control, standardise practices, and accelerate academic labour. Consequently, the chapter delves into discussion of the measurement apparatuses operating in higher education, consolidated with the aid of the evaluation state, and examines their implications for the

16 

K. SZADKOWSKI

sector’s organisation. It is through these measures and indicators that merchant capital establishes its relationship with academic labour and facilitates further self-valorisation. Understanding how capital operates in the academic field and adapts to the dynamics of academic labour requires reconstructing the genealogy of the conceptualisation of prestige. While delving into the history of ideas is beyond the scope of Chap. 7, it highlights the significant role played by Robert K. Merton and his Columbia group in this process. The chapter argues that Merton and his group, who are closely associated with the creators of the bibliometric tools discussed in Chap. 6, exerted a profound influence on the formation of the ideology of prestige that prevails in contemporary science. By tracing the Mertonians’ argument equating citations with prestige, the chapter examines how this argument is employed today to justify economic inequalities in global science and higher education. Furthermore, the chapter underscores the importance of Marxist analysis, which reveals the significance of these mechanisms for the undisturbed valorisation of capital in the sector. This Marxist reflection offers a way to overcome the analytical and political deadlock caused by the naturalisation and glorification of existing structures of prestige distribution in science. Chapter 8 examines how open access operates in capitalist science and higher education. It offers three main arguments. First, it refutes exceptionalists’ claim that establishing capitalist relations in higher education is impossible due to the peculiar character of knowledge, which makes it difficult to privatise. Modern capitalist open access, a growing source of revenue in academic publishing, shows that capital can adapt to this sector’s unique features. Second, the chapter challenges Marxist theorists of cognitive capitalism, which saw the contradiction between the common form of knowledge and the private form of appropriation as the basis for sublating the capitalist system. By discussing the main contradictions of cognitive capitalism pointed out by Italian and French Marxists, the chapter focuses on how capital assimilated each of them, leading to a communism of capital rather than its demise. Third, the chapter explores the distinction between relations of exploitation and relations of appropriation in the context of academic labour. The transformation of research results into a commodity has been the basis for interpretations that speak of the dominance of relations of dispossession in the publishing industry. However, capitalist open access has altered the relations in this area, thus

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

making it necessary to address the issue of productivity of academic labour from a completely different angle. As Marx emphasised in Theories of Surplus Value, a discussion on the productivity of labour is simultaneously a discussion on the political ontology of labour, where every economic theory needs to take a fundamental decision of a metaphysical and political character. The answer has significant consequences of an economic nature (the idea of productive/unproductive labour is a foundation on which every political, economic theory is built, while assigning no “productivity” to labour is equally a foundational act) and of a political nature (to indicate which sector of the economy needs to be mobilised in order to abolish a dominant mode of production). Chapter 9 presents a position within the broader political debate on Marxism. It employs the arguments from the previous chapters to preserve the specificity of academics, but, at the same time, it firmly stands within the long Marxist tradition. Chapter 9 focuses on academic labour and its relation with a particular faction of capital, namely the merchant capital concentrated in academic publishing. It does so in light of the discussion on the processes of instrumentalisation of particular aspects of internal dynamics of the academic field exerted by capital, as presented in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8 and operationalised in Chap. 5. It assumes that it is necessary to develop a Marxian theory of productive and unproductive labour within higher education, as one that would account for the systematic character of production that goes on in the sector. As shown in the previous chapters, not only do productive activities in higher education operate on a system-wide scale, but the subsumption of labour under capital itself has a systematic character. For this reason, an Autonomist Marxist perspective on productive labour is developed here, as it precisely reflects the systematic character of exploitation and has a more inclusive lens through which it approaches activities in production. Moreover, it offers an openly political point of view on productivity, emphasising the resistant side of productive subjectivities. The essence of the approach developed in Chap. 8 is rooted in an exposition of the two-sided perspective on Marxist categories of the critique of political economy. It is used here to approximate the concept of directly productive academic labour and to indicate its apparent limitations. Furthermore, Chap. 9 presents a view of the systemic productivity of academic labour. This is the only way to address the issue of truly productive academic work in the Marxian sense (academic labour productive in and of the common) and the obstacles standing in the way of its full

18 

K. SZADKOWSKI

implementation. The key to this is the smooth functioning of capitalist measurement exercised within the field of science and higher education. As Chap. 9 concludes, there is a seed for developing alternative political-­ economic relationships that shines through the capitalist subsumption of academic labour on which capital builds its power to self-valorise but which may bring this process to an end. This seed is the common. Therefore, Chap. 10 synthesises the argument developed throughout the book into an overarching theoretical claim that points beyond capital and its imperative of valorisation in higher education. Building a bridge towards the future, it sketches an alternative, common-based take on the reality of higher education. Such a proposal can support the formulation of a draft framework for the development of the sector of higher education beyond the limitations imposed by its capitalist development.

References Arboledas-Lérida, L. (2020). Formal Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital and Project-Based Funding. The Case Study of Horizon 2020. Critique, 48(2–3), 237–256. Blackmore, P., & Kandiko, C. B. (2011). Motivation in Academic Life: A Prestige Economy. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 16(4), 399–411. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bousquet, M. (2008). How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-­ wage Nation. New York: NYU Press. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. New  York: Basic Books. Clark, W. (2006). Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Cleaver, H. (2006). On Schoolwork and the Struggle Against It. Canberra: Treason Press. Fyfe, A., et  al. (2017). Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship Between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research. University of St Andrews. [@:] https://doi. org/10.5281/zenodo.546100. Godin, B. (2007). From Eugenics to Scientometrics: Galton, Cattell, and Men of Science. Social Studies of Science, 37(5), 691–728. Hall, R. (2015). The Implications of Autonomist Marxism for Research and Practice in Education and Technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(1), 106–122. Hanson, M. (2023, April 1). Student Loan Debt Statistics. EducationData.org. [@:] https://educationdata.org/student-­loan-­debt-­statistics

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

Harvie, D. (2006). Value Production and Struggle in the Classroom: Teachers Within, Against and Beyond Capital. Capital & Class, 30(1), 1–32. Hazelkorn, E. (2011). Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ivancheva, M., & Garvey, B. (2022). Putting the University to Work: The Subsumption of Academic Labour in UK’s Shift to Digital Higher Education. New Technology, Work and Employment, 37(3), 381–397. Krzeski, J. 2022. Power and Agency Within the Evaluative State: A Strategic– Relational Approach to Quantification of Higher education. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022. 2162388 Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), 1–15. Leher, R., & Accioly, I. (Eds.). (2016). Commodifying Education: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Financialization of Education Policies in Brazil. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Levidow, L. (2002). Marketizing Higher Education: Neoliberal Strategies and Counter-Strategies. In K. Robins & F. Webster (Eds.), The Virtual University?: Knowledge, Markets, and Management (pp.  227–249). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and the Common Good. Melbourne: MUP Academic. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Münch, R. (2014). Academic Capitalism. Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. London: Routledge. Neary, M. (2020). Student as Producer: How Do Revolutionary Teachers Teach? Winchester: Zer0 Books. Neave, G. (2012). The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-engineering Higher Education in Western Europe: The Prince and His Pleasure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Negri, A. (2017). Marx and Foucault: Essays, Volume 1. Cambridge: Polity Press. Preston, J. (2022). Artificial Intelligence in the Capitalist University: Academic Labour, Commodification, and Value. London: Routledge. Raunig, G. (2013). Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Rikap, C., & Harari-Kermadec, H. (2020). The Direct Subordination of Universities to the Accumulation of Capital. Capital & Class, 44(3), 371–400. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings, and the Reassembling of Society. Current Anthropology, 56(3), 421–444.

20 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Szadkowski, K. (2019). An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-productive Academic Labour. tripleC, 17(1), 111–131. Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2022). Conceptualizing Capitalist Transformations of Universities: Marx’s Relevance for Higher Education Research. Critique, 50(1), 185–203. Vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating Academia. The Changing Structure of Academic Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilbers, S., & Brankovic, J. (2021). The Emergence of University Rankings: A Historical-Sociological Account. Higher Education, 1–18. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10734-­021-­00776-­7. Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. London: HEFCE. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363.

CHAPTER 2

Method

2.1   Introduction As Hegel famously stated, the whole of metaphysics could be boiled down to the issue of method. In considering the question of the method adopted by a given researcher, we may uncover some tacitly accepted premises. We must confront our implicit assumptions before attempting to tackle the socio-economic reality. There is no escape from metaphysics. What then might qualify as a Marxist higher education research (HER) method when Marx seems to have left us no clear-cut guidebooks? His approach was an immanent critique—developed from within the studied reality. As Lenin observed, even if Marx did not provide us with a methodological treatise, he showed how his method operates in Das Kapital. While there are few books written since Marx’s magnum opus that would match its rigour, Marxist scholarship continues to flourish. Mastering the method appears to hold the key to any analytical success. We shall develop some signposts that higher education researchers could follow. The argument elaborated in this book centres on two key aspects of Marx’s method. First, it relies on an understanding of Marxian critique as a movement. Second, it aims to grasp the ontological foundations of this movement. Any Marxist project that aims to enter a new socio-economic reality—and higher education is undoubtedly such an area—must embrace these two components.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_2

21

22 

K. SZADKOWSKI

The method holds the key to the actuality of the Marxist project, as well as its strength and its continuing vitality. It is a flexible procedure that always engages with a historically changing world instead of offering some universal truths. Marxian method is the orthodoxy beyond dogmatism, a praxis instead of doctrinal faith. The attachment to the flexibility of the methodological procedure itself had been praised by Marxists from Friedrich Engels to Rosa Luxemburg to György Lukács and Antonio Negri. Nonetheless, any Marxist project, this book included, requires an explicit statement on the methodological principles. Capital in Higher Education offers a methodological proposal against two dominant streams of reflection on higher education. Firstly, it pushes back against mainstream HER, which lacks a conception of antagonistic dynamics of capitalist development of the sector. Secondly, it opposes the Marxist reflection on academic labour lacking a positive ontological grounding. Paradoxical as it may sound, in this respect, some Marxist proposals may seem dangerously similar to HER in discarding the class struggle. The chapter starts by exposing the crass empiricism of HER: a direct consequence of its genealogy and the historical role played by this corpus of knowledge—for capital and its rule over the sector and the state. Then the focus turns to a discussion of general capitalist transformations and their consequences for the form in which knowledge is produced at capitalist universities (including academic Marxism). Can Marxist theory escape the internal deadlock of crass empiricism imposed by the capitalist form of knowledge production? To answer the question (positively), I turn to historical ontology. Marx developed it to expose the dynamic conception of critique as a movement. Exposing three interrelated moments of this movement (in, against, and beyond), I claim that any Marxist study of higher education needs to be based on such an idea of critique. Even if—as in this book—the main emphasis is placed on one of the moments, it needs to take the other moments into account. From this position, referring to value critique theory which is popular in the anglophone Marxist reflection on the sector, I show what could result from dropping the idea of the integrity of the three moments and focusing solely on one (i.e., in). Here lies the difference between this project and most Marxist proposals in the field. To explain it in relation to the classical works I turn to Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy. First, to discuss the role of ontology and movement in formulating the tasks of developing the theory. Second, to explain Marx’s assumptions for an efficient critique of political economy.

2 METHOD 

23

The chapter ends with an exposition of the political reading of Marx’s categories. My book provides such a reading in the field of critique of the political economy of higher education. In this way, I explain how the critique of the political economy of higher education can offer a map for the struggles within the sector.

2.2  Crass Empiricism of Higher Education Research In Theories of surplus-value, Marx (1969) discussed what vulgar political economists did with Adam Smith’s theory. As part of that discussion, Marx elegantly expressed what we may well consider the core of the problem faced by contemporary research on higher education: “Crass empiricism turns into false metaphysics, scholasticism, which toils painfully to deduce undeniable empirical phenomena by simple formal abstraction directly from the general law, or to show by cunning argument that they are in accordance with that law” (Marx, 1969, p. 89). What is crass empiricism? Instead of developing concrete abstractions from within, it is a metaphysical approach to an economic or social reality concerned with deriving knowledge based on empty abstract rules. It forces the material to comply with some pure abstractions without looking at how processes occur. Marx took a harsh stance against detachment from the critical mode of theory development that is still present in Adam Smith’s work. He despaired that it completely disappeared from vulgar political economy. HER is in no better situation. Therefore, we move the focus and point to several structural limitations that make HER easily fall into the traps of crass empiricism. HER has a specific status. It is a field of knowledge production that emerged out of particular interest on the part of the states in expanding and controlling the sector. We cannot forget about that fact. Today, most of the knowledge produced by HER serves either governments or capital to expand their control and infiltrate higher education reality. This structural position of HER accounted for both the interest and the financial stimulus for funding research projects and the centres dedicated to developing such knowledge (Tight, 2004). In this respect, it reminds us of the early attempts in political economy to try to come to grips with the modern form of economic control over an ever-expanding sector: the industry.

24 

K. SZADKOWSKI

This structural location in the division of labour within the knowledge production processes (subordination to external interests) presents a challenge for everyone who wants to develop a theoretical, critical reflection on the sector. For many years, authors discussed problems with the development of theories in HER (Slaughter, 2001; Tight, 2003, 2004, 2015; Ashwin, 2012; Bligh & Flood, 2017; Cantwell, 2020, p. 150). The obstacles that were identified were once again structural (Teichler, 1996): the field’s multidisciplinarity and undefined boundaries, the domination of practical orientation, and the low degree of institutionalisation of research, programs and fields of study. Compared to other fields, HER has minimal achievements in generating theories and methods (Tight, 2015, p. 277), and participants of its main discussions are usually representatives of other fully developed disciplines (Teichler, 2015). However, a persistent problem that makes theory development in HER more complicated as compared to other fields is the relatively small share of purely conceptual works (Tight, 2013), as along with the fact that most contributions to the field still refer to theoretical assumptions only implicitly (Tight, 2014). Lacking the capacity to develop theories, HER is prone to the dangers described by Marx. Indeed, most mainstream research on higher education falls directly into the “crass empiricism” trap. We can see that theoretical efforts in HER rely either on borrowing crude formal abstractions derived from other disciplines or fields or abstracting something from “undeniable empirical phenomena” (Conrad, 1989). But this is not just a question of heavy reliance on “unmediated” empirical data. The problem goes deeper. It touches on understanding the status and the conditions for developing theories within HER. We can observe a culmination of efforts to develop a methodological and theoretical self-reflection in this field in a recent piece by two German sociologists of higher education, Julian Hamann and Anna Kosmützky (2021). While trying to escape the “defeatism” of many meta-synthesis of the literature on the use of theory in the field and to propose a positive contribution, Hamann and Kosmützky lay the limitations of theorising in higher education bare. The authors shift their attention to the “theory work”, understanding “theories not as sterile and disembodied knowledge and, ultimately, uniform sets of propositions, but as tools that can be used for different purposes” (2021, p.  469). Relying on the debates on the status of theory and theorisation developed within sociology, the authors

2 METHOD 

25

offer a tripartite, spectrum-like categorisation of theories found within HER. Looking more carefully into the construction of the spectrums reveals widespread limitations in understanding the status of theory in HER in general. The first of the proposed categorisations is the level of abstractness of a given theory or its range. The spectrum stretches between the poles “metaphysics” and “empirics” as if they were separate worlds. Nonetheless, the authors have noted the limitations of their dual representation in this spectrum, agreeing with Jeffrey C.  Alexander that: “it would be more accurate to see the distinctions as quantitative and not as qualitative because each element on the continuum contains both empirical and non-­ empirical properties, and thus, general and specific properties” (Hamann & Kosmützky, 2021, p. 472). Unfortunately, this recognition is not sufficiently elaborated in the article. Their first level of analysis of HER (“range of theories”) starts with “case-specific interpretations” and goes through finding “empirical regularities”, developing “mid-range” theories, to the formulation of the “general and universalistic” theories. The second level of categorisation deals with the ways in which higher education researchers engage with concrete, existing theories. Here the proposal is relatively simple and intuitive. The categorial spectrum Hamann and Kosmützky propose includes “testing”, “modifying”, and “building” theories. The third level of categorisation highlights the limitations of the first. In essence, it contradicts the minor caveat that the authors made about the interpenetration of theory and empiricism (i.e., representations of the world and observations about it). It is the level of the “epistemological autonomy of the work of theory” in HER as if such autonomy would be possible in the case of any theory. Here the spectrum maps the different levels of straight-forwardness in the expression of the political interest of a given researcher and includes: “rather unfiltered non-academic interest”, “non-academic interests, refractured into academic problems”, and “almost purely academic concerns” (Hamann & Kosmützky, 2021, p. 473). Several problems with such a categorisation are immediately clear. First, there is an obvious problem with the mode of presenting the processes of theorising in a spectrum-like, linear way. If anything, a circular model of presentation would seem more suitable. The creation of a spectrum and the juxtaposition of universal-like theory and empiricism seems unpersuasive (even for the authors themselves); as there is no seeing without knowing,

26 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the epistemology precedes observation. The ontological level is not even considered as important here, no matter that it underlies human capability to make sense. We see only what we think exists and only within a particular frame that hardly changes over time. Forms of being that we believe to be valid allow us to observe and structure the observed phenomena. Therefore, not only are “universalistic” theories based on a series of past observations and observed empirical regularities, but case-specific interpretations are possible due to tacitly shared quasi-universalistic assumptions. Second is the process of engagement with theories. Every “stage” distinguished by the authors is a step towards another. If not by given research, then in a general movement of collective theorising. Actual theory building never occurs at the end of testing and modifying. It relies on all steps, or it does not occur at all. Once again, a more circular presentation of the categorisation would be more appropriate. The third is the issue of epistemic autonomy. In constructing the last level of the spectrum, the existence of ideology is almost forgotten. Yet precisely here, it is given in a pure form. There is essentially no “academic purity” in the study of higher education (and there cannot be). There is almost exclusively functionality to the capitalist transformations of the university. Going through the recent contributions on two thematic areas of interest of higher education researchers—governance and academic careers—Hamann and Kosmützky are well aware of that fact. They diagnose it, saying that “the epistemic autonomy of theory work seems to be relatively low in both thematic fields” (2021, p. 481). Nevertheless, they postulate the potential existence of the purity of academic interests in researching higher education, to which they try to be faithful in their attempt at meta-synthesis. One could legitimately ask: how autonomous is the “almost purely academic interest” exercised in developing the theory on higher education’s “governance” (rather than “mechanisms of organisation of surplus value extraction”) or “academic careers” (instead of “academic labour”)? Epistemic autonomy of theory as postulated by the authors has never been seen in any area of human reflection. Yet, it is often used, as is clear in the examples mentioned above, to naturalise a particular political viewpoint (in this case, to depoliticise the academic labour problem in HER). Like an early capitalist bourgeois vulgar economy, HER hinges between crass empiricism and postulating epistemic autonomy. This is all because it is a product of its time—a form of knowledge functional to capital development in higher education.

2 METHOD 

27

2.3  Capitalist Transformations and the Form of Knowledge Capital dominates and transforms science and higher education production processes. Its logic percolates down through the foundations of knowing and knowledge. Capital imposes the general form in which knowledge is created, disseminated and validated. The commodity logic subsumes knowledge production in the modern university (Azeri, 2019; Arboledas-Lérida, 2020). This ongoing transformation leaves a deep mark on our methodologies. Richard Hall (2021) rightly points out that the dominance of capital spreads a “methodological hopelessness.” As he notes, “The University operates methodologically through a tempo set by its associations, and with a harmonic motion dictated by value’s gravitational pull. It systematically organises and arranges singular forms of work, in particular, closed ways” (Hall, 2021, p. 145). The rhythmicity of output production and a cyclical tempo of ongoing evaluation rounds increasingly dictate the format of thinking, researching and writing at contemporary universities (Dakka & Smith, 2019). The proliferation of capitalist forms of cognition parallels the development of capitalist valorisation processes. It consists of knowledge fragmentation, increasing specialisation, homogenisation of language, acceleration of the circulation of citations, standardisation of writing style, domination of empiricism and rationalism, and positivism (Lukács, 1978b). As a result, even critical knowledge is devoid of meaning and content. Hall offers us the description of what he calls a “methodological university”: a capitalist knowledge institution within which “objective study categorised inside disciplines, is devoid of any explanatory power beyond either the metrics that define its value or the commodities that serve as ways of finessing specific, schematic representations of society and nature” (Hall, 2021, p. 148). Yet we could see only a late capitalist form of knowledge production in this development. Much time had to pass until capital deactivated revolutionary and critical knowledge and imposed a commodified form on it. The university played a crucial role in that process as an institution that aims to detach and abstract the knowledge produced with and within the social and workers’ movements and to use it for its valorisation processes. The university devours critical knowledge. We can see an example of this phenomenon dating back to the legacy of global students protests of 1968 in the West. The protests opened up a

28 

K. SZADKOWSKI

brief window through which the students’ and workers’ desires intermingled with the university’s institutional form. Here, the classics of HER put forward some insightful remarks. Both Burton R. Clark (1998) and Tony Becher and Maurice Kogan (1992) focus on the influences of the student and faculty movements on the structure of the universities as organisations in the West. They emphasised that such movements influenced the governing design of Western universities and reshaped the curricula. Such transformation was not left without a response. It is worth noting that in Becher and Kogan (1992), the student movements, which are viewed as progressive social forces, are considered to be the external factor in producing change within the university. As they put it, “Extrinsic pressures for the introduction of ‘socially relevant interdisciplinary groupings such as those concerned with peace studies, black studies or women’s studies have generally come up against objections based on academic credibility and intellectual coherence” (1992, p. 146). Once again, we can observe that HER was never even pretending to be “value-free”. A conservative stance is here explicit and most visible in their essentialist views on the academic “norms”, as something related with the traditional set of disciplines. Higher education researchers rightly spotted the tricky position of various progressive “studies” in the institutional structure of the universities. Precarious status, however, has never gotten in the way of the tremendous quantitative growth in the literature within these areas. All these methodologies and research activities seem to flourish. Yet the demands that emerged out of these movements remained largely unfulfilled. Once radical and rooted in the social movements, they have become “just another” topic or methodology to be covered or used extensively in fashionable literature published in capitalist outlets. Gigi Roggero (2010, p. 369) shed light on this process. He emphasised how various American foundations from the 1960s onwards targeted Black studies scholars with their funding proposals to exercise tighter control over what can and cannot be researched. Roggero reiterated that: it is precisely the continual subsumption of the production of ‘oppositional knowledges’ and the experience of self-organisation on which academic governance nourishes itself. Just as the ‘university of excellence’ is nothing more than the response to the struggles of 1968, autonomous education provides the vital energy for the survival and reproduction of the institutional ‘ruins,’ energy to be captured and submitted to the production of value. (Roggero, 2011, p. 132)

2 METHOD 

29

Observing the ongoing process of subsumption of critical knowledge, we can ask: is Marxism, as a form of knowledge, any different from all the other subsumed studies?

2.4  Marx’s Ontological Grounding and Critique as a Movement My answer is affirmative: Marxism is indeed different. The differences rely on the importance of the ontological dimension in Marxist reflection. However, it sounds like a paradoxical statement. It is widely believed that ontology is incompatible with Marxism and was supposedly something alien to it for decades (Murphy, 2003). Marxism developed a critique of ideology, and ontology, which is primarily relevant for theological considerations, was treated as its pure expression. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the late work of György Lukács and the entire oeuvre of Antonio Negri, both of which are essential references for this book, it is impossible to imagine Marxist critique without an ontology. However, it is not a substantialist ontology but a historical one that captures being in its processuality and historical transformability. The Marxist approach to being in its historicity was well described in one of the interviews given by Lukács: The fact that new phenomena can be genetically derived on the basis of their everyday existence is only one aspect of a general relationship, namely that being is a historical process. There is certainly no Being in the strong sense, and even that which we call everyday being is a specific and extremely relative configuration of complexes within a historical process. (Lukács, 1974, p. 21)

Several vital aspects of the materialist approach to ontology become apparent in Lukács’ statement (see Murphy, 2003). First, it is a profoundly dynamic rather than a static conception of being. It takes being historically rather than trying to naturalise it. Secondly, forms of being are understood on their grounds as historically conditioned processes, not as extra-­ historical things. Third, historical forms of being arise in conjunction with transformations of larger wholes. Lukács speaks in this context of “complexes”—complex ontological interrelationships. Fourth, the starting point for analysing changing forms of being is the analysis of ‘everydayness’ in its concreteness. Fifth, forms of being are and become

30 

K. SZADKOWSKI

independent of the process of cognition. They are objective and heterogeneous. There is no relation of mutual subject/object conditioning. Marxist ontology does not assume this dualism at all. The most difficult to accept is precisely this last issue—the primacy of ontological structures and their independence from the subject of cognition. This issue also becomes a bone of contention between the method proposed here and the Marxist proposals in use in higher education reflection. Lukács argues that in developing his approach to the analysis of social reality, “Marx consistently and sharply separated two complexes: social being, which exists independent of whether it is more or less correctly understood, and the method most suitable to comprehend it in thought” (Lukács, 1978a, p. 26). On the grounds of the materialist method, this ontological primacy means only so much (and as much) that the isolated element can exist independently without the necessary connection (material and analytic) with others. Lukács writes “this ontological priority does not involve any hierarchy of values. It only emphasises the simple fact of existence that one particular form of being forms the indispensable ontological foundation for the other, and not vice-versa or reciprocally” (Lukács, 1978b, p. 88). For Lukács, one such primordial ontological category is labour, which, like Marx in Das Kapital, he understands as a metabolic relationship with nature. For Negri, whose work we build on in this book, this fundamental ontological primacy takes the form of the common (see Szadkowski, 2019a). The Marxist ontological reflection developed by the late Lukács and by Negri is a response to a crisis. On the one hand, it is a crisis provoked by the entry of capital into the phase of real subsumption. Both philosophers read it as all-prevailing subordination of social life in all spheres by capital’s self-valorisation movement. On the other hand, it is a crisis of traditional Marxism, especially in its dialectical-materialist, Stalinist distorted forms. Historical ontology is a way of carrying out the denaturalisation of the field outlined by the opponent. Its tasks lay in transforming the conceptual vocabulary used for capturing the being itself, and in moving the social movements optics from individualisation and atomism to co-becoming and the common. It is the foundation on which the critique can develop. Marx often made use of such ontological grounding to develop his critique. In this instance ontological reflection became a means to hold negative and affirmative moments of critique together and establish a dialectical relation between them. It turns into a specific mode of intervention, which I will refer to as political ontology. Dismantling ontological

2 METHOD 

31

assumptions present in the object of critique does not pass only through mapping contradictions immanent to this very object, but at the same time ontology within the movement of critique points beyond this very object. It allows Marx to keep the horizon open and employ critique for the purpose of working towards the alternative. Consider for example, the opening parts of Grundrisse, where he dismantles the Robinsonade, that is, the naturalisation of the causal individual as the model subject of economics. Political economists often use such naturalised subjects in their classical works. A similar ontological point of view accompanies Marx when he deals with specific pieces of political economists in Theories of Surplus Value. But he did not stop at the denaturalisation of subject’s form. At the same time, he pointed beyond it. Referring to the excellent work of John Holloway (2015), one might be tempted to say that the affirmative dimension of the ontological moment (although Holloway does not put it in such terms) can already be found in the opening sentence of Capital, where Marx speaks of wealth. For Marx, wealth is an ontological primordiality, a reality that in successive historical epochs “manifests itself” in gradually changing forms so that only in capitalism does it take the form of the commodity as an elementary form. Marx develops the full definition of this category in one of the passages Grundrisse: In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of human needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? Where he does not produce himself in one ­specificity, but produces his totality? Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? (Marx, 1973, p. 488)

Transhistorical wealth understood beyond the historically determined form is the potentiality of autonomous satisfaction of needs achieved through the transformation of matter. The development of this potentiality is determined only by its past path of development and measured only by reference to the further unbroken growth of this potentiality.

32 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Additionally, it is not a thing and does not seek to preserve the status quo but is an ever-expanding process—the becoming of this potentiality. The fact that Marx has a concrete idea of wealth in its transhistorical form cannot be easily ignored. Moreover, this ontological account is the foundation and starting point of his critique of political economy as presented in Das Kapital. To imagine his critique of capitalism would be impossible without it. Finally, in this ontological account of wealth that we find in the Grundrisse, the dynamic conception of being as a movement—“the absolute movement of becoming”—becomes once again apparent. While Lukács (1978a) will see labour in this expanding becoming of potentiality, Holloway (2015) associates wealth with what Negri (2008) and Autonomist Marxists refer to as the common. Regardless of terminology, however, all of the authors see it as the ontological basis of both Marxian critique and historical process. Connection between the ontology and movement needs to be further clarified. Recently, Thomas Nail (2020) has developed a reflection on Marx’s ontological assumptions and method, allowing us to better understand the non-anthropocentric character of Marx’s ontology. He aims to explain the foundations of what here, in this book, I call the common, praxis or a movement. Discerning Marxian materialism from materialist atomism, Nail wrote: Marx’s theory of motion is not an ontology of matter or of motion; it is a historical ontology. Marx grounds his kinetic materialism neither in a metaphysical theory of matter ‘in itself’ nor in a strictly anthropocentric or social practice of how matter is ‘for us.’ For Marx, there is no ontological division between nature and society. Marx’s theory of matter instead is strictly grounded in praxis, but praxis is not something only humans do. (2020, p. 14)

The notion of praxis that Nail has in mind is this “absolute movement of becoming” that Marx refers to as the transhistorical force of ever-­ expanding wealth. While Nail is making movement and praxis a key to understanding Marxian ontology as historical ontology, we can see that it also offers an answer to understanding Marx’s method of critique. In this second context, Marx’s ontological grounding is transformed into political ontology—a method of reading historical manifestations and expressions of being—as it perpetuates the movement of critique and gives it direction

2 METHOD 

33

for the purpose of constructing the future beyond the immediate present. What is not surprising in Marx is the consistency with which the main ontological feature, that is, the processuality, historicity and praxis dimension of being, are tied into one procedure that testifies to the specificity of the Marxian method. 2.4.1   Movement as Critique Marx laid out the general framework of critique in a particular quote from The German Ideology. When defining his critical project (to which Engels added some insights), he called critique ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence’ (Marx & Engels, 1968, p. 60). This movement includes three distinct moments overlapping with the features of the transhistorical wealth defined by Marx in Grundrisse. First, the primary coordinates of this movement form “the present state of things”. The movement is locked within it. Therefore, it assumes the necessity of inquiring about the status quo, tracing its contours, and understanding it on its terms. Second, the direction of the movement is the abolition of this state of things. The critique is responsible for its ‘abolition’, acquiring an antagonistic stance towards it and its limits. Finally, this movement’s shape and potential development are historically conditioned, and the shadow of the past somehow lays on its future paths. In other words, the possibility of this movement coming into existence is already given; the prospect of going ‘beyond’ a capitalistically organised economy or its particular sectors inheres within the capitalist mode of production itself. These three moments can help to explain the methodological approach for the Marxian method of critique as applied to higher education. It contains three main aspects (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2019, 2022). First, the “in” moment of the critique requires us to diagnose the phenomenon of crisis and to indicate the mechanisms operating on the inside of the university: to expose their base, reveal the internal ties, disassemble them, and identify their source. To this end, critique examines works and documents, theories and discourses that structure and influence the contemporary global higher education terrain and thus shape the university. It could be done through a method similar to a Marxian critique of works by classical political economists, this time tracing the contradictory paths of liberal thought within mainstream HER or any other form of reflection on higher education.

34 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Second, the critique has to situate itself on the side of the subject, acting “against” the university in crisis while resisting dominance, hierarchy, expropriation, and exploitation that drain the contemporary university. Hardt and Negri wrote, “the critique must thus reach the level of antagonism and revolutionary subjectivities, defining and redefining their changing figures, showing how their movement and progressive transformations continually conflict with and destroy the new arrangements” (Negri & Hardt, 1994, pp. 5–6). The critique must follow the struggles within and against the university to co-research their composition (Roggero, 2011), desires, aims, the contradictions they exposed, and the future horizons they established. A negative method is insufficient. Thus, the critique must assume some sort of positivity. For this reason, its third aspect demands that the critique look “beyond” the limited horizon imposed by the crisis and map imminent forms of social relations that are perceptible today in their incipient appearances, but that might create a basis for the higher education of the future. This type of critique does not draft a utopian prospect but reveals the elements of what has to come within the empty shell of the old university. As Hardt and Negri put it elegantly, the task of such critique is “to clarify affirmative, productive figures that continually emerge from the struggles between the two classes, between domination and the desire for liberation” (Negri & Hardt, 1994, p. 6). The ontological dimension cuts across all three moments of critique. It represents both the possibility of grounding a transhistorical perspective when analysing the capitalist subsumption of labour and production in higher education under capital, as well as permeating the antagonistic moment in which the movement transcends the constraints imposed by capital. Finally, ontology provides a reference point for thinking about what lies beyond capital’s rule. That is, it emphasises the existing autonomous capabilities for the expanded reproduction of the common. Capital in Higher Education is devoted in its most significant part to the development of the first moment: the critical analysis of the political economy. Nonetheless, I offer an integrative approach that always-already relies on the virtuous circle formed by the three moments of critique. This differentiates the proposed approach from both Marxist and mainstream HER proposals. It does not offer yet another fine-tuned and subtle political economy of the sector, regardless of whether it would be focused on

2 METHOD 

35

the sphere of exchange and abstract processes of valuation and valorisation of labour-derived commodities or concentrated on the sphere of production. Rather, it rather develops a critique that mediates the reflection on the capitalist political economy in the desires of social subjects struggling to escape the tight embrace of capital.

2.5  Against “Negative Critique” The outlined components of the critique need contextualisation. Scattered, recent Marxist scholarship on science and higher education often relies on an alternative model of critique: the “negative critique” of academic labour (Winn, 2015; Neary, 2019; Arboledas-Lérida, 2020, 2022). In short, the “negative critique” of labour rejects grounding the analysis of the capitalist system in the concepts and phenomena determined by that system. Facing academic labour, it rejects all forms of “labourism”, which is the social democratic belief in the possible restoration of the dignity of academic labour and conditions, allowing it to prosper and perform its proper duties again within capitalism. At the same time, the “negative critique” of labour assumes that all references to labour in its ontological dimension have the character of naturalising its capitalist form, as if the ontology required the common-sense-driven representation of wage labour and its characteristics in a transhistorical guise. Such an approach has a few distinctive features: distrust towards capitalistically structured wage labour, assumption of total domination of the social and economic spheres by capital, denial of the importance of working-­class struggle, and the conviction that the end of the capital’s domination over higher education will come about as a result of its internal contradictions. In more philosophical terms, all these assumptions stem from a theoretical rejection of any positive ontological manifestation of the living productive force that precedes and overflows capital, therefore, resisting its subsumption. This interpretation is contrary to Marx’s ideas about where his critique of value needs to find its ground (Holloway, 2015) and goes against the grain of both current and classical Marxist reflection (Negri, 2022). Nonetheless, if we are about to ground our methodological position, such interpretations must be revisited. To grasp their core, we need to readdress one of their most essential references—Moishe Postone’s project of social critique.

36 

K. SZADKOWSKI

2.5.1   Postonian Ontology… Moishe Postone’s proposal to renew Marxism in the 1990s as contained in his magnum opus is a product of its time. He was influenced by the re-­ discovery of Marx’s Grundrisse and the overall need to go beyond traditional Marxism, mired as it was in in sentimental attachment to both the industrial working class and the Soviet Union that were disappearing before the author’s eyes. The general problem with Postone and his followers can be narrowed down to the fact that they have an unclear understanding of the ontological dimension, both in Marx and “traditional Marxism”. This prevents them from fully grasping the assumptions of Capital and, more broadly, historical materialism. The biggest challenge is that the ontological understanding of labour as a mediation process in metabolism between humans and nature, which opens the chapter on labour in Capital (Marx, 1990, p. 283), seems here to be wholly neglected. Instead, Postone approaches the efforts to “ontologise” the labour in the industrial epoch of capitalism that he finds amongst “traditional Marxists” (like Paul M. Sweezy or Maurice Dobb) and presents this procedure as a problem with the use of historical ontology in general. At the same time, his whole proposition of social critique as established in Time, labor and social domination (Postone, 1993) is based on reading the Marxian Fragment on Machines (Marx, 1973) and transhistorical understanding of wealth that we can find in Grundrisse (Marx, 1973). Postone counterposes the “real wealth”, as a transhistorical form of materiality produced to satisfy human needs, to “value” as a historical form in which “real wealth” appears in capitalism (Postone, 1993). In precisely the same way as the transhistorical, ontological assumptions on “wealth”, “subjectivity”, “labour”, and “productivity” serve Marx to establish the grounds for his project of critique, Postone is posing his view on “traditional Marxism” on the ontological foundation of category of „wealth” in its difference with historical form of “value”. The Postonian perspective is not without its limitations. After explaining why the proletariat cannot be treated as “the Subject” of history, on the shoulders of which rests the potential for emancipation from capitalism, Postone touches upon the core of the Marxian proposal, saying “the logical thrust of Marx’s presentation implies that this historical negation should be conceived as people’s reappropriation of socially general capacities that are not ultimately grounded in the working class and had been constituted historically in the alienated form of capital” (Postone, 1993,

2 METHOD 

37

p. 357). It is clear that the fundamental Postonian oppositions lie between the ontologically understood subject: “people” with their “socially general capacities”, and capital that in its movement for self-valorisation alienates them. In other words, Postone uses ontological standing to detach the historically determined form from the subject of emancipation. Furthermore, he opposes the common (socially general capacities of the people) to capital. It is all in line with the core opposition that structures his project of critique: that between the “real wealth” and “value”. Nonetheless, here we encounter a second problem. Postone equates the sociological category of the industrial working class with that of the proletariat (Postone, 1993, 2003). His primary opponents—traditional Marxists from the 1920s up to 1970s—usually do the same. However, the proletariat is just a function of the universal subject that emerges from the sphere of production in Marx and has no once-and-for-all determined material emanation. However, for Postone (1993, p. 17), the problem lies in the fact that when understood essentialistically, the working class is internal to capitalism and, therefore, cannot provide a perspective that would allow going beyond its limits. It appears that Postone, as he rejects class and its struggles, offers no solutions to the end of capitalism other than the extinction of the proletariat, understood as the industrial working class in the course of a sole and consequential development of capitalism. Reviewing Postone’s contribution, Negri rightly indicated that its core proposal “tirelessly reiterated the conviction that the structural contradictions of capital cannot be reduced to class struggles” (Negri, 2014, p. 433). I cannot do anything but agree with Negri. The problem reappears when Postone addresses the postcapitalist condition in Marx concerning what he understands as the subject of the process of establishing it. As he writes, Central to Marx’s conception of the overcoming of capitalism is his notion of people’s reappropriation of the socially general knowledge and capacities that had been constituted historically as capital. […] at the core of his vision of a postcapitalist society is the historically generated possibility that people might begin to control what they create rather than being controlled by it. (Postone, 1993, p. 373)

Again, Postone’s perspective here is purely ontological. What he proposes is merely an abstract act of dealienation, returning control over what was produced to the producers. In this respect, we can see that Postone’s

38 

K. SZADKOWSKI

refusal of ontology allows it to return to the foundation of his Marxist metaphysical project of social critique and cannot be exorcised from there. No matter how deeply the ontological dimension permeates Postone’s proposal, his followers in the realm of academic labour analysis still try hard to repress it. 2.5.2   … and Its Realisation in the Negative Critique of Academic Labour In his methodological piece “Writing about academic labour”, Joss Winn (2015) offers a perspective on the limits of the existing reflection on academic labour. His theoretical starting point is Moishe Postone’s social critique and emphasis on the Marxian discovery of the two-fold character of labour in capitalism. Winn writes that “a critique of capitalism and its apparent complexity must be undertaken through a critique of labour, rather than from the standpoint of labour” (2015, p. 15). The same goes for academic labour. Winn’s theoretical “opponents” are primarily representatives of academic labour studies. He convincingly accuses them of reifying the capitalist determinations of academic labour conditions. Such research originates from discussions on the so-called crisis of academic labour would be alleviated by reinstating the conditions predating the capitalist subsumption. Winn suggests that a remedy for such uncritical approaches is to employ Marxian fundamental categories since they are considered to be “fully adequate to our historical condition, i.e., capitalism” (2015, p.  5). It is hard to argue with the harsh assessment of the current state of the debate on the academic labour predicament. Nonetheless, the solution that Winn proposes is just as hard to accept as the approaches he criticised. No matter that we need the critical set of categories to present the dynamics of capitalist development and taking hold over academic labour, we also need a perspective to think about how to transgress the current status quo. Winn shares Postonian doubts about ontology. He is therefore sceptical about any idea that suggests transhistorical structures of the living being can be grasped and expressed. He refuses to accept any “commonsensical ideas which we take for granted as transhistorical and natural, such as the idea of ‘labour’” (2015, p. 6). At the same time, in the conclusion to his methodological article on writing about academic labour, Winn postulates that overcoming the capitalist modes of valorisation of labour of academics subsumed under capital will have to lead to the emergence of “new

2 METHOD 

39

institutional forms for the satisfaction of human needs”. While Winn tries to avoid relying on ontology, it is inescapable. It is clear that no matter that the Postonian line of thinking about capitalism will indicate a break with the transhistorical and ontological understanding of labour, Winn argues that the metabolic relationship that humans establish with nature (“satisfaction of human needs”) is a transhistorical fact that simply needs to be historically redesigned and actualised. Nonetheless, relying on the negative critique does not attend with Winn’s proposals. In his critical reply to Szadkowski and Krzeski (2019), Mike Neary (2019) repeats and deepens the distrust toward labour expressed by Winn (2015). He warns anyone who would like to develop a critical perspective on capitalist transformations of higher education against relying on the sociological category of the working class and labour. For Neary, it is not a subject nor a class struggle that can end the problems with academic capitalism, but an “explosive critique of the value form” (2019, p. 32). According to Neary, it is a value-form where one needs to search for the moving contradiction of capital, and labour seems to be just its manifestation. Critique, therefore, can remain at the level of pure theorisation and needs contact with neither a subject nor struggles. Following Postone (and like Adorno before him), Neary shows suspicion towards the working class as a component of the society that subjugates it. Capital for Neary has no outside, and as for Postone (2003), it is the Subject of history that constitutes academic labour (2019, p.  33). Any reliance on labour is therefore futile, as capital has an “inherent tendency to selfdestruct” (2019, p. 34). Therefore, we can wait and see when it will blow up under the weight of its contradictions. As Neary repeats after Postone, “revolution is not the triumph of labour but the abolition of the capitalist value and the creation of a new form of social wealth” (2019, p. 35). Finally, after repeating Postone’s critique of labour in capitalism, Neary can explain why he finds “perspectivism” a position filled with bourgeois sensibility: “the individualised point of view that is a feature of perspectivism can be attributed to the moment of exchange” (2019, p.  37). Throwing out the idea of the class struggle, Neary cannot accept that perspective or a viewpoint can have a class character. He assumes that any research is either done using “a view from within the value-form and the capital relation” (2019, p. 37) or is a simple expression of bourgeois particularism. While I will return not only to the problem of perspective, the importance of class struggle and the ontology at the end of this chapter, at this point, one issue needs restating.

40 

K. SZADKOWSKI

The look from inside the value-form that Neary is talking about is precisely the viewpoint of capital: a historically conditioned perspective internal to its development. Although Marx was concerned with its reconstruction, developing a dialectical scheme for presenting the value problem in Das Kapital, he did not stop there. Moreover, he did not make this perspective his own. Instead, he located himself in a transhistorical and ontological position, from which it was possible to take a stand in his analyses of capitalist production. Despite this, it is crucial to acknowledge that Marx’s political allegiance lay with the proletariat and their fight for freedom from the grip of capitalist domination. In order to fully appreciate this, we must delve into the importance of its ontological underpinnings, which necessitates a brief detour into Marx’s early works. In early 1846, in a letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov Marx gave an example of how he understands the transhistorical perspective on society that emerged in the political economy of relations that he developed. Coming to terms with the transhistorical concept of society, he states: “What is society, irrespective of its form? The product of man’s interaction upon man” (Marx, 1975, p. 95). A year before that, in the sixth of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx explained the materialist idea of the dynamic essence of man as “the ensemble of social relations” (Marx, 2010, p. 4), where he brought this understanding to the second level of generality. The transhistorical level did not serve as the primary foundation of his reflection, nor was it a blueprint to establish a society free from capital’s domination. It was a simple methodological operation that allowed thinking of social beings in their historicity. When combined with the normative valorisation of the rule of self-determination, immanence and human autonomy, it offers a stable ground for the task of critique. An ontological grounding of critique has nothing in common with ontologising the existing, historical material relations. Nor does it have anything to do with attempts to ahistorically impose them on the vision of the alternative setting that shall emerge after the breakup of capitalism. Ontology provides us with an indication of points of historically expressible flexible structures, which we can use to imagine the departures for critique of and escape from capitalism.

2 METHOD 

41

2.6  Ontological Foundations of Critique of Political Economy Marx’s historical conception of being understands its openness to the formation through the process of struggles. As Negri and Hardt put it in Labour of Dionysus, “ontology is not a theory of foundation. It is a theory about our immersion in being and about being’s continuous construction (…) Our conception of being must be open to the production of the discontinuous, to the unforeseeable, to the event” (Negri & Hardt, 1994, p. 287). Ontology is a battleground on which opposing viewpoints clash and our ideas on being are the results of these constituting practices. Marx’s perspective, as I read it in this book, is a standpoint that emphasises the role of struggles in articulating the level of the real and denaturalising the historically determined forms of being, rather than on the moral superiority of one of the opposite sides. We can find examples of thinking through such logic in various texts by Marx and Engels. Engels, in his introduction to Poverty of Philosophy, criticised the limitations of the political consequences of the leftist Ricardians’ theory of exploitation, insisting that in economic terms, it was formally false, representing only an attempt to moralise in the sphere of economics (Engels, 1990, p. 281). This formal falsity of exploitation was the problem of the non-criticality of the theory of the leftist Ricardians, who simply inscribed their political assumptions into economic theory, introducing into it, as if from the outside, a false and unproductive contradiction. The critical approach developed by Marx differed in that he pointed to the existence and importance of the surplus value that results from unpaid labour. Thanks to that, he ontologically grounded his theory of exploitation, as well as his vision of the inevitability of communism. Thus, he inscribed the workers’ viewpoint within the framework of formal, bourgeois economic theory, blowing it up from within and paving the way for a political project capable of transcending its limitations. Bringing the matter to the consideration of higher education, critique, in a sense I would like to develop here, is a way of eschewing such politically motivated moralism. Thanks to the ontological perspective it adopts, materialist critique can point at economic facts that escape the attention of formalised theories. Following Marx, we accept the inevitability of the manifestation of the duality of class viewpoints: the bourgeois political economy of higher education (which denies academic labour the full equivalence for the value created or neglects its role in the formation of

42 

K. SZADKOWSKI

value) and its critique conducted from a workers’ viewpoint (which derives ultimate consequences from the fact of value creation through labour). In addition, following Engels, we accept the necessity of building an “ontological” basis for the theory of communism if it is not to be solely a viewpoint of moral superiority. However, to understand the specifics of the critique of political economy developed from a class viewpoint, it is worth tracing the remaining part of Engels’ argument. He writes explicitly that: But what in economic terms may be formally incorrect, may all the same be correct from the point of view of world history. If mass moral consciousness declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it did at one time in the case of slavery and statute labour, that is proof that the fact itself has outlived its day, that other economic facts have made their appearance due to which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Therefore, a very true economic content may be concealed behind the formal economic incorrectness. (Engels, 1990, p. 282)

Engels importantly tied together various moments of the project of the critique that I develop in this book. First, the moment of ontological recognition comes to the fore. It requires grasping “the real,” which precedes the present historical form of the articulation of being. Secondly, Engels points at the subject of this recognition. The working masses, or more precisely, the “moral feeling” they express and the practical or political critique of injustice they carry out. The recognition of the masses and their struggle against it make formally correct economic facts realistically anachronistic. Third, Engels points to the dependence (and dynamism) of economic knowledge structures on social and economic relations and the constant necessity of fine-tuning them. Economics or political economy is not a natural science, defining once and for all the laws governing social production. It is a battlefield in which opposing forces have historically clashed. Fourthly, the point of reference for decisions concerning reality is universal history created by the masses. The matter of consideration is the sum of facts to which the struggling subjects turn their critique.

2 METHOD 

43

2.7  Applied Metaphysics of Political Economy and the Critique My book aims to confront the current political economy of higher education using the Marxian toolbox. But how did Marx use his method to analyse political economists’ theories? Revisiting the Poverty of Philosophy, a critical pamphlet targeted at Joseph Proudhon and his metaphysical take on the political economy, will help address this question. It is not the most popular book. Nonetheless, it is refreshing in allowing us to grasp the role of historical ontology in grounding Marx’s method of critique of political economy. Poverty of Philosophy contains few positive stances on what the critique of political economy, in general, should look like. In seven remarks on method, Marx focused on the bourgeois classical political economists’ methods and their idealist caricature encapsulated in Proudhon’s proposal. It is worth taking a closer look at some of them. First, Marx points out the limitations of the economic categories and Proudhon’s idea on how and why to put them in order. The deadliest sin of the bourgeois economists is to “express the relations of bourgeois production […] as fixed, immutable, eternal categories” (Marx, 1976, p. 162). The class-driven, bourgeois science stabilises the historically contingent categories as if they were expressing the natural state of social metabolism. Political economists often omit the historical dimension of how their categorical expressions of social relations came into being. As Marx put it, “Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth” (Marx, 1976, p. 162). Material rooting of the abstractions of social relations plays a crucial role for Marx. For a theoretical analysis to be meaningful, it must be grounded in an investigation of the material conditions that allow certain categories to emerge within a particular historical epoch or mode of production. Without this mediation, the analysis runs the risk of being untethered from the concrete reality it seeks to elucidate. It reminds a purely idealist abstraction. Such an approach evokes crass empiricism of higher education research, where abstractions are often brought in from outside the matter of consideration and used as guiding principles of investigation. Even more crucial for understanding the specificity of Marxian critique in this context is his emphasis on movement, historical process and general flux in which being is constituting itself. As expressed by Marx, “All that exists, all that lives on

44 

K. SZADKOWSKI

land and underwater, exists and lived only by some kind of movement. Thus, the movement of history produces social relations” (Marx, 1976, p. 163). Seen from that perspective, Proudhon’s approach seems idealistic and abstract. It turns the relations between the matter and ideas upside down. Moreover, Proudhon’s method is static, as it presents categories as eternal and refuses to follow the historical movement that allowed them to constitute the political economists’ thought. As rightly observed by Marx, reflection deprived of these two components (materiality and processuality) ends up as a sort of “applied metaphysics”. Second, the ideal expresses the material, not the other way round. It is the essence of Marx’s second observation on Proudhon’s method. He puts it bluntly: “economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production” (Marx, 1976, p.  165). Thus, he breaks with the standard idealist view of ideas. In Marxian critique, the “categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products” (Marx, 1976, p. 166). Theories and categories on which they are built are deemed to pass away throughout history. They are as stable as the material relations they aimed to express. Every bourgeois economist faces the problem of naturalising the basic categories and presenting the laws governing the current economy as eternal. In a longer passage, Marx sheds light on the issue: Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. […] When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. […] Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. (Marx, 1976, p. 174)

Introduction of the historical component into the reflection on the passed socio-economic formations allows for seeing the past formations not as artificial or unfinished projects of the natural formation—that is, capitalism—but as self-standing, separate periods in the development of the material forces of production. While most of present-day HER is far from describing academic capitalism or markets as natural and the previous modes of organisation of that sector as artificial, capitalist structuration of

2 METHOD 

45

the sector often seems to be presented as the end of the history of the development of material relations. Marx criticises Proudhon’s reflection on economic categories even further, focusing on the dysfunctional moral turn. Unable to deal with the dialectical character of contradictions inscribed in every economic category, Proudhon is forced to move to morality, producing dichotomies of good and bad sides of each of them. This moralism serves as the compensation for the idealist staticity. Against this moralism, Marx took an example of slavery and discussed its “good sides” (according to such a moralistic approach, it needs to have some), placing it at the core of the emergence of historical world-market capitalism and showing how this was served by slavery. In the context of higher education, we could expose the limit of this type of thinking by looking at the apologetic uses of economic categories like “flexible employment”. Without a concrete political position, one is consistently unable to properly assess the “goods and bads” of economic categories, as they are always good from the point of view of a particular class. Finally, within the last observation, a vital component of the Marxian method is introduced: the perspective of antagonism. As stated by Marx in relation to feudalism, a given socio-economic formation “must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism” (Marx, 1976, p. 175), a conflict between the classes that, on the one hand, stimulate the movement of history, and on the other, express the moving contradiction. This movement also seeps into the field of economic theory. “The more the antagonistic character comes to light, the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, find themselves in conflict with their own theory”, writes Marx (1976, p.  176). The clash of social producers affects the development of the discipline of economics and the form the economic categories take. So, not only must the economic categories be seen as an abstract expression of the historical and social relations of production, but moreover, they are determined by the antagonism that traverses both the field of material practices and theoretical practice. Marx emphasised the class conflict in the field of theory, saying that “Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class” (Marx, 1976, p. 177). But Marx did not stop there. The author of Das Kapital underlined the reliance of the economic theory on the development of actual class struggle and the maturity of the proletariat to actively pursue it as a self-constituted class. While at the

46 

K. SZADKOWSKI

beginning of a given cycle of class struggle, the communists and bourgeois are just abstract opposites, they come to life as flesh-and-bone actors with further development. The same goes in terms of the maturity of theory. While initially, working class-oriented theoreticians “are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and search for a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it, the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and become its mouthpiece” (Marx, 1976, p. 177). These utopian beginnings of critical reflection on capitalist domination are something that research on academic labour shares, focusing on applying abstract categories to analyse injustice that it faces, rather than studying and following the movements’ struggles. Marx presents the interdependence of science and the historical movement of the proletariat as necessary. Whilst the proletariat has not yet entered the historical scene, critical economic thought is considered utopian or moralistic. Standing on the side of the proletariat opens a different path of development for economic science. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary. (Marx, 1976, p. 177)

Science needs to stand on the side of the ongoing historical movement, otherwise, it is just abstract speculation, formulating yet another system detached from reality and, at best, imposed on it theoretically. It is precisely for this reason, by the end of this methodological excurse, Marx raises opposition to the political economy—not to its “critique” but to “communism”—seeing both the critique of political economy and communism itself as two sides of an actual historical movement that abolishes the present state of things. Summing up the Marxian reflection on the method of the critique of political economy from Poverty of Philosophy, I have to emphasise the importance of its seven moments. First, it sees the economic categories as abstract expressions of material social relations. Second, it considers the social relations as historically changing and addresses the economic

2 METHOD 

47

categories that emerge from them as transitory products. Third, it understands the dynamic character of the contradictions on which every economic category is founded not in moralistic terms but in the dialectical oppositions that constitute every social formation. Fourth, it denaturalises classical political economists’ eternal set of economic categories. Therefore, it sees every socio-economic formation as traversed by social antagonism, expressed in the sphere of production. Sixth, it uses the identification of antagonism not only to understand the studied socio-economic reality but to self-reflect and to understand itself as an abstract sphere depending on the development of this antagonism. Seventh, it sides with the historical movement that aims to abolish the present state of things, becoming itself a material and revolutionary force. These are the Marxist method’s foundations, whether applied in political economy or HER.

2.8  Political Reading of Marx The preceding sections of this chapter serve an important purpose. They ground a specific interpretation of both Marx and the critique as a method and posit it in the context of mainstream HER’s theoretical and methodological deficits. Previously, I discussed various aspects of the method as seen from within Marx and Engels’s works, but now it is time to openly side with one particular camp within the contemporary Marxist debates. The critical analysis of the political economy of higher education that I developed in this book follows the political interpretation of the Marxian oeuvre and the categories he developed (Luxemburg, 2013; Cleaver, 2000, 2019; Bell & Cleaver, 2002; Lebowitz, 2003, 2021; Tronti, 2019; Negri, 2022). Political interpretation presents the political-economic categories as always-already twofold—that is, as being an effect of the contentious negotiation between the two classes—both in terms of their content as well as their form (Luxemburg, 2013). As Mario Tronti rightly remarked: “the relationship between the two classes is such that whoever has the initiative wins. On the terrain of science, as on the terrain of practice, the strength of either side is inversely proportional to the other: if one grows and develops, the other stays put and thus slips backward” (2019, p. xvi). Seen from such a viewpoint, the class struggle goes on interrelatedly in the theory of capitalist development and the terrain of struggle against it. Moreover, these interrelated struggles mutually reinforce each other. Therefore, the political reading proposed here differs on one side, from, for example, an “altermarxism” developed by Jacques Bidet and

48 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Gerrard Duménil (2007), where the scientific approach to studying capitalism by Marx is a parallel yet delineated and separated task from the proletarian struggle for emancipation. While Marx was formulating both scientific goals (study capitalism and modern society) and revolutionary goals (contribute to the emancipation of the proletariat), Bidet and Duménil claim that he carefully assessed the modes of achieving each separately. In other words, there is neither a link nor connection that would tie together the intellectuals developing the critique of the political economy of capitalism with the struggling subjects, other than a vertical relationship of the intellectual vanguardism. When engaging in political reading, it is necessary to distinguish it from the “value form” critique and the so-called New Reading of Marx (NRM), as outlined by scholars such as Neary (2019), Arboledas-Lérida (2022), and Pitts (2017, 2020). These approaches represent a highly abstracted form of Marxian thought that is divorced from the revolutionary struggle. They argue that value producers cannot be relied upon as privileged observers of capitalist development and that the collapse of the value-form could lead to an end of the system of exploitation. Such perspectives need to be overcome. The reversed relationship between the sphere of production as the source of value (substantialist interpretation) and the sphere of circulation that NRM assumes presents the process of formation of value as dependent in the first instance on the social processes of validation of labour through the exchange of its products. Pitts rightly emphasised that Autonomist Marxists and most political readings of the theory of value lack the “conception of abstraction by which labourers enter into relation” (2020, p. 8) with capital. It is accurate, and reflection on the social conditions of validation of labour offered in NRM is helpful in this respect, as it “provides resources for the study of the unfolding process of social validation whereby abstract labour time productive of value is ideally and retrospectively conjured at various points of the circuit of capital, culminating in the successful exchange of the commodified good or service” (Pitts, 2020, p. 8). Such mechanisms are prevalent, not only the sphere of capitalist production in general but in higher education in particular (Arboledas-Lérida, 2020; see Szadkowski, 2016, 2019b). NRM escapes the blind alleys of the controversies that emerged around the concept of immaterial labour, while homogenising any differences between the concrete labour forms that are subsumed under the process of establishing real abstractions. Nonetheless, it does so without any particular purpose

2 METHOD 

49

other than a Marxological precision. Moreover, here we can also find the assumption of the vertical relationship between the Marxist theoreticians and the working class patronised and emancipated from the above. Links between theory development and revolutionary practice are non-existent, and the task of the critique resembles an empty shell. Pitts declares that “critical thinking, and not wishful thinking, is our only resource” (2020, p. 17) in developing a struggle against capitalism. One cannot disagree with such a declaration. Yet, what NRM and its followers in the sphere of reflection on higher education offer is a self-­ referential critique that deals mainly with the nuances of how the process of abstraction goes on in the capitalist society. Even if perfected to the highest possible level, self-referential critique of capitalist abstraction cannot deliver more than just an equally abstract critique that is depleted of any political content. While it makes sense to study capitalist abstraction, the task of the Marxist critique, including a critique of political economy, may start from such endeavour but cannot end at that point. Therefore, I offer a turn to the political perspective on Marxian categories—one that can prove their usefulness for the contemporary struggles in science and higher education. The political reading of Marx has a long history. There are two sources of crucial importance for the perspective contained in this book. First, Michael Lebowitz, in his Beyond capital, wrote about the necessary two-­ sidedness of reading of Marx’s categories, about the inclusion of the struggling working-class point of view into the Marxian equations and categories. Second, Harry Cleaver (2000, 2019) proposed reading Das Kapital and its categories politically. Within the political interpretation, Marxian categories “are all categories of the class relations of struggle. The development of capital is the development of the class relation, not just the development of the capitalists” (Bell & Cleaver, 2002, p. 1). It is not hard to find the philological evidence of such perspective inscribed and maintained in Marx’s oeuvre (Mezzadra, 2018). There is a fundamental duality inscribed in the essence of political economy, which Rosa Luxemburg perceptively indicated more than a hundred years ago. As she wrote, “At the very first step across the threshold of political-economic knowledge, with the first fundamental question as to what political economy is and what its basic problem is, the paths of bourgeois and proletarian knowledge already diverge” (2013, p.  132). While the former field uses the grid of its categories to hide the anarchy of capitalist production, the latter uses them to expose it and ultimately to build on its ruins a

50 

K. SZADKOWSKI

system that enables the realisation of the continually expanding needs of the proletariat. These two perspectives, although overlapping in the analysis of capitalist relations (one of them builds on the achievements of the other), are disproportionate and ultimately antagonistic. As Bell and Cleaver remind us, from a political perspective, accumulation is seen: as the expanded reproduction of a fabric of capitalist control that is always tenuous and repeatedly threatened by working-class struggle. The crisis is, thus, most basically, the rupture of that fabric and a positive consequence of the development of the working class as a subject. Within this framework, revolution is to be understood as a ‘working class produced’ crisis to which capital is unable to find an adequate response. (2002, p. 1)

The development of the critique of the political economy that would be faithful to such methodological premises serves to expand the class struggle within a given sector. It aims to identify the cracks that could be expanded into crisis-igniting holes and to find the doors through which the working-class subjectivities could escape capitalist control. Such critique seeks to help them to establish the conditions of their productive autonomy. As Bell and Cleaver rightly emphasised, within a political-­ economic exploration done from the working-class viewpoint, “every factor related to the crisis must be evaluated in terms of the development of sufficient power to overthrow the system” (2002, p. 2). Such reading of the basic Marxist categories only confirms the general intention that Marx and Engels posed for themselves, as “their interest in discovering the dynamics of capitalist growth, including those laws or regularities concerning the crisis, was an integral part of their attempt to determine optimal working-class strategy” (Bell & Cleaver, 2002, p. 3). In this book, the critical reflection on the capitalist growth in higher education is seen as an integral part of the academic labour struggle to end it. It is clear that in this context, the issue of the class point of view comes to the fore. Earlier in this chapter, I referred to Mike Neary’s (2019) critique of bourgeois “perspectivism” in the analysis of academic labour and exposed the fundamental problems with such critique. Marx’s ontological understanding of the proletariat as a productive force resisting capital’s impositions protects the critique conducted from this perspective from accusations of essentialising particular features of a specific social class in capitalism. When the proletariat is understood as a function of a general

2 METHOD 

51

antagonism to capitalist separation, the critique that takes its side appears more like a revolutionary rather than a conservative force. Nevertheless, the methodological issue of the perspective or a viewpoint should be clarified. No one has articulated better the meaning of the working-class point of view as the foundation of a practical-theoretical project of emancipation than Mario Tronti (2019) in his classic Workers and Capital. This powerful political interpretation of both Marx and Lenin sets the ground for understanding the Marxian task of studying the political economy of capital. As Tronti puts it, “It can never be repeated enough that to foresee capital’s development does not mean submitting to its iron laws: rather, it means forcing it to take a certain road, waiting in ambush at some point with weapons more powerful than iron, where we can attack and smash it” (2019, p. xx). Studying the movement of capital is part of a political strategy. Predicting its further movements, reflecting on the substantial needs of capitalist development and the ways in which capital envelopes its subsumption of the working-class lives, serves a fully political purpose. Marx was far from formulating an objectivist interpretation of the value production and circulation in capitalism. He wanted to uncover the contradictions and necessary tendencies that, once exposed, can serve as a map that could be utilised by the struggling subjects to target the weakest links in the chain. Tronti formulated this task clearly: From the working-class point of view, capital’s contradictions should neither be rejected nor resolved but only utilised. But making use of these contradictions also demands that we exacerbate them […] The task of theory is to reconstruct the chain of contradictions, to connect it again and to grasp it anew, by way of the class’s collective thought, as our enemy’s single development process. (2019, p. xxx)

Mapping contradictions that emerge in the course of capitalist development, and studying its logic, serves the purpose of politically organising against the capital’s embrace of our productive capacities. Intervention into what appears to be the seamless process of value production, which capital portrays as its self-valorisation, attempts to halt the reign of capital and to put an end to its movement. For capital, as a value in motion (Harvey, 2017), stoppages, blockades and standstills are the deadliest moments. Yet, as Tronti argued:

52 

K. SZADKOWSKI

In certain moments, the possibility of getting a sense of the struggle – and of organisation – lies exactly in the ability to foresee capital’s objective path and its needs within the terms of this path. We must thwart the fulfilment of these necessities and thus block capital’s development, pitching it into crisis before – sometimes long before – it has achieved the ideal conditions that we have ourselves contemplated. (2019, p. xxii)

Capital’s crisis will not come from the conclusion of an automatic process, and will not result from some implosion under its internal contradictions. It can only be the result of the organised action of the associated producers of value. Nonetheless, we need to remember that there is a necessity for a double movement—to attack capital and hit its weakest parts, we need to grow and expand our capacities. Today, the chain on which capital keeps labour must be broken “not where capital is weakest, but rather where the working class is strongest” (Tronti, 2019, p. xxix). In other words, the critique maps the objective paths of capital’s expansions. It operationalises the contradictions it encounters to offer the struggling subjects the map that they can use to get rid of capital and expand their capacities to self-sustainability and expanded reproduction. But what does it mean for research into higher education? We can finally summarise our reflection.

2.9  Conclusion In this chapter, I have addressed issues related to theory in analysing higher education. These issues can be found in both mainstream HER and some Marxist approaches. While it is understandable that HER often neglects the historical context of its theories and disregards the class origin of its concepts and categories, it is surprising to find similar problems in Marxist reflection, particularly in the areas of “negative critique” or the NRM. The biggest problem in the latter case is the tendency to naturalise Marx’s categories and present them as objective and stable, which purportedly explains all forms of capitalist dynamics, regardless of the economic sector or historical period of development of class struggle and capitalism itself. In addition, deeply distrustful of militant subjects, Marxists of this vein neglect the class struggle, both as a force driving history, leading the capitalist system to collapse, and as a context for explaining the phenomena analysed or as the origin of the concepts or methods they use. The perspectives thus created—detached, paternalistic and

2 METHOD 

53

expecting an automatic collapse of the capitalist system due to the sophisticated reflection of its representatives—do not help to explain the dynamically changing reality of capitalist higher education. Marx did a good job of capturing the problem with the scientific status of theory. Although he was referring mainly to bourgeois reflection on political economy, Marxist currents that focus on an analytical approach to circuits of value within capitalism share many of its negative features. Already in his Postface to the second edition of Das Kapital, Marx stated that bourgeois political economy: “can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena” (Marx, 1990, p. 96). Today, however, global capitalism and capitalistically structured higher education are all traversed by class struggles. One can mention fierce student conflicts over tuition fees in Chile (Fleet & Guzmán-Concha, 2017) or South Africa (Cini, 2019), the long-standing strikes against cuts, precarisation or the capture of pension funds by finance capital in the UK, or the wide-ranging boycotts of the activities of Elsevier or other oligopoly of academic publishers (Szadkowski, 2019b). Although the conflicts are swarming all around, contemporary HER remains powerless in the face of the problems they pose. Helplessly witnessing injustices that the protesters highlighted, mainstream HER and objectivist Marxist reflection are forced to step back from their quasi-­ universalist claims to a status of science. Their inability to respond theoretically and methodologically to the struggles at hand leaves these theories out of step with reality, and even more so, robs them of their functionality with regard to making a difference. Change in higher education is possible. The condition, however, is that we consider the methodological assumptions presented in this chapter. Given this, it is worth recalling the two main elements of the Marxian method. The first is the historical ontology, which has been exorcised by Marxists, and virtually ignored by mainstream higher education scholars ignore. Above all, historical ontology allows us to denaturalise the categories used by political economists or higher education researchers, specifically, by appealing to complex, transhistorical structures of being. One example of the use of this thinking is the dismantling of the modern Western opposition between the public and the private—functional for the organisation of social and economic reality along the lines beneficial to the capital’s development. Whether such research is carried out in a comparative cultural context (Yang, 2022) or a more political one (Szadkowski, 2019a), the result is to historicise and demonstrate the transitory nature of modern

54 

K. SZADKOWSKI

typologies. Placing fundamental economic categories in the historical context of their emergence is just one step that a higher education researcher applying ontological reflexivity can take. Another practical aspect offered by historical ontology is sensitivity to the recognitions carried out by protest movements. As Engels pointed out, even if initially the issues that the struggling subjects find unjust come into formal conflict with existing theories—the worse for the theory. Ontological recognitions of social struggles have the effect of developing theory and bursting old concepts from within. Making the perspective that we develop sensitive to this element is an essential aspect of the Marxist method in HER. Finally, political ontology, in turn, allows us to address the transhistorical component of the reality around us: the invariable necessity of repeated metabolic relations with nature to sustain and develop life, including social life. Marx (1976) called this component wealth, to which capital in his epoch gave the form of value. This book will refer to it as the common (Szadkowski, 2019a; Negri, 2022). The common represents a pure form of relationality, interconnectedness, the interrelation of the elements of the system under study and socio-economic reality as a whole. Consequently, it underpins the project of reclaiming the future for the sector, or life more broadly, from the power of capital. Political ontology provides a reflective approach that allows us to reveal what lies beyond the narrow limitations of the value and commodity form. To put it another way, it makes a critical perspective about higher education possible. The Marxist method presented in this book extends beyond the mere inclusion of an ontological dimension. The second element I drew attention to in this chapter was the Marxian understanding of critique as a movement and praxis. Perhaps it still seems somewhat counterintuitive. It combines movement as the movement of change and the movement of the method through the three-element circle. Regardless of these ambiguities, I feel that a critique understood in this way is somewhat helpful in reflecting on higher education. First of all, it equips this reflection with a horizon. Marx pointed out that the process of critique, or theoretical development, must plug into a movement that changes history. Many of the recent discussions within HER have been devoted to the question of the future of higher education. The Marxian method is one of the few that allows a theory being developed in the present to relate to the future—a future that begins always-already-now. It has its place in the frictions, tensions or contradictions plaguing the existing

2 METHOD 

55

order, or in the protests against the current system. A movement that abolishes the status quo is, in a sense, an abolitionist movement. This is also how we can understand the material basis for critique. Nonetheless, in the chapter, I distinguished three moments of critique, which as a method, takes a circular form. It is based on the integral interconnectedness of the moments of critique and their interchangeability and irreplaceability. The three moments of the movement of critique are inseparable from each other. What do I mean by this? Concerning the study of higher education, such a critique does not, for example, amount to developing ever more convincing descriptions of how we are enslaved by capital. That is, the aim of a Marxist critique of the political economy of higher education is not, for instance, to convince us that there is no life beyond the measures or rankings of universities. Nor is it to point out that the past actions of the big academic publishers have taken the conditions of knowledge production to the brink, allowing the capitalists to earn profit even by making knowledge publicly available. Indeed, analyses of the mechanisms of capital in higher education must have a purpose. They are meant to help provide a map for struggling actors seeking to counteract the negative consequences of capital’s actions, and to allow for identifying the productive contradictions—moments of relations between academic labour and capital that might be addressed to constructively break it. Suppose one can perceive some friction in the study of capital operations in the publishing sphere. In that case, one’s overriding task is to frame the conclusions of the analysis in such a way that they can feed a movement for change to transcend the power of capital. Mapping and resolving the contradictions that have emerged in course of establishing the relationship between capital and academic labour in higher education is the task of the remaining chapters of this book. In precisely the same way, Marxist critique does not stop at referencing the demands of social movements. Taking them into account, pursuing the tropes they set, following the recognitions they indicate, Marxist critique seeks to integrate them into a dialogue with the findings made on the grounds of the critique of political economy. Moreover, part of such research can be carried out in common—in so-called “co-research”—in which the boundary between researcher and researched disappears, and the results aim to feed a transformative praxis (Roggero, 2011). Finally, a research practice oriented towards critique as a movement does not allow for detached utopistic dreaming. It does not create

56 

K. SZADKOWSKI

scenarios of an alternative reality. Instead, using its ontological recognition, it traces their elements in the researched reality of the higher education sector and helps to highlight them. It takes as its objective the expression of the horizontal and immanent relationships that are conducive to this. The research that can be carried out in higher education with the help of such a set of methods is also not linear. Each moment can become an entry point into the research, as long as it remains in dialogue and relationship with the others. At the end of the chapter, it is worth asking a simple question: how will the method reconstructed here be applied in this book? As mentioned above, this book focuses primarily on the “in” moment of capital-­ dominated higher education. It makes the mechanisms of capital’s functioning and its subsumption of academic labour the object of its interest. Here, too, contemporary HER and Marxist reflections face problems. The former ignores the Marxian understanding of capital (Marginson, 2016), while the latter seeks to deny the possibility of other ways of articulating the question of value. The objectivist Marxists treat Marxian schemas developed concerning industrial capitalism as transhistorical and seek to apply them to the reality of the sector. For this reason, in this book, using a flexible Marxian method, I try to show the actual ways that capital instrumentalises the various forms of organisation of higher education to install within it its long-known mechanisms of valorisation. Marxist literature will remain helpful, but I will not become uncritical. Rigorous engagements with the existing body of HER will be equally helpful. My critique will develop primarily as a critique of the work of political economists of higher education. I will show their limitations and formulate relevant conclusions, all in relation to the methodology adopted and outlined in this chapter. My next step is confronting the market and its forms in the sector, as understood by higher education researchers.

References Arboledas-Lérida, L. (2020). Capital and the Scientific Endeavour. An Appraisal of Some Marxist Contributions to the Debate on the Commodification of Science. Critique, 48(4), 321–367. Arboledas-Lérida, L. (2022). ‘Give the Money Where It’s Due’: The Impact of Knowledge-Sharing via Social Media on the Reproduction of the Academic Labourer. Social Epistemology, 36(2), 251–266.

2 METHOD 

57

Ashwin, P. (2012). How Often Are Theories Developed Through Empirical Research into Higher Education? Studies in Higher Education, 37(8), 941–955. Azeri, S. (2019). Activity, Labour, and Praxis: An Outline for a Critique of Epistemology. Critique, 47(4), 585–602. Becher, T., & Kogan, M. (1992). Process and Structure in Higher Education. London: Routledge. Bell, P., & Cleaver, H. (2002). Marx’s Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle. The Commoner, 5, 1–61. Bidet, J., & Duménil, G. (2007). Altermarxisme: Un autre marxisme pourun autre monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bligh, B., & Flood, M. (2017). Activity Theory in Empirical Higher Education Research: Choices, Uses and Values. Tertiary Education and Management, 23(2), 125–152. Cantwell, B. (2020). Explanatory Accounts in International and Comparative Higher Education Research. Higher Education Quarterly, 74(2), 149–161. Cini, L. (2019). Disrupting the Neoliberal University in South Africa: The# FeesMustFall Movement in 2015. Current Sociology, 67(7), 942–959. Clark, B.  R. (1998). Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. New York: Emerald. Cleaver, H. (2000). Reading Capital Politically. San Francisco: AK Press. Cleaver, H. (2019). 33 Lessons on Capital. Reading Marx Politically. London: Pluto Press. Conrad, C.  F. (1989). Meditations on the Ideology of Inquiry in Higher Education: Exposition, Critique, and Conjecture. The Review of Higher Education, 12(3), 199–220. Dakka, F., & Smith, R. (2019). An Exploration of Rhythms in the Contemporary Academy: Time, Space and Affect. In J. Huisman & M. Tight (Eds.), Theory and Method in Higher Education Research (pp. 153–171). London: Emerald Publishing Limited. Engels, F. (1990). Marx and Rodbertus. Preface to the First German Edition of the Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx. In Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 26: Engels: 1882–1889 (pp. 278–291). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Fleet, N., & Guzmán-Concha, C. (2017). Mass Higher Education and the 2011 Student Movement in Chile: Material and Ideological Implications. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 36(2), 160–176. Hall, R. (2021). The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the end of The End of History. London: MayFly Books. Harvey, D. (2017). Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamann, J., & Kosmützky, A. (2021). Does Higher Education Research Have a Theory Deficit? Explorations on Theory Work. European Journal of Higher Education, 11, 468–488.

58 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Holloway, J. (2015). Read Capital: The First Sentence: Or, Capital Starts with Wealth, Not with the Commodity. Historical Materialism, 23(3), 3–26. Lebowitz, M. A. (2003). Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lebowitz, M. A. (2021). Between Capitalism and Community. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lukács, G. (1974). Conversations with Lukács. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lukács, G. (1978a). Ontology of Social Being, Volume 1 Hegel. London: Merlin Press. Lukács, G. (1978b). Ontology of Social Being, Volume 2 Marx. London: Merlin Press. Luxemburg, R. (2013). Introduction to political economy. In The complete works of Rosa Luxemburg (Vol. 1, pp. 89–300). London: Verso. Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and the Common Good. Melbourne: MUP Academic. Marx, K. (1969). Theories of Surplus Value: Part 1–3. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1975). Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov. In Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 38: Engels: 1882–1889 (p. 95). Moscow: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1976). Poverty of Philosophy. In Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 06: Marx and Engels: 1845–1848 (pp. 102–212). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (2010). Theses on Feuerbach [Original Version]. In Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 05: Marx and Engels: 1845–1847 (pp.  3–5). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Mezzadra, S. (2018). In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects. New  York: Rowman & Littlefield. Murphy, T. S. (2003). The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs and Antonio Negri. Strategies, 16(2), 163–184. Nail, T. (2020). Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neary, M. (2019). Chain Reaction: Critical Theory Needs Critical Mass: Contradiction, Crisis and the Value-Form. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 8(9), 31–41. Negri, A. (2008). The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e). Negri, A. (2014). Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Critical Economy 150 Years Later. Rethinking Marxism, 26(3), 427–433. Negri, A. (2022). Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context. Cambridge: Polity Press.

2 METHOD 

59

Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (1994). Labor of Dionysus: Communism as Critique of the Capitalist and Socialist State-Form. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Pitts, F.  H. (2017). Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pitts, F. H. (2020). Value. Cambridge: Polity Press. Postone, M. (1993). Time Labour and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postone, M. (2003). Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism. In R.  Albritton & J.  Simoulidis (Eds.), New Dialectics and Political Economy (pp. 78–100). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Roggero, G. (2010). Five Theses on the Common. Rethinking Marxism, 22(3), 357–373. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Slaughter, S. (2001). Problems in Comparative Higher Education: Political Economy, Political Sociology and Postmodernism. Higher Education, 41(4), 389–412. Szadkowski, K. (2016). Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour Under Capital. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 28, 9–29. Szadkowski, K. (2019a). The Common in Higher Education: A Conceptual Approach. Higher Education, 78(2), 241–255. Szadkowski, K. (2019b). An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-productive Academic Labour. tripleC, 17(1), 111–131. Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2019). In, Against, and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis. Social Epistemology, 33(6), 463–476. Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2022). Conceptualizing Capitalist Transformations of Universities: Marx’s Relevance for Higher Education Research. Critique, 50(1), 185–203. Teichler, U. (1996). Comparative Higher Education: Potentials and Limits. Higher Education, 32(4), 431–465. Teichler, U. (2015). ‘Higher education research in Europe’. In A. Curaj et al. (eds.) The European higher education area: Between critical reflections and future policies (pp. 815–847). Dordrecht: Springer. Tight, M. (2003). Researching Higher Education. London: Open University Press. Tight, M. (2004). Research into Higher Education: An a-Theoretical Community of Practice? Higher Education Research & Development, 23(4), 395–411. Tight, M. (2013). Discipline and Methodology in Higher Education Research. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(1), 136–151. Tight, M. (2014). Discipline and Theory in Higher Education Research. Research Papers in Education, 29(1), 93–110.

60 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Tight, M. (2015). Theory Development and Application in Higher Education Research: Tribes and Territories. Higher Education Policy, 28(3), 277–293. Tronti, M. (2019). Workers and Capital. London: Verso. Winn, J. (2015). Writing about Academic Labour. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 25, 1–15. Yang, L. (2022). Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

CHAPTER 3

Markets

3.1   Introduction Marx applied his critique to works of authors who had not yet undertaken the systematic effort of expounding the presuppositions of their own methods and theories. Therefore, to be able to criticise the misconceptions of the political economists, with each step that his critique took, he was forced to formulate assumptions, to construct his own programme of political economy, and to grasp and present the methodological foundations of classical political economy. Unlike Marx, we do not have to synthesise the methods or the foundations of the theories used by higher education researchers. Most of the studies, especially in the sphere of the economics of higher education, rely on neoclassical economics, the methodological limitations of which were laid bare, becoming an object of constructive critique (e.g., Fine & Milonakis, 2009; Milonakis & Fine, 2009; Keen, 2011; Fine, 2016). Although there is no need to repeat this effort, it is still important to acknowledge Marx’s class position, which is evident in his reconstruction and critique of the theories of bourgeois political economists. This is a feature that the critique presented here intends to share. Surplus value— the central concept of the Marxian project, but also the point around which the thought of political economists of all sorts has gravitated—was the proxy for the political positions and class interests of the authors that

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_3

61

62 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Marx discussed. Show me your attitude to the source of surplus value and I will tell you which side of the class conflict you are on and whose interests you are defending. In a similar way, we can look at contemporary theories of value in science and higher education. Show me in which part of the system and in which processes you locate the activities generative of value, or how and through what prism you understand the organisation of economic relations, and I will tell you where on the map of class conflict you are located. To gain perspective on the historical movement in the theory of recent transformations of higher education, one can turn to the concept of the “market”. As a metaphysical notion, its content is shaped by the political positions of the author employing it. Such concepts have the capacity to trigger processes of discourse production, entailing ontological creation, and thus offer the possibility of applying political ontology. It is a method of unveiling ontological assumptions underpinning historical manifestations of being and disclosing their political implications. Put differently, the concept of the “market” is at the same time a lens that allows for a seemingly clear delineation of materiality, as well as a mirror in which interests of political economists can be seen. Once it is stabilised it allows us to follow the evolution of thinking that revolves around it, and to track its political consequences. This chapter focuses on the various conceptions of the market and its accompanying theoretical assumptions (expressed explicitly and implicitly), as well as their implications for analyses of higher education. It is possible to point out the main limitations of analyses utilising the concept of the market to capture the specificity of capitalist transformations of higher education. Moreover, this can be done in relation both to the model proposals, as well as to all those analyses that use similar assumptions only partially, or that mix them together between the types. In the movement of critique of these concepts, the advantage of shifting the analytical focus to capital in its relations of subsumption of academic labour will become clear. In this move, we come to understand a second aspect of political ontology. It is not just about denaturalizing ontological conceptions of being to reveal their political implications. It also involves opening up the field of ontology itself to conflict. From this point on, there is no return. By highlighting the conflictual nature of conceptual determinations of reality, political ontology requires us to formulate and be aware of our own philosophical positions on being and its manifestations. This involves a positive

3 MARKETS 

63

aspect too: the formulation of propositions that go beyond denaturalized conceptions. Over the last thirty years, an unusually large amount of space in the literature of mainstream HER has been devoted to the market. Consequently, the overview presented in this chapter is only partial. Against the background of the general panorama of the approaches, the chapter focuses on the three distinct approaches to the problem of markets in higher education: economics of higher education (Toutkoushian & Paulson, 2016), academic capitalism theory (e.g., Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Cantwell & Kauppinen, 2014; Slaughter & Taylor, 2015), and exceptionalism in understanding economic relations within higher education (e.g., Marginson, 1997, 2004a, b, 2013, 2016). While the first approach incorporates an almost pure form of the repertoire of neoclassical economic theory, the other two stay declaratively critical to both the neoclassical methodology and the neoliberal practice in reforming higher education based on it. However, as I will argue, not only do academic capitalism theory and exceptionalism reinforce the neoclassical optics on higher education (focusing on the relations of exchange and the market, instead of relations of production with labour and capital entanglement), but despite the best intentions of their authors, they also do not provide the grounds for actual critique of capitalist processes of transformation of higher education. I will bring together the limitations discussed and justify in this context why reaching for the Marxian framework reconstructed in this book seems necessary.

3.2   Marketisation of Higher Education and Its Reflection in Theory Linked to the reversal of the vectors of class struggle and the victory of neoliberal doctrine in the 1970s (Harvey, 2007; Dardot & Laval, 2014, 2019), the gradual process of marketisation of higher education swept through the world in several waves (Leslie & Johnson, 1974; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Marginson, 1997; Jongbloed, 2003; Berman, 2012; McGettigan, 2013; Enders et al., 2014). The development of competitive logic and the commodification of the outputs of universities and their staff lay at the ideological core of this process, which exhibited diverse manifestations across different countries worldwide. In Higher Education System, Burton R. Clark (1983) pointed to the USA as the champion of marketisation. In the years that followed, more countries joined, first the

64 

K. SZADKOWSKI

developed West, and from the 1990s, increasingly the former socialist bloc (Slantcheva & Levy, 2007) and the developing world—including Africa and South America, which began to lead the way in the most profound market-led transformation processes of their systems (Federici et al., 2000; Leher & Accioly, 2016). Under neoliberalism, the market became the dominant model for organising and reshaping socio-economic realities. The advent of a unilateral world further reinforced this trend. In the context of higher education, this meant a growing emphasis on efficiency, competition, and profit, with universities increasingly adopting business-like practices and metrics to measure success. The market model thus came to be seen as a panacea for the challenges facing higher education, from declining public funding to changing student demographics (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Marginson & Considine, 2000). In Europe, these changes went hand in hand with public sector reforms under the banner of New Public Management (McLaughilin et al., 2002), aimed at adapting the broader environment of universities, as well as their legal structure, to changing priorities. Public sector universities were expected not only to increase their competitiveness and efficiency, but above all, to implement austerity measures—to save and manage scarce public resources efficiently. Ideally, however, they would also generate surpluses. The model of bureaucratic over-regulation and a strong state, which Clark (1983) complained about back in the 1980s, contrasting it with a flexible market model, was slowly fading away. However, the changes have not led to the transformation of higher education into a pure capitalist production sector selling its goods on the market for profit (Marginson, 2013). Rather, they have left it in a sort of hybrid state. Indeed, as Dardot and Laval argue, neoliberalism is “‘world-reason’ whose main characteristic is that it extends and imposes the logic of capital on the totality of social relations, to the point of making it the very form of our lives” (Dardot & Laval, 2019, p. 3). The goal is not to implement a preconceived set of rules or policies designed to convert the state and public sector into market-based entities. Rather, it involves a rationality that governs the organisation of new aspects of our lives. Actions aligned with this rationality promote the progressive accumulation and self-­ valorisation of capital, but they do not necessarily result in the complete transformation of reality to reflect this image. The rise of neoliberalism provided the necessary impetus for the theoretical revolution in economics to gain momentum and expand into other

3 MARKETS 

65

fields of human practice (Mirowski, 2013). As acceptance of neoliberal dogmas became widespread, the assumptions and bodies of theory to which higher education researchers began to refer also changed. Research topics now included not only the inefficiency of the state bureaucracy or consequences of massification, but also markets and their operation in the allocation of resources in a given sector or the issue of tuition fees. The changes introduced by implementation of neoliberal policies demanded a metamorphosis of the theoretical discussion of the sector’s problems, as well as the creation of foundations for a new kind of knowledge about higher education. The discussion on the economic transformation of the higher education sector involved not only higher education researchers, but also economists attempting to make use of the theories that they were developing in the new area. Representatives of neoclassical economics, however, did not have an easy task in applying their theory to the new sectors. Although strongly supported by their networks, as well as governments and ministries around the world, the adaptation of vulgar economic theory proved to be a task requiring sacrifices. As Ben Fine (2016, see. 2000) writes, neoclassical economics, as it entered the first phase of ‘economic imperialism’ (Lazear, 2000), dismissed social, political, institutional or historical components from its field of interest, thereby, in its own view, making itself immune to criticism of any kind. The demand for a pure, or more— sterile—scientism made it difficult to explore new spheres of reality. Confronting new areas required a mutation of neoclassical economics, and resulted in a shift to a second phase of economic imperialism (Fine, 2016). In this phase, “non-markets”, which did not operate according to the determinants of perfect markets, were seen as mainly resulting from governmental responses. The second wave of the economic imperialism’s subsumption of the new disciplines entailed accompanying the process of inclusion of other realms under the rule of capital. It was not the process of imposing the pure logic of perfect markets. Rather, while acknowledging their imperfection, the second wave was about working towards adapting this sphere to have at least partial functionality for capitalism. Where reality resisted change, theoretical concessions had to be made. The first of these was the introduction of the ideas of imperfect markets or market failure mentioned above. That is, it was assumed that in some areas the market could not cope on its own. Some assumptions were therefore abandoned. The neoclassical theory of public goods (Samuelson, 1954) was intended to justify and explain a deviation from the transformation of

66 

K. SZADKOWSKI

certain sectors (including, the public higher education sector) into profit-­ driven market enterprises. However, there were also deviations in the field of the valuability of all goods—here the issue of “externalities” came to the fore (Hardt & Negri, 2009). This refers to the fact that part of the goods or commodity production process also generates side effects (both positive and negative) that cannot be valued during standard market valuation. Finally, the issue of choice. The main problem, however, turned out to be that of ‘asymmetric information’. The manifold incompatibility of higher education with economic reality seen through the prism of consumer choice theory and competitive markets has often led to the conclusion that universities do not match economic reality at all as a consequence of their unique characteristics. Thus, they are to some extent protected from the most extreme manifestations of the processes taking place in this area (Bok, 2009). However, what appeared to be a stable conclusion derived on the basis of generally accepted theories is merely a misrecognition based on a theory that is incompatible with reality, falsely altering and obscuring the optics of the economic processes taking place in higher education that meet capital with its need for constant expansion. The advancing capitalist expansion in the sector of science and higher education, together with the ongoing neoliberalisation of Western societies, has been the subject of numerous analyses (e.g., Roggero, 2011; Hall, 2018). These are most often identified as a progressive marketization of higher education (e.g., Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Marginson, 1997; Dill, 1997b, 2003; Marginson & Considine, 2000; Berman, 2012; McGettigan, 2013). In both the critical and apologetic literature on these processes, the concept of the market plays an important role. On the one hand, the researchers looked at the changes and read them against the model of the ideal market form, inquiring whether or not it was implemented as part of the ongoing reforms (Dill, 1997a; Jongbloed, 2003; Teixeira et al., 2006). On the other hand, attention was focused on the political and practical mechanisms of instilling markets in systems and institutions (Komljenovic & Robertson, 2016, 2017; Komljenovic, 2019). The sector was viewed through the lens of existing market relations, with the aim of investigating how they could be strengthened, stabilised or made more effective, or what factors were impeding their existence (Becker & Toutkoushian, 2013). Finally, some national differentiation between the existing markets in national systems was proposed (Jungblut & Vukasovic, 2018). In the maze of literature, one can hardly find any pieces that would address these

3 MARKETS 

67

changes from the point of view of the producers and labour employed in the sector. The discussions on markets in higher education span a broad spectrum. In the following sections of this chapter, I will focus on the three, most prominent—pure, so to speak—types of theories of markets in higher education that have gained attention and popularity in the HER community. The aim is not only to be able to present a coherent picture, but more importantly to be able to articulate clear and not fully convergent positions with which further theoretical discussion is possible. HER seldom contributes to fundamental theoretical work. Rather, there is a gradual assimilation of the theoretical achievements of other disciplines and a framing of them to the specificities of the sector (most often seen through the prism of US systems). However, this theoretical poverty, combined with a concomitant American-centricity paradoxically facilitates theoretical discussion. The pretensions of quasi-universality inherent in market theory are further reinforced here by geopolitical blindness and by ignoring the fundamental differentiation between higher education and science sectors worldwide.

3.3  Neoclassical Economics of Higher Education Reflection on higher education is not the place where the dogmas of neoclassical economics get challenged. Consequently, among the majority of works, one will find various elements of a conception of public sector markets, which was designed back in the 1980s. A work that presents the assumptions of the classical market approach in higher education in a textbook and model way is the monumental Economics of Higher Education, whose authors Robert K. Toutkoushian and Michael B. Paulsen, economists involved in HER in the US, have clearly synthesised the approach. It is a shining example of economic imperialism (Lazear, 2000), in which microeconomic analyses of decision-making behaviour in markets provide a template for explaining all possible behaviour in different spheres of human activity (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016, p. 235). Toutkoushian and Paulsen’s example is illustrative. Firstly, they start from the fundamental neoclassical assumption that all economics is a science of choice—a choice of participants on the market (or markets, because economics assumes the existence of markets in all spheres of social life). Wherever choices are made about the allocation of resources and the estimation of the benefits of those allocations, neoclassical economics

68 

K. SZADKOWSKI

comes in handy. Authors define the core concept as follows: “A market is where buyers and sellers of goods and services come together to engage in trade. […] Economists describe markets as a means for making decisions about what a society should produce, how goods and services will be distributed, and how much buyers will be charged for goods and services.” (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016, p. 151). In turn, the task of economics, including the economics of higher education, is to analyse the conditions and consequences of the choices made by individuals or organisations, through the lens of the simplistic models. All decision makers in the markets must optimise their behaviour in order to get the scarce resources they desire. Their decisions are assumed to be rational and are seen through the prism of simplifying frames to allow for the focus on the essence of given relationship (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016, pp. 18, 21). Thus, the authors take the view that economics comes close to being an exact science and that the models it uses have strong claims to objectivity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Toutkoushian and Paulsen frame higher education through the assumption that those who benefit should bear the costs. Sector economics, which, according to the authors, has its origins in the emergence of human capital theory, developed against the backdrop of the need to provide “scientific evidence” for public policies calculated to slash funding for higher education in the US in the 1970s. One of the paradoxes in higher education economics is that one needs to argue for the individually understood benefits (because the whole idea of paying for education is grounded in the image of an individual benefiting from being educated and getting the wage premium) while at the same time quantifying the benefits for society and explaining that there is a solid ground for public subsidies for higher education. Yet, in this second aspect, the discussion often shifts to demonstration of the contributions of private higher education institutions to social well-being, therefore proving the legitimacy of their claims to get public subsidies and to secure the competition between private and public institutions in HE in the US (see McMahon, 2009). This is the point at which the function of economics in class conflict is illuminated—its role is not to inquire, but to find a hard-to-argue argument for maintaining the mechanisms of paid higher education. In Economics of Higher Education academic institutions are presented as individual decision-makers, and labour is reduced to one of the resources in relation to which decisions are made (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016, p. 269). For neoclassical economists, market a great equaliser. Therefore,

3 MARKETS 

69

insofar as universities face choices with regard to how to get maximum benefits given the constraints they are in, they resemble other for-profit organisations. Nonetheless, they do not operate to maximise profits (2016, p. 7) since they have multiple goals and objectives (2016, p. 301). As Toutkoushian and Paulsen put it, for higher education institutions, “profit maximisation is at best a means towards another end not an end in and of itself” (2016, p. 281) because, more than profit-maximizers, universities are considered by neoclassical economists to be “prestige maximaizers” (2016, p. 285). Even a neoclassical textbook for the analysis of higher education, which presents the sector as regulated by market relations amenable to rational explanation, questions the possibility of reducing higher education institutions to purely economic actors. In this view, the market becomes simply a mechanism for regulating human behaviour, rather than a tool for explaining economic relations in production. Market rationality, however, can also be extended to activities aimed at achieving the goals of prestige maximisation. There, too, it can be used to analyse the actions of both individual actors in the system and entire institutions. Toutkoushian and Paulsen (2016) reduce the entire economic reality of the sector to exchange relations. Within this framework, they focus only on behaviour and choices based on it. Academic labour has no place in this analysis, nor does capital and the relationships it establishes. A textbook on the economics of higher education leaves us with an insight into how reductive neoclassical economics can be. It provides a clear glimpse into the way in which a purportedly scientific approach to higher education can be used to rationalise and justify the implementation of neoliberal policies for restructuring the sector. At the same time, due to the ahistoricity of their proposal, the authors do not address the essence of capitalist relations in the sector. In order to confront the market-based account of the relations of academic capitalism, we must turn to another theoretical proposal.

3.4  Academic Capitalism One of the most popular critical theoretical approaches used in HER to explain capitalist transformation is the theory of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Cantwell & Kauppinen, 2014; Slaughter & Taylor, 2015). At its centre lay the market-­ like and quasi-market-like behaviours in higher education. The sector is portrayed as a network of interconnected actors who establish

70 

K. SZADKOWSKI

relationships to secure revenues in the face of declining public budgets, and who generate profits through economic activity or by obtaining competitive public subsidies from the state. The theory has been formulated primarily with reference to the countries of the global North, in particular, the US. The emergence of academic capitalism in the core countries (primarily the US, UK, and Canada) resulted in a retreat from public good knowledge/learning regime, which assumed a strict separation between the public and the private, the state and the market, as well as the operation of pure Mertonian norms of science (a focus on the development of basic research as an autotelic activity) and a belief in the importance of knowledge and education as public goods. The academic capitalism knowledge/ learning regime instead implies the intrusion of the financial motive into the activities of all actors involved in the sector, the privatisation of part of the public services or public functions of universities, as well as the encroachment of the neoliberal state in regulating the activities in the sector through competition. Although, as the authors point out, these regimes “coexist, intersect, overlap” the academic capitalist knowledge/ learning has a tendency to undermine to public support for the system (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, p. 29, 107). Theory of academic capitalism views the material phenomena systemically. It places universities, their sub-units, and their academic staff—also referred to as ‘state-subsidised entrepreneurs’ (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997, p. 9)—at the centre of the networked system. Within the context of “academic capitalism”, the term “capitalism” is construed as a competitive distribution system where academics and university units “act as capitalists from within the public sector” (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997, p. 9), and are market agents who by entering into exchange relations are able to secure monetary gains. Although the authors adopt a critical stance, their individualising perspective places the theory of academic capitalism within the neoclassical ontological horizon because they focus on individual actors, whether they are institutions or academics, as well as on relations of exchange and the market. The components distinguished within the theory are meant to allow for an analysis of links of universities and sub-units to a new knowledge-based economy (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Within these components are new circuits of knowledge, indicating that the knowledge produced within traditional public research universities is changing its nature and that non-­ traditional actors (e.g., ranking agencies or industry representatives) are

3 MARKETS 

71

involved in both its production and validation. The second element is the emergence of interstitial organisations, i.e., elements of public universities that establish direct links between them and the economic environment, whether they be patent offices or university spin-offs. Interstitial organisations make public universities more porous and allows for active sell-out of produced knowledge in forms of patents. Further, the role of the external organisations in the system is distinguished by highlighting the role of intermediating networks in mediating the activities of universities and staff in establishing relations with the economic environment. Whether they be associations, foundations operating in the field of science and higher education or consultancies, all of them aim to build links with the economy and stimulate policy-making. Furthermore, the challenge of the era described by academic capitalism theorists has pushed public universities to develop extended managerial capacity, involving stronger steering power of managers at the public higher institutions and their broader autonomy. Verticalization of relations of power within the universities allowed for more effective engagement in profit generation activities by more easily managing the employed academic labour (Rhoades, 1998). While the theory of academic capitalism offers an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between academic labour and capital, the market-­ oriented perspective and individualising approach of the theory render this task ineffective. Although the theory provides a framework for grasping the academic labour performed both within and at the interface of universities with regard to its potential for value creation, the emphasis on profit-­ seeking actors engaging in various forms of exchange undermines this potential. The authors do not pose questions about the conditions of production, but focus only on the monetisation of results and outputs and on the institutional mechanisms and political and legislative environment needed for the creation of conditions in which these processes will occur smoothly. Attention is focused on the actors, their motivations, and the outcomes of their market-mediated actions, as well as on the conditions hindering or favouring their realisation. Academic capitalism, as described by Slaughter and Leslie (1997) and Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), is free of the focus on antagonistic tensions or conflicts over the conditions of labour, which are ultimately defined as simply being out of the control of academic labour and in the hands of management. The co-occurrence of the two regimes raises a serious problem in the system—the constraint on market and market-like behaviour imposed by the university sector’s inherent attachment to prestige. In both of the

72 

K. SZADKOWSKI

books comprising the foundations of the theory of academic capitalism, the authors referred to universities as ‘prestige maximisers’ (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997, pp. 114, 116), that is, institutions that, whether they operate in the capitalist reality of the market or the past reality of the Keynesian state, have significant preferences once looking for funds. They prefer sources that are able to confirm, maintain or (ideally) enhance their current status—sources that are clearly associated with prestige (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, pp. 2, 185, 196)—even when confronted with a shortage of resources (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997, p. 197). Academic capitalism presupposes, on the one hand, the generation of income from commercial research, patenting or education, and on the other hand, the competition for state funds from numerous grant agencies (e.g. National Science Foundation in the US). However, the activities within these modes of revenue generation differ in terms of prestige they bring. Traditionally, as the authors point out, prestige has been a category linked to the public good knowledge/learning regime, particularly related with the preference for basic research funded by grant agencies (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, p.  194). In this context, although academics have been seen to resist engaging in purely commercial behaviour, preferring to compete for research funds instead (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004, p. 194), the distinction between prestige-driven and commercial academic actions appears to have become increasingly blurred. Slaughter and Rhoades (2004, p. 322) point out that the prestige system is progressively being “defined in academic capitalist terms”, primarily through the increasing hierarchisation of academic institutions based on the level of funds raised. In acknowledging the possibility that the criteria of prestige can be transformed by the academic capitalism regime, they differ significantly from the last strand to be discussed here: exceptionalism in the political economy of higher education.

3.5  Exceptionalism in Political Economy of Higher Education The final conceptualisation of the market and its place in the higher education system emerges within what I define as exceptionalism. It refers to the belief in the uniqueness (either partial or full) of universities and academic systems as compared to other economic organisations. It is the notion that these institutions can resist the corruptive aspects of the pursuit of profit,

3 MARKETS 

73

commercialization, or the organisational forms inherent in capitalist enterprises. That is to say, many scholars and commentators on the economic life of higher education have sought to point to characteristics that will make a university different from a profit-driven organisation. A classic example is Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, who pointed out the incompatibility of the profit motive with the highest academic standards, highlighting the inadequacy of purely economic motives for an academic employment policy (Bok, 2009). Another is Christine Musselin (2006) who offered an elaborated reasoning on how universities differ from ordinary organisations—including companies in the business sector—emphasising first and foremost the functional looseness of the different activities of universities and the unclearness of their underlying technologies. Put differently, she drew attention to the parallelism and independence of the teaching and knowledge production processes within a single organisation, while also highlighting the weak link between delegated tasks and achieved results, thus pointing at the difficulty in measuring and capturing how and what universities produce. It seems that the development of an exceptionalist discourse is not so much aimed at defending universities, but rather at accepting the commercial motive. In other words, by claiming that universities are resilient to negative business behaviour, advocates are attempting to justify current trends and argue that universities, due to their inherent academic values, are capable of engaging in any commercial activities without compromising their integrity. Perhaps this is a most misguided belief that is designed to lull the vigilance of other participants in academic life. The aim of the chapters making up the second part of this book (Chaps. 6, 7 and 8) is to point out how capital instrumentalises those areas which, in the perception of the representatives of exceptionalism, seem to testify to the resilience of universities. These are not the only aspects to which proponents of exceptionalism point. The question of the state and its role in defending universities from the most corrupted forms of capitalist marketisation is also often emphasised. However, I consciously leave that aside in this book, for the reason that I see the state and the market, or rather the state and capital, as two sides of the same coin. Different approaches to exceptionalism can be distinguished. First one assumes that while specific features of universities exist and the government needs to compensate for the resulting “market failures” through its policies and actions, the government can facilitate the deepening of market relations (Jongbloed, 2003). Second, exceptional characteristics of

74 

K. SZADKOWSKI

higher education exist, and therefore the government needs to step out of any attempts to reform higher education based on the market model (Leslie & Johnson, 1974). Third, the exceptional features of higher education and science protect the sector from degeneracy resulting from contact with the capitalist market logic (Bok, 2009; Marginson, 2013). Fourth, specific features of higher education and science exist and they are operationalised to expand the market logic in the sector (Münch, 2014; Reitz, 2017). While the first argumentative line is based on assumptions that could be embraced by neoclassical economics and the second line presents its clear social democratic opposite, the fourth line is one closest to what is proposed in this book, mainly, the understanding of how capital needs to—and actually is—instrumentalising the specific features of science and higher education to establish its rule over the sector and benefit from the production within it. The third approach to exceptionalism is particularly interesting and deserves further discussion. However, it falls short in providing an analytical understanding of how capitalist restructuring is taking place in the sector, and undermines the potential for political actions aimed at changing the status quo. Simon Marginson, after years of analysing and creating theoretical interpretations of the market in higher education, has recently adopted a position of denying the possibility of constituting the capitalist markets in this sector. The strong point of Marginson’s proposal is to go beyond economic determinism and the perception of non-economic factors conditioning the logic of the functioning of the higher education and science sphere. Starting from Braudel’s layered concept of capitalist market economy, in which the reality of everyday life, the market and the capitalist market coexist, Marginson (2004a, b) assumes that the logic of capitalist markets forms only a part of the sector, mainly a relatively small and limited to profit-oriented vocational higher education or international student education. According to him, these types of processes do not determine the general logic or mechanisms of action that guide higher education as a whole, which is instead determined by global competition for status. This fact was highlighted by Marginson (2016) when he tried to answer the question of why the years of implementing the neoliberal model of higher education and science reforms in the New Public Management paradigm failed to bring about the expected results: above all, why they did not lead to the creation of truly capitalist markets in this sector. By a capitalistically structured market, Marginson (2013) understands the

3 MARKETS 

75

simultaneous occurrence of the following factors: (a) clearly defined market-­boundaries and clear entry conditions; (b) regulation of internal relations between actors in accordance with the principle of competition for profit and market share; (c) outputs take the form of commodities; (d) rationality of profit-making governs the production of goods; (e) entities operating within the market act in accordance with the rationality of maximising benefits/profit. Looking at the reality of the sector, Marginson points to the three major constraints for the constitution of capitalist markets in higher education. Two of them are inherent, while the third is external. First, higher education systems generate goods in the form of public or common goods, and the effectiveness of knowledge dissemination depends on its openness. Secondly, the behaviour of actors in science and higher education is primarily determined by competition for status and prestige. Thirdly, most national systems are regulated by a state whose representatives employ non-economic goals (fostering the needs of the middle class, competition in a technology-military race, etc.), therefore they have no interest in undermining their own control over the sector by the market rule. All this leads Marginson to state that it is impossible to fully implement capitalist market relations on the scale of the whole system. It is a fact that without understanding the autonomic logic of the academic field, it would be difficult to capture the mechanisms responsible for the formation of actors’ activities and orientation in the field of higher education. However, in his proposal, the sphere of labour and production disappears, as does the experience—even if neoliberal reforms have been implemented only partially—of the negative effects of accelerating academic labour or exacerbating individual competition between university employees. Due to the fact that the system is not being reshaped fully according to the ideal (implementation of the capitalist markets), Marginson decides to ignore all elements (and their consequences) of the capitalist functioning of the sector.

3.6  Conclusion All the theoretical perspectives discussed in this chapter focus on the relations of exchange and the question of the market as its medium. Just as, for Toutkoushian and Paulsen, the naturalised market is simply the mechanism that regulates social life in all its manifestations, for both the theorists of academic capitalism and the exceptionalists discussed here, the market

76 

K. SZADKOWSKI

simply becomes the essential key to understanding all economic relations in higher education, or, by negation—being, as it were, a non-market— everything deviating from it. Marginson offers a broad, culturalist conception of markets in higher education. From the very beginning of his analyses of the phenomenon, Marginson follows Braudel in emphasising their historicity, their rootedness and the contextuality of their functioning, which allows for partial denaturalisation of the neoclassical proposals, as well as offering a critical stance. However, still using an analytical perspective that focuses on decision-making individuals and institutions to interpret the economic reality of higher education, he limits the political potential of his approach. The extreme form that this kind of logic takes is, of course, in the neoclassical approach; however, the theory of academic capitalism is also not free from such limitations. An important problem with the theories discussed above is the almost complete disregard of the question of capitalist production taking place within higher education. This involves both a reductive framing of academic labour as a resource in the calculation of the academic institution (Toutkoushian & Paulsen, 2016) or as either a subject of market activity (at best) or a managed academic exposed to extended managerial capacity (at worst) (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Also, the ability to define functioning capital (in all its factions) operating in the higher education environment is limited in all approaches by focusing almost exclusively on the internal dynamics of higher education, and even more narrowly, on single institutions or individual academics. In this respect, the potential for analysis is left open by the theory of academic capitalism, although it appears limited. The problem with Marginson’s approach, however, goes deeper. It ignores all the issues related to the capitalist aspects of the functioning of today’s higher education systems, including, in particular, capitalist production taking place within its framework (Hall, 2018, pp. 99–100). What is instructive is how Marginson argues against Marxist interpretations of contemporary changes in higher education, such as when he warns against losing sight of the specificity of the sector for which one is developing a critique (2016, pp. 176–177). In this context, Marginson denounces “the assumption that higher education is, in essence, a variant of the old base-­ superstructure model bequeathed by Engels” (2016, p.  176), which is allegedly widespread among Marxist theorists. Such an imaginary and easy-to-tackle opponent resembles a representative of some economic

3 MARKETS 

77

reductionism or even a Stalinist vulgar dialectic materialist, whose only tool of analysis is the base and superstructure model, in which higher education and science fall into either one extreme (university-factory) or the other (state ideological apparatus). It is true that in this way the uniqueness of academic labour and its products would be subject to far-reaching blurring. The Marxist approach can offer a much more complex analysis than this. The biggest problem with Marginson’s reading is his lack of an understanding of the precise mechanism by which capital subsumes academic labour at the level of entire higher education systems, using for this purpose, for example, mechanisms of competition for prestige. In this respect, the much less subtle, neoclassical proposal of Toutkoushian and Paulsen (2016) inherently treats the logic of the struggle for prestige as a resource and as a process entirely subject to the logic of the market and the logic of rational choices. Although in this case it is a consequence of economic reductionism, more than an understanding of the capitalist transformations of the mechanisms essential to the academy. Within this theoretical framework, these processes are conceivable (moreover, even desirable). The same is true of the theory of academic capitalism (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), whose representatives are torn between believing in the autonomy of the academic field and the prestige-­ distributing mechanisms intrinsic to it, and the acceptance of the possibility of gradual transformation of this logic in result of the spread of the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime. In this chapter, I have addressed the discussion of the market as a conceptual tool for understanding capitalist transitions and transformations in the higher education sector. This is not an innocuous concept. On the one hand, we have seen that it is easy for HER to be penetrated by neoclassical economics and that even concepts critical of marketisation share its conceptual horizon. On the other hand, we have seen that the postulates of the sector’s resilience to capitalist transformations—so-called, exceptionalism, which on the basis of the specific characteristics of higher education and science tries to propose the non-penetrability of the sector by capital—aims not so much to safeguard it against negative changes, but rather to defend the existence of undisturbed commercial processes. If the processes of capital’s self-valorisation are not capable of penetrating to the core of what is considered an academic enterprise and if a certain autonomous operation is permitted, then it can be allowed to function peacefully. I see these kinds of positions as hindering not only the development of an

78 

K. SZADKOWSKI

analytical perspective on the sector, but also closing off the political possibility for transforming it. In the upcoming chapters of this book, I will be recursively referring to the arguments highlighted in this chapter. But now we can slowly step into capital’s hidden abode of production in higher education.

References Becker, W.  E., & Toutkoushian, R.  K. (2013). On the Meaning of Markets in Higher Education. In M. Paulsen (Ed.), Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research (Vol. 28, pp. 323–376). Springer. Berman, E.  P. (2012). Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Princeton University Press. Bok, D. (2009). Universities in the Marketplace. Princeton University Press. Cantwell, B., & Kauppinen, I. (Eds.). (2014). Academic capitalism in the age of globalization. Baltimore: JHU Press. Clark, B.  R. (1983). The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. University of California Press. Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2014). The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Verso Books. Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2019). Never Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy. Verso Books. Dill, D. D. (1997a). Higher Education Markets: Introduction. Higher Education Policy, 10(3–4), 163–166. Dill, D.  D. (1997b). Higher Education Markets and Public Policy. Higher Education Policy, 10(3–4), 167–185. Dill, D. D. (2003). Allowing the market to rule: The case of the United States. Higher Education Quarterly, 57(2), 136–157. Enders, J., Kehm, B.  M., & Schimank, U. (2014). Turning Universities into Actors on Quasi-Markets: How New Public Management Reforms Affect Academic Research. In D.  Jansen & I.  Pruisken (Eds.), The Changing Governance of Higher Education and Research: Multilevel Perspectives (pp. 89–103). Springer International Publishing. Federici, S., Caffentzis, C. G., & Alidou, O. (Eds.). (2000). A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. Africa World Press. Fine, B. (2000). Economics Imperialism and Intellectual Progress: The Present as History of Economic Thought? History of Economics Review, 32(1), 10–35. Fine, B. (2016). Microeconomics: A Critical Companion. Pluto Press. Fine, B., & Milonakis, D. (2009). From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences. Routledge.

3 MARKETS 

79

Hall, R. (2018). The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University. Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Belknap Press. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Jongbloed, B. (2003). Marketisation in Higher Education, Clark’s Triangle and the Essential Ingredients of Markets. Higher Education Quarterly, 57(2), 110–135. Jungblut, J., & Vukasovic, M. (2018). Not All Markets Are Created Equal: Re-conceptualizing Market Elements in Higher Education. Higher Education, 75(1), 855–870. Keen, S. (2011). Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? Zed Books Ltd. Komljenovic, J. (2019). Making Higher Education Markets: Trust-Building Strategies of Private Companies to Enter the Public Sector. Higher Education, 78(1), 51–66. Komljenovic, J., & Robertson, S. L. (2016). The Dynamics of ‘Market-Making’ in Higher Education. Journal of Education Policy, 31(5), 622–636. Komljenovic, J., & Robertson, S. L. (2017). Making Global Education Markets and Trade. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 15(3), 289–295. Lazear, E. (2000). Economic Imperialism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(1), 99–146. Leher, R., & Accioly, I. (Eds.). (2016). Commodifying Education: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Financialization of Education Policies in Brazil. Sense Publishers. Leslie, L., & Johnson, G. (1974). The Market Model and Higher Education. The Journal of Higher Education, 45(1), 1–20. Marginson, S. (1997). Markets in Education. Allen & Unwin. Marginson, S. (2004a). A Revised Marxist Political Economy of National Education Markets. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3–4), 439–453. Marginson, S. (2004b). Competition and Markets in Higher Education: A ‘Glonacal’ Analysis. Policy Futures in Education, 2(2), 175–244. Marginson, S. (2013). The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education. Journal of Education Policy, 28(3), 353–370. Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and the Common Good. MUP Academic. Marginson, S., & Considine, M. (2000). The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge University Press. McGettigan, A. (2013). The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. Pluto Press. McLaughlin, K., Osborne, S. P., Ferlie, E., & Osborne, S. (Eds.). (2002). New Public Management: Current Trends and Future Prospects. Routledge. McMahon, W. J. (2009). Higher Learning, Greater Good: The Private and Social Benefits of Higher Education. John Hopkins University Press.

80 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Milonakis, D., & Fine, B. (2009). From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory. Routledge. Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso Books. Münch, R. (2014). Academic Capitalism. Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. Routledge. Musselin, C. (2006). Are Universities Specific Organisations? In G.  Krücken, A. Kosmützky, & M. Torka (Eds.), Towards a Multiversity? Universities Between Global Trends and National Traditions (pp. 63–84). Transcript Verla. Reitz, T. (2017). Academic Hierarchies in Neo-feudal Capitalism: How Status Competition Processes Trust and Facilitates the Appropriation of Knowledge. Higher Education, 73, 871–886. Rhoades, G. (1998). Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor. SUNY Press. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Temple University Press. Samuelson, P. A. (1954). The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 36(4), 387–389. Slantcheva, S., & Levy, D. (Eds.). (2007). Private Higher Education in Post-­ communist Europe: In Search of Legitimacy. Palgrave Macmillan. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S., & Taylor, B. J. (Eds.). (2015). Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development: Competitive Advantage in Europe, the US, and Canada. Springer. Teixeira, P., Jongbloed, B. B., Dill, D. D., & Amaral, A. (Eds.). (2006). Markets in Higher Education: Rhetoric or Reality? Springer. Toutkoushian, R.  K., & Paulsen, M.  B. (2016). Economics of Higher Education. Springer.

CHAPTER 4

Capital

4.1   Introduction In the preceding chapter, we examined the inadequacies of market-­ oriented approaches for explaining capitalist transformation in the higher education sector. Not only did researchers developing such analyses emphasise the inapplicability of neoclassical economics, but they also formulated a number of caveats about the possibility of developing capitalist relations sensu stricto in the sector. What interests us in particular is the proclamation of the incompatibility of the reality of higher education with capitalist markets. I have referred to this position as exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is the view which assumes that, as a consequence of the unique configuration of relations and motivations within the sector, as well as the goals attributed to the sector by internal and external stakeholders, it does not fully submit to capitalist transformation or to the establishment of capitalist market relations. As I have pointed out, one of the dangers of such a positioning is the tacit acquiescence to the progressive subordination of the sector to capital. Emphasising exceptionality that seemingly protects universities from the most severe effects of capitalist transformation extends the acceptance of the presence of capitalist actors in the higher education setting. This chapter attempts to conceptualise the ways in which capital (in the Marxian sense) can manifest in global higher education—not only in private and profit-driven institutions, but also more broadly in public institutions that depend on state support and are © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_4

81

82 

K. SZADKOWSKI

not formally interested in seeking profit. If, in the work of exceptionalists, the field of higher education is characterised by a particular resistance to capitalist transformation, Marxist theorists do not make our task of considering this sector as a sector of capitalist production any easier. By treating science and higher education primarily as an unproductive sector, they have given it far too little attention. It should be noted that the contemporary Marxist position on this subject has been impacted by Marx’s scant attention to it. Within the body of his works, one will not find many references to the sphere of education nor an analysis of its reproductive role in the smooth functioning of the capitalist system as a whole. This work does not even attempt to criticise its mode of organisation. The author of Das Kapital was usually satisfied with short references to the ideas of Robert Owen on the integration of education with the process of factory work, invoking a vision of education that is similar to the current model of vocational training (Anyon, 2011). There is no detailed discussion of the institution of the university, higher education, or academic research in Marx’s work either. The Results of the Direct Production Process does include a mention of scientists employed by capitalists in private institutions, but the very specific nature of capitalist organisation and transformation of these practices lay entirely outside of Marx’s interest. Many times, however, Marx did point out the crucial role of science and technology for capitalist development. He emphasised the fact that the capitalist view treats the achievements of human civilization, knowledge, and science as a “gift of nature” (Marx, 1982, p. 508) or a kind of external “commons” that could be easily enclosed. The capitalist view appropriates overall social creations of the human mind, harnessing them in its own development, or in other words, transposing social forces (including research) into capital power, thus mystifying these social relations. Ultimately, however, Marx limited himself to an inspiring, but somewhat enigmatic expression, that with the entry of the capitalist industrial production into the phase of real subsumption of labour under capital, science becomes a direct productive force (Marx, 1973). However, he had not drawn out the consequences of the fact that the increased relevance of science to the development of capital must be associated with the acceleration of the processes within the field of inventions, and therefore also with the gradual stretching of the capitalist domination into this very sphere, tearing off the nimbus of holiness, and eventually organising it in the most favourable way for the endless accumulation for accumulation’s

4 CAPITAL 

83

sake. Marx overlooks the fact that within this sphere, capital could successfully install its own valorisation processes. Yet, Marx’s particular lack of interest in this issue is hardly surprising. As he noted soberly in his sketches from 1864, known today as the Theories of Surplus Value, autonomous processes of immaterial production accounted only for a fraction of the entire capitalist economy of his time and could be ignored without any serious consequences for his main theoretical project (Marx, 2000, p. 411). Nonetheless it is impossible to accuse him of any prejudices regarding the immaterial forms of labour itself. It is a matter which should be particularly emphasised, because one of the obstacles that has hindered the development of the Marxist analysis of contemporary transformation of the higher education sector up to this point was the deeply held belief in the unproductive nature of labour within the sphere of education and the production of knowledge. However, the functionality of the sphere of higher education and scientific research in relation to the development of capitalist production is not my main interest here. Rather the focus of the analysis is on capitalist production and the organisation of higher education and research. Capital is a totality striving to enclose and subsume the whole of social and biological life under its self-expanding movement. It is, as Harvey (2013) would put it, an organic unity of production, exchange, distribution and consumption. Therefore, within the totality, it is possible to distinguish practically and analytically different moments of capital general movement, allowing us to trace its specificity, genesis, mutations and successive transformations. This also has its political application. Analytical perspectives focusing on the unity and totality of capital very often capitulate before its power, seeing it as an implacable force mastering the totality of social life, from which—as long as it does not collapse under the pressure of its own internal contradictions, does not explode under its own weight—there is no way out and no alternative. I associate this kind of perspective with forgetting alternative forms of life—in the past and in parallel. Forgetting the historicity of capital as a social relation. Forgetting the fact that capital began, coagulated, and came into existence, at a particular moment in history, and therefore it seems equally natural to expect its end. Rather, these perspectives seem to be the consequence, or even the reverse, of the narrative of capitalist apologists who try to convince us that there is no alternative. Without denying the analytical power of theories that focus on the totality of capital, I will place the emphasis on understanding the moments

84 

K. SZADKOWSKI

within this totality. As Marx did in Das Kapital Volume Two and Volume Three in turn, I will try to move from a logical analysis of capital as a social relation, to the industrial cycle of capital in higher education, its moments, and the historical conditions of their emergence in the sector. The purpose of this analytical exercise is quite explicit. In the existing Marxist literature on higher education, we have too little space devoted to the various figures of capital operating and influencing the conditions under which academic labour is performed (Leher & Accioly, 2016; Leher & Costa, 2023; Hall, 2014; Szadkowski, 2016). Instead, too many works focus on the general capitalist relationship in which higher education is integrated (Neary, 2020; Winn, 2015; Arboledas-Lerida, 2021, 2023). I believe that this kind of analysis does not do justice to the specificity of the sector. While it raises important themes and issues, in particular highlighting the unity of labour and thus including academic labour in the ranks of all workers fighting against the domination of capital, it fails to see where and how capital establishes its relationship, and thus does little to help us in terms of understanding how to break it.

4.2   Marx and Capital in Das Kapital Capital is not a thing, but a commodity-mediated social relationship. This is the first aspect of how to understand capital. The second is its dynamic— movement-based—essence. Capital is a value in motion (Harvey, 2017). When it does not move, it stagnates, stands on the brink of collapse, and falls into crisis. For this reason, the difficult task, both for Marx and for current researchers who want to trace capital in a new area, is to capture the laws of movement of capital, given that its social and dynamic nature hardly lends itself to linear representations. Marx tried to solve this problem by proposing, in three successive volumes of Das Kapital, different points of view from which to consider the way in which surplus value is created, realised, captured and absorbed within the movement of capital. If capital is value in motion, passing through different moments, a spiral constant expansion (Harvey, 2017), then each of the volumes provides, as it were, a window through which we can look at its seemingly infinite movement (Harvey, 2010). To present my understanding of capital in higher education, it is necessary, at least in general terms, to follow Marx through his three different modes of presentation. At the same time, it is necessary to be aware that the dynamics of capital portrayed in this way, owing to the specificities of higher education, will require us to go beyond it.

4 CAPITAL 

85

In Das Kapital Volume One, Marx presents a perspective on this totality of the movement of capital from the point of view of the process of value production. He focuses on the moment and the conditions of its creation in the “hidden abode of production”, going against the classical political economists who see its origins primarily in the market exchange. The valorisation of capital is impossible without the employment of workers and, more specifically, without the purchase of a unique commodity— their labour power—the only commodity that, when consumed, contributes more to the process than its possessor receives in return. However, this is a partial perspective. The value created will not become the surplus value of the capitalist if it is not realised through exchange— that is, if the goods created do not find their buyers. In view of this, Das Kapital Volume Two presents the process of the circulation of capital, that is, what happens to capital when it enters the sphere of exchange—the market. Marx looks at how the commodity created in production is transformed into money—how the value produced is realised in the course of exchange. Also in this volume, Marx proposes a breakdown of capital into three distinct movements of circulation: production, commodity, and money. Within these, capital starts at different points to return to them after successfully passing through each cycle. The entire movement of capital through the three successive forms is referred to by Marx as the cycle of “industrial capital”—that is, not so much one that deals with the production of material commodities in the factory, but one that encompasses all the moments of capital’s metamorphoses. It deals with both the organisation of money for the purchase of labour power and the means of production, engages in the process of organising production, and finally deals with the sale of manufactured goods on the market. Volume Two, too, provides only a partial perspective. The viewpoint of Volume Three is distribution. It looks at how the surplus value created in production is distributed between certain factions of capital, including merchant and financial, as well as among landowners or banks. In other words, Marx asks what function in the totality of capitalist relations of production is played by the factions of capital other than industrial capital, and under what conditions and why industrial capital agrees to transfer the lion’s share of the surplus produced. With this general overview, we can move on to see how these perspectives can be used to track the movement of capital in higher education.

86 

K. SZADKOWSKI

4.3  Process of Production of Capital in Higher Education In Das Kapital Volume One, Marx formulates the general formula of capital: M-C-M′. Capital begins its day with a specific financial resource— money (M)—which it wants to multiply. On the assumption that equality reigns on the market and goods are sold according to their value, Marx is convinced that money cannot be multiplied merely by engaging in successive acts of exchange. His object of interest, therefore, is the sphere of production in which this mysterious transformation takes place. Capital, by purchasing (C) (i.e., labour power and the means of production) is concerned with the organisation of production in order to obtain a surplus (M′). This entire Volume is devoted to the strategies used by capital to increase the level of surplus value extracted through prolonging the working day (absolute surplus value), and/or use of technology (relative surplus value). Valorisation of capital in production takes place in higher education globally through buying academic labour power and the means of production and through selling educational commodities on the market. However, it is formally restricted in many countries where it is not legally possible for an academic institution to obtain for-profit status. However, private for-profit formal institutions are widely condoned—formal status alone is often no barrier to aggressively profiteering from educating the poorest (Gupta, 2022a). Regardless, a formula in which an institution of higher learning is organised to valorise capital—such as by hiring staff (usually on precarious terms) and injecting technology to increase the efficiency and scale of education—is not an exotic situation in the global context. I will come to this in a moment. It is different in the case of activities performed to produce knowledge and technological innovation, which are an important aspect of the functioning of universities. While it is true that even in Marx’s time it was conceivable to have private institutes and laboratories engaged in research to support the technological development of industry (Gorz, 2010), and that in the twentieth century the Bell Laboratories were responsible for important results in basic research, nowadays a greater proportion of innovation-related work is taken on by the state, owing to the significant risks and high costs of both the necessary means of production and qualified academic labour (Mazzucato, 2013). Capital tends to avoid taking risks and often refrains from entering production in areas characterised by

4 CAPITAL 

87

long and uncertain production processes. Also, the issue of hiring academic authors to create marketable and distributable goods (articles and books) now mostly bypasses the hiring or contracting of paid academic labour. We will further discuss this issue in Chap. 8. But is it really the case, as some exceptionalists claim, that a layer of profit-oriented institutions represents only a fringe of the global sector? The facts seem to contradict this. Although there are dozens of universities in the US at the top of the global university rankings hierarchies— institutions that put up a huge financial firewall to protect them from the influx of poor student populations—a significant part of the system is made up of institutions that are both formally and actually for-profit and which are dedicated to educating (often only formally) huge numbers of students. Douglass (2012) pointed to the operation of a number of corporations with enrolments of over 50,000 students, including the largest player in the market at the time, Apollo Group (owner of The Phoenix University), which at the time was educating close to 400,000 students, having revenues of about $4 billion and profits at the level of $598 million. By massively taking advantage of online education (Noble, 2001; Ovetz, 2021), these institutions are carrying out what researchers call ‘predatory inclusion’, preying on the desire for education by only formally including students in the higher education system—with negative consequences not only for outcomes, but also for the ability to repay loans taken out for education (Smith et al., 2023). India, one of the largest higher education systems in the world, has experienced a similarly negative expansion of private higher education institutions. Approximately 78 per cent of higher education institutions in India are privately managed, and they account for about 66 per cent of the total number of enrolled students in the country (Gupta, 2022a). As Gupta (2022b) points out, formal non-profit status means little when the institutions are in fact run by aggressive, profit-seeking, often foreign, corporations that aim to expand the process based on cheap academic labour and target the poorest students with high dropout rates through a paid system of recruitment agents. The situation is similar in Brazil, where the operation of the private for-­ profit education sector has been sanctioned by law in recent years (Leher & Accioly, 2016; Douglass, 2012). As a result, “private higher education is increasingly monopolised by the operation of so-called investment funds” (Silva & Tavares, 2016, p. 83), which buy up institutions to turn them into profitable ventures (similar to the trend in the US, see Eaton,

88 

K. SZADKOWSKI

2022), with the profits mostly going abroad. As Leher and Costa (2023) have convincingly shown, there is no doubt about the dominance of private and, in large numbers, for-profit higher education institutions in Brazil. There are 2153 private institutions, making up 87.6% of the total number of institutions in the Brazilian system and accounting for 77.5% of undergraduate enrolments, which in 2020 amounted to approximately 3.26 million students enrolled in undergraduate courses (Leher & Costa, 2023). There are many more examples. Actual private for-profit higher education is primarily the domain of peripheral countries, as well as a means of providing access for the poorest—often burdened by debt—to higher education in the central countries and their systems (Eaton, 2022). Its exponential growth is supported by financial capital because it depends primarily on the involvement of low-paid precarious academic labour, as well as on having recently undergone efficient technological modification (lecture recording, online learning). In addition, however, it represents a profitable investment. Meanwhile, from the side of the users, who pay tuition fees to access these institutions, the role of financial capital lending to education is not insignificant. It therefore amounts to arrogance to deny the important role in the overall dynamics of higher education subsumed under capital and profit-oriented education—an act which can only be committed by those occupying a privileged place in the global division of academic labour.

4.4   Metamorphoses of Capital and Its Circuits in Higher Education Capital is the unity of the process of production and the realisation of value, that is, the unity of production and circulation. It is not enough to produce commodities using labour power; it is still necessary to find buyers for these commodities on the market. In Das Kapital Volume Two, Marx begins his discussion by developing the general scheme of capital into a figure of circular motion of money capital taking the following general form: M – C … P … C′ – M′. In order to self-valorise, capital is forced first to purchase certain commodities (C), then to go through the production process (P) to create more commodities (C′), all in order to sell them on the market at a profit (M′). Marx, in discussing this circuit, points out that in the case of productive capital (the focus of Volume One), the

4 CAPITAL 

89

starting point is production (P) and the need to expand it; however, each of the other elements (C) and (M) can similarly be the starting point for other kinds of circuits (commodity and money, respectively). As he writes: If we take all three forms together, then all the premises of the process appear as its result, as premises produced by the process itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, of transit, and of return. The total process presents itself as the unity of the process of production and the process of circulation; the production process is the mediator of the circulation process, and vice versa. (Marx, 1992, p. 180)

Capital as a whole is precisely this mutual mediation of the processes of production and circulation. It is the movement within which successive metamorphoses take place: solidification into commodity, combustion in production or liquefaction into money. In between the processes of metamorphosis into each successive form, capital exposes itself to risk and crisis of rupture (Marx, 1992; Bell & Cleaver, 2002; Harvey, 2013, 2017, p. 74). Its success depends on the smooth ability to pass through successive phases, as well as the constant extension of this movement. Marx refers to the entire cycle, composed of the three identified circular movements of capital, as the cycle of “industrial capital”. Can we speak of the occurrence of a similar cycle in the case of higher education? From the point of view of the private for-profit higher education that we described in the previous section, the matter seems simple. The owners organising the higher education institutions in question—be they private individuals/groups or legal entities at the service of finance capital—operate within the full cycle of industrial capital, taking their capital through all the metamorphoses specified: raising finance, organising production and, finally, realising the created surplus value of their goods on the educational markets. The issue seems devoid of controversy. The problem looks different when we enter the public sector, however. This is especially true if the institution does not charge for education even in the form of modest and state-regulated tuition fees. In this case, both the source of the money raised for the purchase of labour and the means of production is the state budget or, in some cases, the financial markets where the necessary loans are raised. The work process itself is organised by the university, disregarding the principles of management and the squeezing out of surplus value. Moreover, the results of the teaching process are not necessarily sold on the market. From the point of view of

90 

K. SZADKOWSKI

educational processes in purely public institutions, Marxian schemes seem to have no application. The problem, however, is that fewer and fewer higher education systems are completely free of tuition fees. Secondly, the governance mechanisms of public universities increasingly use toolkits taken from market organisations. Finally, the teaching process is not the only aspect in which universities are engaged. In other areas—such as knowledge production or innovation—their outputs take the form of commodities and enter circulation. This is the case even for purely public universities. This process opens up them to the general cycle of industrial capital, which is already commodified by other factions of capital not engaged directly in organising production. The connection of knowledge-­ based products to the global market exchange makes it possible for us to consider their participation in the industrial capital cycle in a certain context and at the same time to reflect on its effects. The phenomenon itself, in Das Kapital Volume Two, was also anticipated by Marx, who wrote extensively about the fact that, from the viewpoint of the circulation of industrial capital, the origin of the goods put into circulation is irrelevant. It is worth quoting his words in extenso. Within its circulation process, in which industrial capital functions either as money or as commodity, the circuit of industrial capital, whether in the form of money capital or commodity capital, cuts across the commodity circulation of the most varied modes of social production, in so far as this commodity circulation simultaneously reflects commodity production. Whether the commodities are the product of production based on slavery, the product of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of a community (Dutch East Indies), of state production (such as existed in earlier epochs of Russian history, based on serfdom) or of half-savage hunting peoples, etc. – as commodities and money they confront the money and commodities in which industrial capital presents itself, and enter both into the latter’s own circuit and into that of the surplus-value borne by the commodity capital, in so far as the latter is spent as revenue; i.e. in both branches of the circulation of commodity capital. The character of the production process from which they derive is immaterial; they function on the market as commodities, and as commodities they enter both the circuit of industrial capital and the circulation of the surplus value borne by it. (Marx, 1992, pp. 189–190)

No matter the character of the production process, commodities become part of the circuit of industrial capital as they enter branches of circulation of commodity-capital. As long as higher education produces outputs in

4 CAPITAL 

91

commodified form, it gets woven into the circuit of industrial capital. Marx allows us to see the importance of the world market and forms of capital other than productive capital in completing the process of capitalist transformation of the sectors concerned—regardless of their formal nature or the way in which their production is organised. In this way, he introduces elements of historical argumentation into his broader logical argument, which we will come to later in this chapter. For example, he questions the genesis of developed capitalist production, a question that has troubled many Marxists after him, and which also has its function and importance in our view.

4.5  Capital’s Factions and Capture of Surplus Value in Higher Education Das Kapital Volume Three provides us with a view of capital as a whole. In it, Marx primarily addresses the question of how the surplus value created and realised in circulation accrues to specific capitalists competing in the market. Moreover, he also outlines the specific figures of capital—the factions, including the merchant or financial factions—that are in constant conflict with each other for a share in the surplus from production, whether in the form of profit from trade, interest or rents from property rights. When we turn to the analyses in Volume Three, the productive capitalist no longer appears to us as a privileged figure, for we see that, in the capitalist system seen as a whole, he only gets to share in the surplus value to which the other factions do not claim their right. Already in Volume Two Marx pointed out that the separate circuits of capital having as their starting point both money and commodity only manifest themselves as autonomous capital; in fact, they do not have their objectivity outside the totality of the industrial cycle of capital. In the Volume Three we see what happens on the surface of capitalist society, where appearances take on the material shell of real agents—merchants and bankers who organise their activities to capture as much as possible of the value produced by labour (no matter how this labour is organised). Financial capital offers money as a commodity to productive capital in exchange for a percentage of the amount lent. In this way, it enables not only the continuous expansion and acceleration of production, but also secures “the equalisation of the rate of profit, extracting funds from those working in low profit sectors of the economy and redirecting them to

92 

K. SZADKOWSKI

wherever the rate of profit is higher” (Harvey, 2017, p.  40). In other words, financial capital makes it possible to unlock the potential problems of continuously running expanded production. In contrast, merchant capital operates within the sphere of realisation. It appropriates part of the value, through offering its services to producers, allowing the realisation of value in a more efficient and faster way, therefore sharing part of the risk of unsold commodities with the productive capital. In higher education, including public education, we can consider the actions of the merchant and financial faction of capital as intercepting the surplus value redirected to the sector by the state. Even if one agrees that public higher education does not produce surplus value for capital, we can assume that active merchant and financial capital, permeating the activities of higher education institutions at various levels, intercept the surplus value delegated to the sector by the state, previously taken away from capital in the form of taxes. Such an account does not do justice to the role in production of these factions or the productive character of labour producing for them, which we will discuss in later chapters of this book. It rather presents them as forces that support the development of capitalistically organised higher education, accelerating its cycle and operations, and having a dissolving effect on the way they operate. The global presence of these two factions of capital in higher education is clearly felt. Recently, Charlie Eaton (2022) has provided a penetrating analysis of the role of the financial sector in US higher education (a similar one was previously done by Andrew McGettigan (2013) for the UK). Eaton’s primary focus is on understanding the importance that the development of financialisation of the higher education system in the US contributes to the exacerbation of powerful inequalities by distributing student debt for education to the most vulnerable parts of US society. Nonetheless, the framework he provides elucidates the ways in which financial capital manifests itself in higher education. Financial capital is a form of mediation of activities and relationships in the system—it permeates the deepest aspects of the system and consequently spreads the logic of efficiency and profit maximisation. This kind of capital is involved in both federal student loan servicing (e.g. Sallie Mae), as well as the investment service of university endowment funds (e.g. Fidelty) or, finally, the purchase of private and for-profit colleges (e.g. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, The Blackstone Inc.) (Eaton, 2022). The high degree of concentration of financial capital in the sector, as well as the

4 CAPITAL 

93

enormous scale of the prevalence of financial intermediation, only serves to deepen the relationship of dependency of higher education. According to the report published by the Federal Reserve in 2019, more than 44 million Americans have accumulated about $1.46 trillion in student debt (FRBNY, 2019). This makes it the second-largest consumer debt sector in the US, after the mortgages. The amount of student loans acquired by US citizens is the only one that kept growing after the recent recession of 2008, reaching almost 157 percent in cumulative growth over the 11 years (Griffin, 2018). The report published by the Brookings Institute suggests that by 2023, it is likely that about 40% of debtors may default on their student loans, resulting in over $560 billion of debt remaining unpaid (Scott-Clayton, 2018). It looks even more serious when we note that the student loan is the only form of consumer credit in the US that cannot be an object of consumer bankruptcy. The “student loan crisis”, as it has been called, brings serious consequences for higher education and the economy at large. This form of debt contributes to situation where pedagogical experience not only naturalises higher education as a consumer service but also limits the horizon of potential career choices of students (Williams, 2009). Moreover, given that in 2016–2017, the average borrower left college with $37,172 in loans (Mitchell, 2016), this undermines the future capacity of graduates to either start a family or buy a house, contributing to a general economic slowdown in some sectors of the economy (Bleemer et al., 2017). The student debt crisis seems to stem from the general financialization trend that prevails in the US higher education, a crisis that has a critical impact on the sector, as well as on the social and economic fabric in which it is embedded. The partial debt forgiveness announced by the Biden administration will do little to change the situation as long as fees remain in place. Merchant capital in higher education is primarily concerned with the sale of the products of academic labour, to which it itself simultaneously gives commodity form. This seems to be the most problematic element in the relationship between the sector and the merchant capital faction. In the case of the profit-oriented private sector referred to in the context of productive capital, operatives of merchant capital are all sorts of commercial agents representing institutions in various settings (e.g. in other countries when students are interested in undertaking paid study abroad) that help to sell commodified education. In the case of purely public higher education the relationship with merchant capital is largely limited to that concentrated in oligopoly of academic capitalist publishers. Companies

94 

K. SZADKOWSKI

such as Wiley, MDPI, Springer Nature, and Elsevier control a substantial share of the academic publishing market and form a seemingly indelible part of regular practices of scholarly communication, particularly given their dominant presence in journal indexing databases such as Scopus or Web of Science (Larivière et  al., 2015). However, the relationship that they form with academic labour is specific from the point of view of political economy. Firstly, academic labour employed at public (and private) universities does not typically transfer its outputs as commodities to publishers; it is only in some cases that these outputs are transformed into commodities and sold on the market. Secondly, the commodities are often sold to the same universities that are home to the academic labour that initially produced them, meaning that these universities are the main consumers of their own creations and they pay substantial subscriptions to access them. Third, academic labour steadily continues to deliver the results of its work to very specific publishing channels to disseminate the results of its research, despite the availability of alternative, often non-­ commercial journals. In this way, merchant capital mediates the crucial process of disseminating the research outputs of academic labour concentrated in public universities, appropriating the surplus value transferred to produce these outputs by the state. In the chapters that follow, we will seek to understand the conditions that allow this process to reproduce and expand. However, before we go any further, it is worth concluding our discussion of capital in higher education and clarifying the perspective adopted in this book on the role of merchant capital in the transformation of higher education into a capitalist sector of production.

4.6  Conclusion In this chapter we started from the observation that Marx devoted relatively little space to the sphere of the capitalist organisation of higher education and science. This omission, together with the exceptionalist assumption of the impossibility of installing capitalist relations in higher education, accompanied by the fairly common Marxist belief in the unproductive nature of the labour performed in public universities, provided the impetus to rethink the possible conceptualisation of capitalist relations in this sector. Working through the three perspectives on capital offered by the successive volumes of Das Kapital, I have tried to look at the ways in which capital can manifest itself in higher education. From the point of

4 CAPITAL 

95

view of capital located in production, global higher education can be divided into capital-subordinated peripheries (as well as peripheries within central systems), i.e. systems in which an extensive for-profit sector is present, and those based more on a state-supported public sector, where direct relations between capital and labour in production do not take place within the institution (except for specific, profit-oriented fragments). Nevertheless, we have been able to understand the openness of production systems to different circuits of capital—regardless of the nature of their internal organisation—by analysing Marx’s reflections on the cycle of industrial capital and the questions of circulation and realisation of value contained in Das Kapital Volume Two. Finally, in the previous section, we looked at the factions of capital—merchant and financial—which not only constantly accelerate the cycle of production and circulation, but which also capture the surplus value directed by the state to the public sector. But regardless of whether the institutions are public or private, openly for-­ profit or formally non-profit, how do we understand the relationships in higher education systems? An answer may be found in a consideration of the historical function of merchant capital in the transition to capitalist relations. Using his method of abstraction, Marx analysed merchant capital only in its narrow function, in which it was responsible for the sale and purchase of goods created under capital in production. This was the place it occupied in his theoretical framework. As Jairus Banaji (2021, p. 5) points out, “buying in order to sell is commercial capital’s ‘true function’ because the merchant’s role is to act as a circulating agent of industrial capital”. However, Marx was fully aware of its historical functions and the fact that in many places merchant capital took control of or dominated production (Banaji 2021). For Marx, a merchant capitalist is a specific kind of capitalist, however, as Banaji (2021) points out, in Das Kapital Volume Three, it clearly does not acquire the capacity to exercise the function of subordinating labour under its rule. Merchant capital remains in a relaxed relation with labour, granting it a limited degree of autonomy—certainly autonomy in terms of organisational patterns of production. In the Grundrisse we find a pictorial passage illuminating the essence of this loose relationship: “Here, then, the mode of production is not yet determined by capital, but rather found on hand by it” (Marx, 1973, p. 586). As Carlo Vercellone (2007) observes, capital, in its historical development, seeks ways to decouple from the need to mediate its cycle of valorisation through the sphere of production.

96 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Entering into the necessity of organising a large-scale production process, investing in fixed capital or, even more so, entering into a state-regulated relationship with labour, all delay the processes of circulation and realisation. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is increasing discussion on the contemporary return of merchant capital (van der Linden & Brenan, 2020; Lichtenstein, 2012; Harvey, 2010), about which Marx wrote in Das Kapital Volume Three that it “can withdraw masses of capital from one industry with extraordinary rapidity and redeploy it just as rapidly in another” (1998, p. 205). This is because it is characterised by greater elasticity than productive capital. Merchant capital also has another important feature. György Lukács (1972) in his essay Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat referred to Marx’s reflection on the role of merchant capital in establishing the conditions for equalisation or commensuration of different types of labour and commodities. Lukács brought to the discussion the specificities of operations of merchant capital in a pre-capitalist landscape, that is, the fact that it deals with and adapts to the conditions it does not create. Moreover, he presents the view of merchant capital that operates as middleman between the social exchange and, through that movement of outputs of labour, establishes the conditions for finding, measuring and amplifying their common components. In this context, the role of merchant capital—especially the academic publishers—in science and higher education, starts to be clear. Through the engagement in selling commodities—articles, journals and books—merchant faction of capital in higher education helped establish the conditions for commonality and measurement of these outputs. They stopped being seen simply as idiosyncratic inputs to the scientific debate and became the bearers of signs of wider social exchange of commodities. Therefore, if one looks at merchant capital in higher education, it is indeed characterised by the following aspects. Firstly, this capital is responsible for enabling the circulation of capital and money in the global system. Its function is crucial from the point of view of exchanging the effects of research for exchange value within the system. We will see how capital overtakes the internal system of valorisation of academic labour in Chaps. 6 and 7. Secondly, this capital is the most appropriate form from the point of view of the specifics of the sector. Knowledge production is an uncertain and risky process. Securing an external position in relation to the costliest processes and difficulties of production organisation is convenient from the point of view of capital. After all, the most important thing is the

4 CAPITAL 

97

extraction of surplus, not direct influence on the production process. Capital is quietly prepared to relinquish this function. Finally, speculatively, perhaps it is the historical form that the capital-labour relationship takes—which will evolve towards a more coagulated form of control and organisation of production. Although the trends in the sphere of the transformation of the role of specific factions of capital in the global economy, as well as the very nature of the knowledge production sector, would tend to cast doubt on this. Capital establishes itself into an organic totality in a long historical process in which it comes to absorb its exterior and establish a definite functional totality. As Marx states in Grundrisse: This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself or in creating out of it the organisms which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its development. (Marx, 1973, p. 278)

The fact that the full industrial cycle of capital in public higher education does not yet exist does not mean that this process will never be completed. What we are witnessing at this moment is the historical process of absorbing the system into capital’s totality—establishing a world market, combining elements that function separately and creating a common framework for them, combining and mediating between them establishing a common totality. Marx developed a special vocabulary to categorise different modes of this absorption of living labour and we will analyse these in the next chapter.

References Anyon, J. (2011). Marx and Education. London: Routledge. Arboledas-Lérida, L. (2021). On the Coercive Nature of Research Impact Metrics: The Case Study of Altmetrics and Science Communication. Social Epistemology, 35(5), 461–474. Arboledas-Lerida, L. (2023). Science Communication, Competitive Project-Based Funding and the Formal Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital. In R. Hall, I. Accioly, & K. Szadkowski (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Banaji, J. (2021). Merchant Capitalism. In B. Skeggs, S. R. Farris, A. Toscano, & S.  Bromberg (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Marxism Volume I (pp.  3–23). London: SAGE.

98 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Bell, P., & Cleaver, H. (2002). Marx’s Theory of Crisis as a Theory of Class Struggle. The Commoner, 5, 1–61. Bleemer, Z., et  al. (2017). Echoes of Rising Tuition in Students’ Borrowing, Educational Attainment, and Homeownership in Post-Recession America. Staff Report No. 820. New York: FRBNY. Douglass, J. A. (2012). The Rise for the For-Profit Sector in US Higher Education and the Brazilian Effect. European Journal of Education, 47(2), 242–259. Eaton, C. (2022). Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. FRBNY. (2019). Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit 2018:Q4. New York. Gorz, A. (2010). The Immaterial. Knowledge, Value and Capital. London: Seagul Books. Griffin, R. (2018). The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse. Bloomberg [@:] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-­10-­17/ the-­student-­loan-­debt-­crisis-­is-­about-­to-­get-­worse Gupta, A. (2022a). For-Profit Higher Education in India. In N. V. Varghese & J.  Panigrahi (Eds.), India Higher Education Report 2021. Private Higher Education. London: Routledge. Gupta, A. (2022b). A Case for For-Profit Private Higher Education in India. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE. 8.2022. Center for Studies in Higher Education. Hall, R. (2014). On the Abolition of Academic Labour: The Relationship Between Intellectual Workers and Mass Intellectuality. tripleC, 12(2), 822–837. Harvey, D. (2010). Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2013). Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2. London: Verso. Harvey, D. (2017). Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502. Leher, R., & Accioly, I. (Eds.). (2016). Commodifying Education: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Financialization of Education Policies in Brazil. Rotterdam: Sense. Leher, R., & Costa, H.  B. (2023). Mercantilization and Financialization of Education in Brazil: Trends and Particularities of Dependent Capitalism. In R. Hall, I. Accioly, & K. Szadkowski (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lichtenstein, N. (2012). The Return of Merchant Capitalism. International Labor and Working-Class History, 81, 8–27. Lukács, G. (1972). History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. New York: Random House. Marx, K. (1982). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. London: Penguin.

4 CAPITAL 

99

Marx, K. (1992). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Two. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1998). Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 37: Marx: Capital III. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (2000). Theories of Surplus Value. Books I, II and III. New  York: Prometheus Books. Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State. Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press. McGettigan, A. (2013). The Great University Gamble: Money. Markets and the Future of Higher. London: Pluto Press. Mitchell, J. (2016). Student Debt Is About to Set Another Record, But the Picture Isn’t All Bad. The Wall Street Journal [@:] https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/02/student-­d ebt-­i s-­a bout-­t o-­s et-­a nother-­r ecord-­b ut-­t he­picture-­isnt-­all-­bad/ Neary, M. (2020). Student as Producer: How Do Revolutionary Teachers Teach? Winchester: Zero Books. Noble, D. F. (2001). Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. Delhi: Aakar Books. Ovetz, R. (2021). The Algorithmic University: On-Line Education, Learning Management Systems, and the Struggle Over Academic Labor. Critical Sociology, 47(7–8), 1065–1084. Scott-Clayton, J. (2018). The Looming Student Loan Default Crisis Is Worse Than We Thought. Evidence Speaks Reports, 2(34). Silva, S., & Tavares, P. (2016). Capital Control Over Higher Education. In R.  Leher & I.  Accioly (Eds.), Commodifying Education: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Financialization of Education Policies in Brazil (pp. 83–106). Rotterdam: Sense. Smith, C. M., Villalobos, A. D., Hamilton, L. T., & Eaton, C. (2023). Promising or Predatory? Online Education in Non-Profit and For-Profit Universities. CGHE Working Paper, London. Szadkowski, K. (2016). Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour Under Capital. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 28, 9–29. Van Der Linden, M., & Breman, J. (2020). The Return of Merchant Capital. Global Labour Journal, 11(2), 178–182. Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism, 15(1), 13–36. Williams, J. (2009). The Pedagogy of Debt. In The Edu-factory Collective (Ed.), Toward a Global Autonomous University (pp. 89–96). New York: Autonomedia. Winn, J. (2015). Writing About Academic Labour. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 25, 1–15.

CHAPTER 5

Subsumption

5.1   Introduction We have now come to the point where conceptualisations of capital will reach their climax.1 We will discuss how capital and labour meet. So far, I have argued in favour of using Marx’s notion of capital in HER primarily by positioning it as an alternative to the neoclassical economics-dominated (if not directly, then at least implicitly) studies of higher education that focus on the non-antagonistic, exchange-relations-dominated market character of sector transformations. Unlike such analyses, I argue that by shifting the focus from individual institutions to entire systems and the academic labour employed within them, we can see the determined actions of capital seeking to transform the sector to meet its own needs. To capture capital in higher education, I ask how it manifests itself in the sector. How do specific factions (production, merchant, or financial) function within it? How do they develop their strategies of self-valorisation? Much of the day-to-day activity in higher education is influenced by capital-­ mediated processes. Capital is a very flexible force, capable of transforming any limit into a barrier and then developing ways of absorbing the resisting matter. Throughout this book, a particular theoretical perspective has guided my understanding of the sector’s ontology and influenced how I perceive 1

 This chapter is a revised and modified version of Szadkowski (2016).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_5

101

102 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the actions of capital. This perspective is rooted in Marx’s concept of subsumption, which offers a useful framework for dynamically considering capitalist relations and their origin in subordinating absorption. Subsuming labour under capital characterises capitalist relations as an encounter between two distinct entities, often enforced through violence or legal sanction. The concepts have become part of the repertoire of Marxist higher education and science analyses. Luis Arboledas-Lerida (2020, 2023) has presented, with the help of formal subsumption, the question of the universalisation of capitalist relations in science occurring with the spread of project-based research funding. In turn, John Preston (2022) applied the entire inventory of Marxian notions of subsumption to trace the use of AI in higher education. Ivancheva and Garvey (2022) used the concept of real subsumption to analyse the digital shift of the teaching environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Shannon Walsh (2023) has recently outlined the utility of Marxian subsumption for critical studies of innovations and their role from the capital perspective. In this chapter, I operate on a more general level to offer a systematisation of the subsumption of academic labour under capital applicable to higher education research. This chapter offers a Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption, discussing its formal, real, hybrid and ideal forms, as well as mutual relations between them. Recapitulating Marx’s concept, it sheds light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se. The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. 5.1.1   Four Levels Reviewing the Marxist literature, we find very different uses and interpretations of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital (e.g., Camatte, 1988; Negri, 2003; Read, 2003; Murray, 2004; Vercellone, 2007; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Endnotes, 2010; Roggero, 2011; Toscano, 2011; Fumagalli, 2015; Hardt, 2015; Hall & Bowles, 2016). Therefore, it is helpful to indicate the levels of analysis that can be taken. Based on the

5 SUBSUMPTION 

103

existing literature, we can draw a systematic map. Let us then try to order the levels of analysis of the concept of subsumption from the most specific to the most abstract. First, sectorial analysis, refers to the constant dynamics of capitalist expansion in the emerging and existing production sectors, such as to the modes of labour subjugation in knowledge service sector or factory work in cotton industry. Second, historical analysis, concerns the existing socio-economic formations and their changes over time, like the consequences of transition from feudalism to capitalism or from industrial to cognitive capitalism. Third, global or systemic analysis, addresses the mechanisms of the global subordination of labour and social life to capital, such as the expansion of financial markets or the development of a system of metrics and bibliometric databases for science. Finally, ontological analysis is the most general level, where consequences of the transformation of work and production on all the aforementioned levels are discussed in purely philosophical terms. While the analysis of processes of subsumption conducted by Marx will be situated largely on the sectorial level, that is, specific processes that occur within a particular sector of production, the use of the concept of subsumption by many Autonomist Marxists, such as Antonio Negri (2003), is concerned almost entirely with the ontological consequences of subsumption. It seems that in the case of tracking the processes and mechanisms of capital expansion in the higher education sector, it would be much more useful to remain on the sectorial and global/systemic levels. Nonetheless, critique of the political economy needs to consider ontological level of analysis to be able to refer to the elements of the alternative to capitalist higher education already contained in the subsumed system. The limitations of much of the critical HER that uses the concept of subsumption come mainly from the mixing up of different levels of analysis. Good examples of this problem can be found in the debate between Alberto Toscano (2011) and Gigi Roggero (2011) on subsumption in higher education. In contrast, a philosopher of Autonomist orientation who captured the specifics of the concepts of formal and real subsumption on all of the above levels is Jason Read (2003). As Read points out, the concept of subsumption has an ontological, social, and sectorial nature, which allows for understanding not only the differences between the modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, communism) but also the internal dynamics of the capitalist mode of production and its internal transformation (2003, pp. 112–113). However, in the following pages, I offer a sectorial level of analysis driven by the concept of subsumption of

104 

K. SZADKOWSKI

labour under capital. This is just one possible approach, and any analysis of subsumption dynamics could provide an accurate picture of a given political-­economic reality as long as it is consistent and consciously moves within one or between different levels of analysis. Addressing the concept and the phenomenon of the subsumption of labour under capital, specifically in the context of higher education where the capitalist value production is historically speaking a recent event, one needs to keep in mind that taking the categories of ‘formal’ or ‘real subsumption’ as a starting point is at once analytically correct and historically misleading. With reference to industrial production that was at the centre of Marx’s interest in the Volume One of Das Kapital, he emphasised that “merchants’ capital and interest-bearing capital are derivative forms, and at the same time [...] historically, these two forms appear before the modern primary form of capital” (Marx, 1982, p. 267). The derivativeness of the relationships established between a merchant and financial capital and living labour does not necessarily mean they should be put to one side. This is especially true in a situation where, as Harvey suggests, “it is important to evaluate the positionality of merchants’ and interest-bearing capital within capitalism in general” (2010, p.  97) because they have become (like in the case of financial capital from the 1970s onwards) or are becoming (like merchant capital within higher education) dominant again. Moreover, I will follow the logical order of analysis of forms of subsumption suggested by Marx.

5.2   Formal Subsumption Formal subsumption has to create a logical (but not historical) starting point, representing the general form of all capitalist production (Marx, 1982, p. 1019). The labour process appears as capital’s own process, and the capitalist becomes the owner of the means of production used within the manufacture and purchase of the labour-power, as well as the manager of the entire process. One of the most important elements of the process of formal subsumption of labour under capital in a particular sector is the establishment of the wage labour relation. As a result, a given sector’s previously independent and self-organised employees enter a relationship of formal dependence on a capitalist. Within the movement of the formal subsumption, a given productive community is transformed into a production sphere where social relations are mediated through money. Under this framework, however, certain

5 SUBSUMPTION 

105

people are confronting each other as “capital” and “labour” (Marx, 1982, p.  1020, 1994, p.  95), which means that “a mode of compulsion not based on personal relations of domination and dependency, but simply on differing economic function” (Marx, 1982, p.  1021) is established. Furthermore, “there is no fixed political and social relationship of supremacy and subordination” (Marx, 1982, p. 1026). Thus, social relationships are mystified by capital in a proper sense (Marx, 1982, p. 1020); that is, a concrete abstraction, capital, achieves a perverse ability to subordinate a specific sector of production and at the same time to present itself as the ultimate truth of it. It means that in formal subsumption it is capital that seems to possess the sole ability to self-valorise. In this way, objectified labour (capital) gains the ability to use living labour (labour power). In essence, what is vital for analysing the capitalist specificity of contemporary higher education is that in formal subsumption, the “available, established labour process” (Marx, 1982, p.  1021) is subsumed under capital in its pre-capitalist shape. As Read puts it, formal subsumption “is a specific articulation of the fundamental elements of the capitalist mode of production against an alien terrain… [it] is capital at the interstices of other modes of production” (2003, p. 108). The dynamics and absorbed form of labour processes are preserved at this stage. This is important when considering the higher education sector’s meeting with capital. The starting point is always a given production sector with its internal mechanisms that rule it. For this reason, as I argued, it is up to capital to adapt to this reality and recreate it for valorisation and accumulation. As we will see in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8, despite the claims by exceptionalists, neither status competition, nor prestige distribution, nor the open form of knowledge poses limits that capital is not able to overcome. What changes, however, at the moment of formal subsumption is that the existing labour processes and production are henceforth conducted in continuous cycles, and the hours of labour are extended and their intensity increases (Marx, 1982, pp. 1021; 1026). In higher education, these processes are often perceived as accelerating academic labour (Vostal, 2016). The crucial point that should be stressed is the relationship between capital and labour in higher education. The meeting between these two opposite positions is taking place on a well-defined ground: within the beaten paths and rules governing the pre-capitalist life of science and education. The consequence of formal subsumption is that it is possible to extract surplus value from labour power in the form of ‘absolute surplus value’ obtained mainly by the extension of working time and an increase in work

106 

K. SZADKOWSKI

intensity. As a result of the growing scale of the production process (Marx, 1982, p. 1022), both in terms of the degree of capital involved and the number of workers employed (Marx, 1982, p.  1027), a situation is achieved in which the capitalist ceases to be one of the workers, and begins to deal exclusively with the coordination and organisation of trade (Marx, 1982, p. 1027). One can say, therefore, that he or she is supposed to play the role of the administrator of the production process. Within the sectors of immaterial production (like higher education and science) where extraction of surplus value is highly contingent upon the degree of the autonomy of living knowledge, the function of commanding or administering the labour of others, even under formal subsumption, becomes more and more artificial and politically imposed. Marx emphasised that the more the objective (means of production) and subjective (means of subsistence) conditions of labour are opposed to the worker as capital, the more the relationship between him or her and capital is shaped by formal subsumption (Marx, 1982, p. 1025). In addition, it should be noted that under the process of formal subsumption, labour and the production process get subordinated, as far as possible, to the rule of the law of value. The production process is increasingly forced to correspond with the socially necessary labour time needed for the production of certain goods and services (Marx, 1982, p. 1026). As we will see in Chap. 6, in the context of global higher education, adaptation to the requirements of socially necessary labour time is carried out using a complex system of measures and metrics presenting the prestige distribution in a quantified way (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009; Burrows, 2012; Do, 2013, 2015). As we are aware, it is not time that necessarily creates the sole social necessity criterion that academic labour faces. Particularly within the context of academic labour engaged in research activities, it is instead a complex mix of time per differently measured impact of produced output (publishing in the “right” journals with high impact factor, getting a “proper” share of citations) that valorise factions of academic labour.

5.3  Real Subsumption As Marx put it, real subsumption is a “specifically capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1982, p. 1019). Unlike its formal phase, this is not an autonomous form of subsumption. In order to constitute real subsumption of labour under capital in a given sector, a formal subsumption

5 SUBSUMPTION 

107

process must have occurred earlier. It can be assumed that real subsumption occurs through the quantitative expansion of formal subsumption in a particular sector—the quantity transforms into quality (Marx, 1982, p.  1021; Read, 2003, p.  110). According to Marx, this, specifically the capitalist mode of production, can subjugate society as a whole (Marx, 1982, p. 1022), which would be consistent with the ontological readings (Negri, 2003; Fumagalli, 2015). However, real subsumption can be analysed simply within a particular production sector. In the stage of real subsumption, the further development of the process of mystification becomes far more intense. The worker now confronts not only the effects of his work in the form of capital, but social forces and their products as a whole begin to confront him of her as private property and the effect of capital (Marx, 1982, p.  1024). This is a result of the transformation of the production process by introducing the products of science and technology, resulting in the overall development of the social productive forces. As Marx puts it, what follows is “the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences” (Marx, 1982, p. 1024). It is no coincidence that the for-profit private sector—because of its overwhelming desire to increase the scale of commodity production and the need to intensify the labour process and reduce the general costs – quickly captures all technological innovations in the field of communication and media. These technological innovations are given a capitalist character and consequently used to transform labour processes. Examples may include a correspondence education system disseminated in the United States in the 1930s (Noble, 2001; Fisher, 2006) and the first experiments with online education that began in 1989 at the University of Phoenix (Breneman, 2006, p. 73). Growing commercial activity and the global expansion of the number of public institutions was the most important reason for creating and disseminating MOOCs, massive open online courses (Hall, 2015b), which were digital education machines fuelled by human labour. Similar processes accelerated with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic when venture capital investing in edtech used the opportunity to expand in the sector (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2022). The increased imposition of technology drastically changes the conditions of academic labour at many universities. The technological transformation of academic production, of course, is not limited to implementing educational technology in the higher education workplace but includes, for example, automated, computerised evaluation of students’ written work (Shermis & Hamner, 2012) or the

108 

K. SZADKOWSKI

influence of the widespread use of Google Translate or DeepL Translator in scientific work as a response to the dominance of English as an academic lingua franca (Mundt & Groves, 2016). These processes go hand in hand with producing just for the sake of expanding the base of the production of surplus value, which is also a feature of formal subsumption. At the contemporary university, this type of process can be recognised in the intense and excessive production of published research results, which is mainly linked to the expansion of the base for the extraction of surplus by the oligopolistic academic publishers (Larivière et  al., 2015) that forms the merchant faction capital in higher education. This kind of production, for production’s sake, proper for the stage of real subsumption, is, as the author of Das Kapital consciously remarked, the antithesis of the productive development of the human individual (Marx, 1994, p.  110). Dehumanising production for the sake of production and publishing just to get published in today’s accelerated academia seems to be an excellent confirmation of this thesis. There is no necessary corollary between the other form of subsumption in the sector. The very formal subsumption of a particular sector does not necessarily entail a transition to real subsumption; nevertheless, real subsumption always needs the formal as its primary stage. However, Marx did not consider these two modes in any deterministic linear way. Domination of labour by capital could stay at the formal level if this resulted in greater surplus value extraction. This will become clearer when we examine the mutual relations between formal and real subsumption.

5.4  Mutual Relations Between Formal and Real Subsumption Prior to delving into an analysis of hybrid and ideal subsumption, it is essential to closely examine the intricate relationships and interdependencies between formal and real subsumption. As pointed out above, this conceptual pair cannot be treated as a simple opposition between ‘undeveloped’ and ‘developed’ forms. Nonetheless, theorists who use these concepts in a progressivist way can be easily identified (e.g. Camatte, 1988; Vercellone, 2007). It seems, however, that such an approach might be a theoretical and practical blind alley, resulting from a mixing up of levels of analysis. Types of subsumptions in each case must relate to the strategy which capital is forced to use when confronted with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx, 1981). When the overall rate of profit is

5 SUBSUMPTION 

109

falling in a given sector (and it inevitably falls, among other reasons, due to the use of machines and a corresponding reduction in the amount of employed labour), capital has to flee to another sector where the labour may be subsumed only formally. Therefore, from the perspective of valorisation of capital, both forms of subsumption are useful and complementary. Their functionality is always a result of the intensity of class struggle within a given industry. Let us look at the entanglement of two forms of subsumption and its consequences. According to Marx, At any rate, if we consider the two forms of surplus-value, absolute and relative, separately, we shall see that absolute surplus-value always precedes relative. To these two forms of surplus-value there correspond two separate forms of the subsumption of labour under capital, or two distinct forms of capitalist production; And here too one form always precedes the other, although the second form, the more highly developed one, can provide the foundations for the introduction of the first in new branches of industry. (Marx, 1982, p. 1025)

In the quote above, Marx is accentuating the immediate treatment of the two forms of extraction of surplus value as a co-existing phenomenon, which cannot be analysed as something abstract and separated. Production of relative surplus value necessarily requires and involves the production of absolute surplus value. These are complementary strategies, and even in the most developed mode of production, one cannot imagine an independent extraction of just relative surplus value. On the other hand, what is very important is that real subsumption in the industrial sector causes a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, simultaneously forcing capital to explore new sectors and branches of production that can be subordinated formally thus make higher profits possible. The growing involvement of capital within the higher education and science sector should be viewed in this way. Generally speaking, capital, pushed back by continuous class struggle within a given sector and competition-driven technological innovations, needs to expand its general forms of domination to further areas of social life. This is how higher education and science got into capital’s web, being seen as a new frontier for its expansion. In the following fragment, Marx expressed the sector-specific nature of the process of subsumption, which captures the essence of capitalist expansion:

110 

K. SZADKOWSKI

It is precisely the productivity of labour, the mass of production, of population and of surplus population created by this mode of production that constantly calls new branches of industry into being once labour and capital have been set free. And in these new branches of industry capital can once more operate on a small scale and pass through the various phases until this new industry too can be operated on a social scale. This process is continuous. At the same time, capitalist production has a tendency to take over all branches of industry not yet acquired and where only formal subsumption obtains. Once it has appropriated agriculture and mining, the manufacture of the principal textiles etc., it moves on to other sectors where the artisans are still formally or even genuinely independent. (Marx, 1982, pp. 1035–1036)

In the long term, the development of a given industry leads to a shift in the interest of capital, forcing it to explore further branches, and each time the same cycle of capitalist transformation repeats itself, going through the stages. It starts from the small forms of production based on archaic and autonomous manufacturing methods, where what changes is an installation of a commodity form and wage labour relationship, and it then proceeds to further production on a large or even social scale. These processes also entail the release of surplus population, whose labour power can then be directed towards newly developed sectors or used to exert pressure on workers remaining in the sector that has undergone real subsumption. However, this shift between branches is not limited to areas of material production. Capital absorbs every potential autonomous area of producing, imposing its own valorisation processes. Moreover, the dynamics of the process of subsumption demands increases the efficiency of labour within a given period. Marx writes: All the methods by which relative surplus value, and therewith the specifically capitalist mode of production, is developed, can be reduced in the most abstract form to this, that this mode of production aims at bringing the value of the individual commodity down to its minimum, and therefore producing as many commodities as possible in a given labour time, or operating the transformation of the object of labour into a product with the smallest possible quantity of labour in the shortest possible labour time. (Marx, 1994, pp. 109–110)

Moreover, Marx later admits that a ‘law’ operates in all spheres, where capital extends its domination (Marx, 1994, p.  110). The inherent

5 SUBSUMPTION 

111

contradiction was apparent to Marx in that due to its effective expansion, capital lowers the value of a single commodity unit to a minimum and simultaneously aims at self-valorisation and profit extraction. Since the main objective is producing surplus value, it is an understandable desire to ensure that the subsequent products contain the smallest possible amount of paid labour and the most significant amount of unpaid labour. Therefore, the logical tendency of capitalist development is to move towards the sectors allowing the greatest absorption of unpaid labour (past or present) and to focus on its appropriation. Unveiling the horizon for an alternative to capitalism is perhaps the most significant aspect of Marx’s analysis of the process of real subsumption: The positive result here is a fall in the labour time needed to produce an increased quantity of means of subsistence; this result is attained through the social form of the labour, and the individual’s ownership of the conditions of production appears as not only unnecessary but incompatible with this production on a large scale. (Marx, 1994, p. 108)

The real subsumption process initiates a transformation of capitalist production that renders individualising modes of labour organisation and private forms of ownership obsolete. This shift is also observed in higher education and science, where collaborative and social forms of knowledge production challenge the traditional model of individual ownership and competition over ideas, hindering the advancement of knowledge. Within the context of capitalist production in higher education and science, there are at least two distinct aspects to consider regarding the social scale of conducting academic labour. First is the development (especially in natural sciences) of “hyper authorship” that slowly undermines the idea of the efficiency of individual authorship (Castelvecchi, 2015), a form which is one of the foundations of past and current academic mechanisms of measure and prestige distribution that fuels the recent expansion of oligopoly of capitalist academic publishers. Second is the emergence of global science and its paradigm of open production, which is an “alternative non-­ proprietary model of cultural production and exchange” that “threatens traditional models of intellectual property” (Peters, 2009, p. 203, 2011). However, as we will see in the Chap. 8, this entails a transformation towards communism of capital in which open access to knowledge stimulates capitalist development rather than allowing for its limitations to be

112 

K. SZADKOWSKI

exceeded. Transgression of limits imposed on knowledge production by capital would not only need to be based on projects that head towards a post-capitalist higher education and science (Neary & Winn, 2012) but it would also have to join the broader anti-capitalist struggles that take place within society and economy at large. Only there will the open social production of science find its fulfilment, but this will not be possible without an organised class struggle. Marx, however, continues: The alien property of the capitalist in this labour can only be abolished by converting his property into the property of the non-individual in its independent singularity, hence of the associated social individual. This naturally brings to an end the fetishistic situation when the product is the proprietor of the producer, and all the social forms of labour developed within capitalist production are released from the contradiction which falsifies them all and presents them as mutually opposed. (Marx, 1994, p. 109)

Real subsumption might be considered a prerequisite for transitioning to an alternative production system—a social or cooperative form of production (Winn, 2014, 2015). The basis of individual ownership of social productive forces that comes to the surface during real subsumption is seen through the eyes of the workers of a given sector as something that should be abolished. It reveals the immanent possibility of the social and non-­ individual nature of the ownership of the productive potential, which could remain at the disposal of the workers themselves. Marx, however, clearly indicates that for the process to begin, it is necessary to develop the material base of production sufficiently. However, we must remain cautious, as without an active role of producers (academic labour), the development of the material base may result in simply establishing the conditions for the communism of capital.

5.5   Hybrid Subsumption As mentioned earlier in this chapter, according to Marx, there are two other rarely acknowledged forms of subsumption of labour under capital. In one of the subsections of the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, Marx analyses the ‘hybrid’ (Zwitter) forms of subsumption (Marx, 1982, p. 645). It is a term that defines how capital includes a site of productive activities in its horizon of interest, which it can take advantage of while not

5 SUBSUMPTION 

113

yet exercising direct control over its course. Formal subsumption is “not yet reached” in such cases (Marx, 1982, p. 1023). It should be noted that hybrid subsumption is not the transitional form between formal and real subsumption. Thus, they are not leading to an automatic occurrence of a specifically capitalist mode of production in a given sector (Marx, 1994, p. 116). They are more like “forms of transition to capitalist production” (Marx, 1994, p.  116), where it is not a wage labour relation but rather a purchase/sale or loan/debt that formally dominates the space opened between the actual producer and the entity that benefits from his or her activities. However, there is no direct capital/ labour relationship here, as we will observe in the context of the publishing industry in Chap. 8, and labour is not exploited in a classic Marxian sense. As Marx writes, “this form can be transitional to the capitalist mode of production. It is itself the extraneous produce” (Marx, 1994, pp. 119–120). Hybrid forms of subsumption precede the capitalist mode of production and reproduce themselves within it and are partly reproduced by it (Marx, 1994, p. 116). We can divide them, therefore, after Patrick Murray, into two separate categories: (a) transitional (Uebergangsform)—which links the process with capitalist social relations, and (b) accompanying (Nebensform) (2004, p. 261). Their extraordinary functionality for the operation of capitalism, including academic capitalism, should be highlighted here. Two important examples of capital that are valorised through a hybrid mechanism of labour subsumption are worth mentioning. For example, usury or financial capital, whose owners are primarily concerned with lending producers the means of production or money for their purchase. In this context, we can distinguish two types of activities of financial capital as part of contemporary higher education. First, capital that develops through an extensive system of student loans (McGettigan, 2013; Eaton, 2022). Second, linked to the advent of neoliberalism that increased the importance of financial markets within the capitalist economy, is the ‘endowment management’ as a way that “universities engage in market activities to generate profit in order to secure an advantage over competitor institutions by amassing wealth” (Cantwell, 2016, p. 173). In contrast, there is commercial or merchant capital whose actions, in many cases, contributes to the inclusion of a geographical area or a sector into a fully capitalist relation. The owners of this type of capital are engaged in ordering products while providing the raw materials or production/ cooperation patterns, and then receiving the product for a fee and selling

114 

K. SZADKOWSKI

it, realising surplus (Banaji, 2020). As an example, we can look to the contemporary domination of oligopolistic academic publishing capital (Larivière et al., 2015) over academic labour. Companies such as Elsevier, Springer Nature or Wiley have products in their portfolios that cover almost the entire scholarly production chain, including data search and regular research tools (e.g. Scopus for literature search), manuscript drafting and editing (e.g. Overleaf), bibliography managers (e.g. Mendeley), preprint publication spaces (e.g. SSRN), tools for tracking published research (e.g. Newsflo), and tools for evaluating academic work (e.g. SciVal, PlumX) (Brembs et al., 2021; Posada & Chen, 2018). These tools not only standardise academic outputs but also synchronise the production of academic labour with publication requirements, which are often controlled by the same companies. Additionally, these tools enable the increasing metricisation of all production moments, providing insight into the dynamics of production and allowing for the profitable sale of other analytical products. This gives the oligopoly greater control over academic production (Pooley, 2022). The contemporary hybrid subsumption of academic labour by merchant capital is conducted more cunningly than it was centuries ago in relation to other production sectors. The entanglement of academic publishers in a game proper to the academic field, where the objective is the maximisation of prestige, makes academic producers willing (or able to be coerced by a national higher education Ministry through a variety of procedures of evaluation) to give the results of their research work to capitalist publishers for free. Indeed, in some cases, academic producers themselves may even pay a fee for publishers’ “services” in the form of an Article Processing Charge (APC).

5.6   Ideal Subsumption The fourth and final form of subsumption which is referenced in various texts by Marx is ‘ideal subsumption’. Although Marx mentions it many times, it is hard to recognise that this could be seen as an autonomous concept of analytical use. Ideal subsumption is used by Marx primarily as a tool to debunk his opponents. It is used to criticise bourgeois political economists’ inaccurate references to spheres of labour and production as capitalist when they are not. At first sight, we are faced with a purely ideological form of subsumption, whose main field of reference is the realm of discourse and social imagination. The category could be easily dismissed if we took an idealist or a crude materialist stance. However, as rightly

5 SUBSUMPTION 

115

emphasised by dissident Soviet Marxist Evald Ilyenkov (2012, p.  149), “the ‘ideal’—or the ‘ideality’ of phenomena—is too important a category be handled thoughtlessly and carelessly”; thus, it cannot be addressed simply as the result of some mental conceptions or something limited to the sphere of consciousness, but has to be seen in its entire dialectical relationship with the material. According to Ilyenkov, ‘ideality’ should be considered as a “very peculiar and very strictly established relationship between at least two material objects (things, processes, events, states), within which one material object, while remaining itself, performs the role of a representative of another object” (2012, p. 155). Thus, material processes produce not only material effects but ideal products. “The act of idealisation of reality (the process of transforming the ‘material’ into the ‘ideal’)” occurs “and then, having arisen, the ‘ideal’ becomes a critical component of the material life-activity of social man, and then begins the opposite process—the process of the materialisation (objectification, reification, ‘incarnation’) of the ideal.” (2012, p. 158). These processes of idealisation and materialisation occur in dialectical cycles, influencing and shaping the material reality of a given sector or an economy at large. As Ilyenkov (2012, p. 161) suggests, in Marx’s work it is the value-form itself that has a completely ideal character. Here we can also briefly address the relationship of the approach developed in this book to analyses that focus on the totality of the value-form in higher education. Unlike Mike Neary (2020), I view the totality of the value-form as a critical element in the subsumption of academic labour—a powerful backdrop that is impossible to ignore when analysing academic production under capitalism. However, it is not the only or sufficient mechanism for explaining the organisation of exploitation of academic labour. Although the value-form provides the logical matrix for the practices of imposition of ideal form of relation of capital in de facto unsubordinated sectors, extending it to these areas does not make them strictly capitalist. Consequently, it cannot be the exclusive point of reference for developing strategies to abolish the relation of capital in higher education. The process of idealisation gets further clarified when Marx notes that: [W]ithin capitalist production there are always certain parts of the productive process that are carried out in a way typical of earlier modes of production, in which the relations of capital and wage-labour did not yet exist and where in consequence the capitalist concepts of productive and unproductive labour are quite inapplicable. But in line with the dominant mode of

116 

K. SZADKOWSKI

production, even those kinds of labour which have not been subsumed by capitalism in reality are subsumed idealiter. (Marx, 1982, p. 1042) [translation modified. K.Sz]

The passage above reveals Marx’s belief in the all-encompassing nature of the social relations of capital; it also gives some insights into how the abovementioned dialectic of idealisation and materialisation with reference to subsequent branches of production occurs. When it becomes the dominant socio-economic relationship of production in a given formation, it is used as an ideal model in which all non-capitalist sectors of production become self-organised, organised or reorganised. Activities of this kind (ideal subsumption) have a strategic function in the context of contemporary transformations of public higher education. The subsumption of labour under capital (in both formal and real forms) provides a logical framework projected onto, for example, the activities of public authorities in relation to a different sector of activity (as in the case of market-oriented reforms of public higher education). Although the direct processes of production of surplus value will not occur, and there will be no actual extraction of surplus in the form of profit from the wage labour employed, the very relations of production may have to undergo transformations that, in effect, will make them resemble the two main forms of subsumption (formal and real). Thus, it could be claimed that the phenomenon of ideal subsumption can play an important role in the preparation of a given sector for a process of subsumption of labour within it under capital in formal and/or real terms. Patrick Murray’s categorisation of the forms of ideal subsumption seems helpful. He differentiates between (a) the ideal subsumption of pre-­ capitalist economic formations under capital; (b) the ideal subsumption of non-capitalist production processes, which exist alongside capitalist ones, that also includes an ideal subsumption of labour under capital in the case of the self-employed worker (Marx, 1982, p. 1042); and (c) the ideal subsumption that takes place within a capitalist firm (Murray, 2004, pp.  265–266). In connection with the strategy of a sectorial reading of subsumption, the most useful forms for further consideration within higher education seem to be form (b). The operation of public higher education organised according to the logic of New Public Management reforms could be considered an ideal subsumption of this type. Furthermore, when an unemployed researcher has sweated over winning a research grant acquired outside any institutional frame, we can also observe this as an ideal subsumption type (b).

5 SUBSUMPTION 

117

The ideal form of subsumption of labour under capital lays beyond the scope of interest of most authors who use the concept of subsumption to analyse changes within the contemporary higher education sector (see, exception in Preston, 2022). However, it can provide a useful starting point to study various types of institutional strategies of individual universities, as well as strategic documents of certain ministries (laws, reform packages). Both treat the higher education system’s public sector as a for-­ profit-­ oriented form of production with valorisation occurring there already. Other higher education scholars perceive this process of ideal subsumption as the hybridisation of the public and the private within the sector (Roggero, 2011) that sets the stage for the efficient colonisation of higher education systems worldwide by capital. Transnational capital depends primarily on these processes and on the way public national systems are structured, and it is not particularly striving to take full control over them. Subject to the laws of market competition, as well as being forced into increasingly intensive diversification of its sources of revenue (including working out profit from teaching activities based on hiring wage-labour), the institution of the public university, transformed according to the New Public Management paradigm, conforms to the ideal subsumption of labour under capital.

5.7  Conclusion I have shown that the various forms of the Marxian concept of subsumption provide a helpful tool for analysing the capitalist transformations of contemporary higher education. While the chapter has covered just a few aspects of the capital/labour relation in the context of the contemporary university, the categories worked out here can be used successfully for further research purposes. Although the typical Autonomist Marxist approach, with its sensitivity to the conflictual nature of the transformation associated with entering the era of cognitive capitalism, is a source of many valuable insights (Hall, 2015a), it has been shown that a reading that understands subsumption as an all-encompassing condition or as a specific historical epoch has serious limitations. It is now time to make a preliminary attempt to answer the key question: how, in accordance with the letter and spirit of Marx’s texts, are we to conceive of the subsumption of labour under capital, especially within a higher education context? It has to be noted that the concept of subsumption should be used for an analysis of a dynamically changing landscape of capitalist production. It

118 

K. SZADKOWSKI

allows us to grasp the development and dissemination of capitalist relations based on the form of wage labour and the value-form in the various sectors of human activity. At the same time, any generalisations should be avoided and, following Marx, we should assume that there are no socio-­ economic formations in which real subsumption in its pure form exists on a social scale. Concepts of subsumption serve primarily to build a map of the sectors of human (and non-human) activities with capitalist attributes, as well as to indicate the degree of their penetration by capitalist relations (formal/real). Attention should be paid to the fact that while a given sector of production may remain for a long time at a stage of formal subsumption (without having to undergo real subsumption), the move “back” from real to formal subsumption of labour within a given sector, historically speaking, can only occur in exceptional cases and usually involves violence or violent social change. An example may be deindustrialization during the Cultural Revolution in China (Eyferth, 2003). Therefore, if there is a move back from real to formal subsumption, it means primarily that the flow of capital occurs from a highly developed dominant sector to another, newly hegemonic sector of production, where labour processes are not yet technologically transformed by capital. However, the means of subordination of labour cannot be reduced just to the two main forms of subsumption. During times when merchant and financial capital dominate the capital located in production (Harvey, 2010), the usefulness of the concept of hybrid subsumption is even greater than the two basic types of subsumption. We will address how this mode of subsumption is organised in higher education in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8. Capital is primarily a social relationship, so the whole of social and economic realities is permeated by its logic through the formation of capitalism. This does not mean, however, that capitalist relations of exploitation and valorisation processes based on living labour are to be found in all areas. The mere occurrence of the wage relation is not a sufficient condition. Sectors where the subsumption of labour under capital has been modelled ideally are guided by a different logic. This does not exclude, of course, that the ideal subsumption in a given sector may be, for example, the preparatory step towards the subsumption of certain processes to capital functioning at a different level. The recent reforms in higher education could be understood in this way. Ruling through competition, establishing market rationality of institutions and individual actors, universalisation of measures and indicators in managing the sector, public-private

5 SUBSUMPTION 

119

partnerships, and many other elements from the handbooks of New Public Management reformers all contribute to the expansion of the conditions of ideal subsumption. They represent the preparation of academic labour for the requirements of, among others, a merchant capital faction (oligopoly of academic publishers). Where each process of capital’s domination over living labour is studied, the type of subsumption must be defined. This is a necessary caution. However, it is not meant to deny workers from the public higher education sector the status of productive workers or to exclude them from the working-class ranks. Instead, it is necessary to identify the real object of opposition and critique correctly and to avoid combatting capital where its characteristic relationships do not exist. The complementary use of the four types of subsumption characterised above allows us to develop an analysis that maps correctly to the reality of capitalist production within contemporary global higher education systems. However, it is certainly not the only approach possible. What are the benefits of the reading of subsumption proposed here for critical reflection on higher education? Firstly, looking through the lenses of subsumption of labour under capital allows for a precise periodisation of development and intensification of relations of domination of capital over labour in a national higher education sector. Secondly, using the full range of concepts of subsumption, due attention could be paid to the indelible role of transitional and accompanying forms of subsumption of labour under capital. Using the category of hybrid subsumption, both the role of merchant capital in the progressive changes in the conditions of academic labour and the financial capital developing parasitically based on credit granted to students can be precisely analysed. Thirdly, thanks to the Marxian concept of the ideal forms of formal and real subsumption of academic labour under capital, we can analyse the situation of academic workers in the public sector of higher education. Finally, the study of changes within the higher education sector based on the concept of subsumption of academic labour under capital allows us to go beyond a narrow sectorial understanding of the problems affecting academics and to involve them in a broad front of class struggle against the capitalist class. Once we have sorted out how capital enters into its relationship with academic labour, we can move to another important step, namely, addressing the question: how does capital tackle the particularities of a given sector it aims to subsume? In order to comprehensively examine the systemic subsumption of academic labour under the merchant faction of capital,

120 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the next three chapters will delve into the topics of measure, prestige, and knowledge. Starting with the concept of measure, we will engage in a dialogue with Marxist theories, which predominantly assume that socially necessary time, linked to direct labour time, constitutes the measure of value. Within this discussion, two fundamental positions on measuring immaterial labour emerge: the continuation of imposition of socially necessary labour time as the measure of value (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009), and the undermining of capital’s ability to set its measure (Hardt & Negri, 2009). However, it becomes evident that capital not only adheres to benchmarks for measuring the effectiveness of academic labour but also utilises and transforms measurement methods developed within the academic field. This allows capital to stabilise the subsumption of academic labour and to establish measures appropriate for its valorisation. Turning our attention to the realm of prestige and the current form of knowledge production, we will explore the views of exceptionalists who perceive these areas as protective mechanisms against capital’s intrusion into higher education. Once again, we will analyse the adaptability of capital and its ability to effectively respond to the unique characteristics of the subjugated sector, as well as to the demands put forth by movements resisting its influence. These investigations will pave the way for the formulation of a conceptual framework encompassing exploitative relations within this context, as well as a comprehensive understanding of productive academic labour.

References Arboledas-Lérida, L. (2020). Formal Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital and Project-Based Funding. The Case Study of Horizon 2020. Critique, 48(2–3), 237–256. Arboledas-Lerida, L. (2023). Science Communication, Competitive Project-Based Funding and the Formal Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital. In R. Hall, I. Accioly, & K. Szadkowski (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan. Banaji, J. (2020). A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Haymarket books. Brembs, B., Huneman, P., Schönbrodt, F., Nilsonne, G., Susi, T., Siems, R., et al. (2021). Replacing Academic Journals. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo,5793611 Breneman, D. W. (2006). The University of Phoenix. Icon of For-Profit Higher Education. In D.  W. Breneman, B.  Pusser, & S.  E. Turner (Eds.), Earnings from Learning. The Rise of For-Profit Universities (pp. 71–92). SUNY Press.

5 SUBSUMPTION 

121

Burrows, R. (2012). Living with the H-Index? Metric Assemblages in the Contemporary Academy. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 355–370. Camatte, J. (1988). Capital and Community. Unpopular Books. Cantwell, B. (2016). The New Prudent Man: Financial-Academic Capitalism and Inequality in Higher Education. In S. Slaughter & B. J. Taylor (Eds.), Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development. Competitive Advantage in Europe, the US, and Canada (pp. 173–192). Springer. Castelvecchi, D. (2015, May 15). Physics Paper Sets Record with More Than 5,000 Authors. Nature News. [@:] http://www.nature.com/news/ physics-­paper-­sets-­record-­with-­more-­than-­5–000-­authors-­1.17567 De Angelis, M., & Harvie, D. (2009). ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race. How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism, 7(3), 3–30. Do, P. (2013). The Global University. The Political Economy of Knowledge in Asia and the Segmentation of China’s Higher Education. PhD Thesis Defended at the Queen Mary University of London. Do, P. (2015). L’università: un laboratorio per la informetrics society? Retrieved from http://www.roars.it/online/ luniversita-­un-­laboratorio-­per-­la-­informetrics-­society/ Eaton, C. (2022). Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education. University of Chicago Press. Endnotes. (2010). The History of Subsumption. “Endnotes” 2. Eyferth, J. (2003). De-Industrialization in the Chinese Countryside. Handicrafts and Development in Jinjiang (Sichuan), 1935 to 1978. The China Quarterly, 173(3), 53–73. Fisher, S. (2006). The Market for Higher Education at a Distance. Traditional Institutions and the Costs of Instructional Technology. In D. W. Breneman, B. Pusser, & S. E. Turner (Eds.), Earnings from Learning. The Rise of For-Profit Universities (pp. 113–145). SUNY Press. Fumagalli, A. (2015). The Concept of Subsumption of Labour to Capital: Towards the Life Subsumption in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism. In E. Fisher & C. Fuchs (Eds.), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (pp.  224–245). Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, R. (2015a). The Implications of Autonomist Marxism for Research and Practice in Education and Technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(1), 106–122. Hall, R. (2015b). For a Political Economy of Massive Open Online Courses. Learning, Media and Technology, 40(3), 265–286. Hall, R., & Bowles, K. (2016). Re-Engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour, 28, 30–47.

122 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Hardt, M. (2015). The Post-Operaist Approach to the Formal and Real Subsumption of Labor Under Capital. Seminar with Michael Hardt. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 2(16), 167–182. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Belknap Press. Harvey, D. (2010). A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso. Ilyenkov, E. (2012). Dialectics of the Ideal. Historical Materialism, 20(2), 149–193. Ivancheva, M., & Garvey, B. (2022). Putting the University to Work: The Subsumption of Academic Labour in UK’s Shift to Digital Higher Education. New Technology, Work and Employment, 37(3), 381–397. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502. Marx, K. (1981). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Three. Penguin. Marx, K. (1982). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. Penguin. Marx, K. (1994). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (MECW Vol. 34). Lawrence and Wishart. McGettigan, A. (2013). The Great University Gamble. Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. Pluto Press. Mundt, K., & Groves, M. (2016). A Double-Edged Sword: The Merits and the Policy Implications of Google Translate in Higher Education. European Journal of Higher Education, 6(4), 387–401. Murray, P. (2004). The Social and Material Transformation of Production by Capital. Formal and Real Subsumption in Capital, Volume I. In R. Bellofiore & N.  Taylor (Eds.), The Constitution of Capital. Essays on Volume I of Marx’s Capital (pp. 243–273). Palgrave Macmillan. Neary, M. (2020). Student as Producer. How do Revolutionary Teachers Teach? Zer0 Books. Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2012). Open Education: Common(s), Communism and the New Common Wealth. ephemera, 12(4), 406–422. Negri, A. (2003). Time for Revolution. Continuum. Noble, D. F. (2001). Digital Diploma Mills. The Automation of Higher Education. Monthly Review Press. Peters, M. A. (2009). Open Education and the Open Science Economy. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 108(2), 203–225. Peters, M.  A. (2011). The Emergence of the Global Science System and the Promise of Openness. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(10), 1013–1019. Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance Publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1), 39–49. Posada, A., & Chen, G. (2018, June). Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers. Journal d’Interaction Personne-Système, 1, 1–21. Preston, J. (2022). Artificial Intelligence in the Capitalist University: Academic Labour, Commodification, and Value. Routledge.

5 SUBSUMPTION 

123

Read, J. (2003). The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. State University of New York Press. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Temple University Press. Shermis, M. D., & Hamner, B. (2012). Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis. Retrieved from http://www.scoreright.org/ NCME_2012_Paper3_29_12.pdf Szadkowski, K. (2016). Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour Under Capital. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 28, 9–29. Toscano, A. (2011). The Limits of Autonomy. Cognitive Capitalism and University Struggles. In M. A. Peters & E. Bulut (Eds.), Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor (pp. 259–274). Peter Lang. Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism, 15(1), 13–36. Vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating Academia. The Changing Structure of Academic Time. Palgrave Macmillan. Walsh, S. (2023). Marx, Subsumption and the Critique of Innovation. Organization, 30(2), 345–360. Williamson, B., & Komljenovic, J. (2022). Investing in Imagined Digital Futures: The Techno-Financial ‘Futuring’ of Edtech Investors in Higher Education. Critical Studies in Education, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750848 7.2022.2081587 Winn, J. (2014). Writing About Academic Labour. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labour, 25, 1–15. Winn, J. (2015). The Co-Operative University: Labour, Property and Pedagogy. Power & Education, 7(1), 39–55.

CHAPTER 6

Measure

6.1   Introduction The ability to set a measure is a sign of sovereignty (Kula, 1986). Being able to measure is tantamount to control, shaping and directing a given reality. Measurement is therefore both a source of and a ground for power: capital’s power. It is a medium of subsumption as an enforced relationship between capital and labour, allowing capital to establish and define its parameters. It enables calculation, and once the calculation is complete, its result can quickly become a norm or yardstick, for the reality being measured. Commensurate entities are obliged to conform to the norm. The measure could thus serve as a vehicle for an empty, homogeneous, linear progress. The same applies when we move from a general consideration of a measure to a more specific examination of production systems. The control of a particular production reality is achieved through a variety of measures, including processes of coordination and expanded cooperation between otherwise unconnected entities. This is particularly relevant in the case of capitalist production, within which, in this book, we consider contemporary higher education. The possibility of control, supervision and, particularly important from the viewpoint of capital, intensification of production depends on the establishment of a common measure and the common standards resulting from its fulfilment. For it is in the measure that the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_6

125

126 

K. SZADKOWSKI

relationship between labour and capital is mediated, given that value is a measure of labour subsumed under capital. It follows that in an area of production in which capitalist relations prevail, the most important measure is that which allows value to be determined. Interested in the infinite extension of its possibilities of self-­ valorisation, capital seeks to impose relations of measurement that allow for the control (and intensification) of value production then realised in circulation. Based on the labour theory of value, a commodity has value only because of the abstract labour that has materialised in it. This is measured by the quantity of the value-forming substance that the object contains (Marx, 1976). That said, the novelty of Marx’s approach was constructing a value theory based on social forms rather than on direct individual inputs (Pitts, 2020). Its basis is the reference to the law of value—that is, a claim that a given commodity’s value equals the socially necessary labour time needed for its production. Marx defines the central concept behind this law in Das Kapital Volume One as follows: “Socially necessary labour time is then the labour time required to produce any use value under the condition of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent in that society.” (Marx, 1976, p. 129). Thus, the medium of value is empty and homogeneous time, while its measure is a socially determined necessity (i.e., a given social form and its productive context). The law of value thus formulated, referred to by Engels in his introduction to Das Kapital Volume Three as the “immanent law of capitalist production” or the “law of modern bourgeois economics” (Marx, 1998), has a double function. On the one hand, it regulates the development of capitalist relations of production. It compels the elimination from the accumulation race of (uncompetitive) capitalists producing above the socially necessary labour time, inducing innovation or intensification of labour to reduce the working time necessary to produce the individual commodities in the individual capitalist’s factory. On the other hand, it is the law underlying the undisturbed functioning of the capitalist economy, ensuring its equilibrium and continuous development. Suppose we want to discuss the establishment of capitalist relations in higher education and science. In this case our task will be to show how the processes of measurement, commensurability, synchronisation and standardisation of initially very heterogeneous activities take place within it. Effective control of the measurement mechanisms is necessary for undistorted and sustainable capitalist production in the system. The aim of this

6 MEASURE 

127

chapter is to link Marxist reflections on the operation of measurement in organised capitalist production with a perspective on how different mechanisms for the measurement of labour have developed and spread in relation to historically existing systems of science and higher education. Hence this chapter discusses various ideas and practices of measuring academic labour, including the first American experiments with Taylorism in the organisation of university, the formulation of the first rankings of scholars, the Western and Soviet contributions to the development of bibliometrics, and finally, the culmination of the process with Eugene Garfield’s creation of both an index and indicators to ‘express’ value in higher education. All the discourses that emerged in this movement were originally grounded in science, as well as designed to meet the needs of sustaining it. As in the other chapters, my assumption is that in order to succeed, capital is forced to adapt to the existing ways of articulating measurement mechanisms in the sector it subsumes. The chapter begins with a brief (and necessarily incomplete) overview of experiments in measurement in higher education and science. This will provide us with a starting point for a revision of Marxist reflections on how the law of value operates in sectors of immaterial labour, including academic labour. I will then discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Marxist reflection on this issue, having sketched the contours of the elements of the contemporary architecture of academic labour measurement. All of this is done in order to address the systemic mechanisms for measuring and demonstrating the value of academic labour in the final section of this chapter.

6.2   Measuring Academic Labour: Historical Overview In June and July 1911, Science received two letters to the editor. The first one, by C.  H. Handschin, opened with a brave sentence for that time: “There is one way in which the efficiency of industrial concerns and educational institutions can be compared effectively, viz., in the administration of the finances.” (1911, p.  892). This little piece aimed to look at universities through the prism of their efficiency as compared to railway enterprises. The indicator that served for this comparison may today seem strange as it was “the ratio of compensation of labor to operating expenses.” (1911, p.  892). In other words, the piece examined how much of a

128 

K. SZADKOWSKI

university’s expenses goes directly to labour in the form of their wages. Paradoxically from today’s point of view, the more the money goes to labour, the more efficient the institution seemed for Handschin. Here, the category of “productive” labourer was limited only to teachers, and Handschin emphasised that in the case of the universities, the administrators, whom he considered typically “unproductive”, are also often engaged in teaching and may therefore be counted as “productive”. In the data presented in his short survey, the universities, on average, outperformed the railroad enterprises in such considered efficiency, as they spend much more on wages of productive labourers. Not long after the publication of Handschin’s letter, W. M. G. Raymond responded. He raised serious doubt about whether the indicator used by Handschin truly helps us to understand productivity. Was this project more efficient if the railroads were constructed without machines and involved an army of labourers? We can see that this argument rests on the idea of socially necessary labour time. Nevertheless, Raymond did not stop there. He pointed to the function of the university in giving the students and their employees the place and time for conducting study and expanding the boundaries of knowledge. As Raymond wrote: “In its mechanical or commercial sense, efficiency is not a word used in connection with this duty of the college, or the work of a university. The cost matters little if the duty and work are well performed.” (1911, p.  120). Raymond knew exactly how the capitalist economy worked. His intuition allowed him to point out the social necessity component required in all successful measures of productive efficiency in capitalism. Even though he eventually took a position close to that of the exceptionalists that we discussed earlier, in an attempt to end the discussion of academic performance measurement altogether, the atmosphere growing around American universities at that time began to change gradually. Questions of effective management of universities and the labour they employed began to come to the fore. 6.2.1   Taylorism in Higher Education Efforts to apply industrial efficiency methods to academia have become more prominent as demands for effective management of universities and their workforces have increased. Control over and improving the effectiveness of academic labour are two long-term objectives in academia. Efforts

6 MEASURE 

129

to approach this matter from the perspective of expanding the well-known mechanisms used in the industry are not recent inventions. As early as 1910, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Fredrick Taylor’s disciple, wrote in his report on academic and industrial efficiency for the Carnegie Foundation that: The first university which will try conscientiously to obtain all the help which it is possible for it to obtain from the commercial and industrial world in a broad effort to increase its effectiveness will make a very strong plea to men of means who have money which they are willing to devote to educational purposes. (Cooke, 1910, p. 8)

Morris Cooke was investigating Physics departments at eight institutions, including Columbia University and Harvard University. His attention focused on raising teaching effectiveness in an academic institution, yet he found that teaching generally gets low priority. Research and publications raised the scholar’s status (not to mention his earnings). Cooke wanted to establish whether the application of Taylor’s methods of scientific management—that is, the strict division of labour and the reduction of time invested in discrete activities, including the most minute ones—hold any potential for raising productivity in teaching, research and laboratory work at American universities. His research was representative of efforts to move academic institutions out of the crisis caused by their overall financial decline and lack of credibility where the general public was concerned. A scientific strategy to raise productivity was seen as a route to the pockets of “men of means” who could help universities get back on their feet. Cooke proposed an industrial measure of effectiveness based on direct labour time. However, he was well aware that focusing solely on direct labour time would not give a complete picture of an academic’s contribution. Academics are engaged in a wide range of activities that require a variety of skills. In addition, he knew that academic labour requires creativity, critical thinking and intellectual curiosity, which cannot be broken down easily into smaller parts and measured against a homogeneous standard. Ultimately, such a short-term focus on increasing the time efficiency of academic labour can stifle creativity and innovation in the academic workplace. Cooke’s views on the applicability of his proposal were mixed. Nonetheless, a Taylorist approach was not the only option on the table.

130 

K. SZADKOWSKI

6.2.2   Quantification of Eminence and Early Bibliometrics Due to the duality inherent in academic labour and its simultaneous dedication to education and research, its effectiveness can be measured from multiple angles. The creative scientific process certainly does not lend itself to standardisation in a direct way, much less to evaluation based on homogeneous working time. In parallel with Cooke’s efforts, from the late nineteenth century onwards, psychologists were addressing the issue of academic productivity from a markedly different perspective. By counting references, articles or the numbers of “brilliant minds” employed by universities, they were comparing academic institutions or scholars or preparing and developing rankings or indexes that would corroborate the scientific identity and contribute to the prosperity of Psychology as an academic discipline (Godin, 2006). Science’s long-serving editor, James McKeen Cattell, dedicated years to exploring the presence of “eminent men” in American science, a pursuit previously undertaken by Alphonse de Candolle. In 1873, Candolle analysed the evolving scientific power dynamics of countries by examining the representation of their international members in esteemed scientific societies (Thackray, 1977, p. 17). Cattell also drew inspiration from Francis Galton’s 1874 work, English Man of Science, as well as eugenics movements that aimed to combat the decline of geniuses amidst rising social emancipation (Godin, 2007). Though initially a proponent of the biological basis of scientific talent, Cattell’s views evolved over time (Hammarfelt et al., 2017). He published American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory in 1906 to highlight geniuses and encourage networking. Cattell also devised a ground breaking ranking system for American academic institutions, measuring “scientific strength” using more than the number of eminent men. He factored in the quantity of doctorates awarded by universities and implemented the first reputation survey to pinpoint leading scientists in various disciplines, as identified by established researchers (Hammarfelt et al., 2017, p. 406). Cattell’s pioneering methods underscored the quantification of academic quality through both output metrics and reputational surveys. Benoit Godin (2007) points out that Cattell was a pioneer in bibliometrics and that his compilations and the methods he used laid the foundation for the further quantitative study of science. In Cattell’s view, identifying active and outstanding individuals and showing their objectivised distribution in the system was a tool in his struggle for public

6 MEASURE 

131

recognition of scientific work and a consequent improvement in the conditions under which academic labour would be performed (Godin, 2007). Echoes of Cattell’s thinking on estimating scientific productivity can be found in two fundamental laws of bibliometrics formulated in the first half of the twentieth century. The individualising perspective, with its focus on individual authors of scientific papers or journals composed of their publications, pushed the procedures for measuring science towards emphasising fundamental inequalities. Lotka’s law, formulated in relation to the study of the productivity of chemists by Alfred Lotka in 1926, allowed for coining a simple mathematical formula proclaiming that “the productivity of scientists follow an inverse square law” (van Raan, 2019, p. 238). In other words, most scientists produce one or two articles over a given period, while only a handful produce more than ten articles. Inequality in the distribution of productivity is understood as the production of scientific articles, and this idea thus underpinned bibliometrics, both as a set of tools subsequently developed on this basis and as a general field of interest. However, a few years later, in 1934, a fundamental principle governing the modern analysis of productivity and estimating the value of academic publications, the so-called Bradford’s law, was crystallised. This law states that the core of the most important literature in a given area of science is published only in a narrow group of journals. Searching for valuable texts in any other group of journals yields “diminishing returns”. Building on Bradford’s law, Eugene Garfield developed the Science Citation Index, a revolutionary tool for measuring science, which he described in his 1955 article and which was commercially implemented in 1963. Before moving on, however, a little space should be devoted to an overlooked context of reflection on the measurement of higher education and science formed by Russian and Soviet experiences in quantifying and evaluating academic labour. 6.2.3   Russian and Soviet Influences When focusing on the Western history of establishing the measurement mechanisms for academic labour in science and higher education, we must remember that these processes had a broader geopolitical context. We can successfully provide a history starting from the ordinances of Peter the Great and the enforcement of annual reports on publications by academics in imperial Russia (Sokolov, 2021; Kulczycki, 2023). These practices underpinned the entrenchment of the Bolshevik approach to science

132 

K. SZADKOWSKI

management through statistics in post-revolutionary Russia. The basing of the modernisation and development of the then peripheral Soviet Union on science had no precedent in earlier history. Prior to the widespread adoption of central planning in Russia’s science, Alexei Gastev, inspired by Taylor, initiated the scientific organisation of scientific labour (NONT). NONT’s founders aimed to enhance research productivity by refining scientists’ work methods and improving their working conditions. In the 1920s, one of the NONT theorists, N.P.  Suvorov, proposed an algebraic formula to compute research effectiveness, which he believed would facilitate science planning by allocating the most demanding tasks to the most talented researchers. As Kulczycki describes: NONT theoreticians assumed that researchers had to be evaluated in certain cycles (which varied for different researchers), and which represented the time needed for a scientist to produce a major scientific discovery. Suvorov suggested the following formula: T = At + 3B + C/X + D/2X, where T= “effective time”, t = the number of years of the report cycle, and X = the average number of “regular” works a year. A, B, C, and D designate numbers for four types of work: (A) of great scientific significance, (B) outstanding, (C) regular, (D) not demanding independent analysis. (2023, p. 83)

If a given researcher in a period of six years published one work of great significance, three outstanding pieces, two regular ones and two not demanding independent analysis, then his “effective time” score was twenty-four years of academic labour time squeezed over a period of six years. Although Suvorov’s formula was deemed utopian (Graham, 1967, p. 51), it formed one of the first attempts to quantify quality in science, sounding similar to modern performance-based evaluation systems that are used in some countries of post-socialist Europe (Kulczycki, 2023). However, it lacked a proposal for quantified criteria of “significance” and “outstanding”. But that mattered little, and Suvorov’s formula served as a point of reference for the installation of planning in science in the socialist context. Despite its shortcomings, the attention given to science by the Bolshevik leadership, the level of exponential investment and the expansion of science and higher education in the 1920s and 1930s did not go unnoticed in the Western world. This approach was the source of the great enthusiasm with which Western scientists looked at the Soviet experiment and the tools needed to carry it out. One such enthusiast was John Desmond

6 MEASURE 

133

Bernal, a key figure in popularising measures of scientific productivity in Western science. In his seminal work, The Social Function of Science, Bernal (1939) posited that science is primarily a social and economic system, wherein the material relations of production hold significant importance. Consequently, he argued that tools from social sciences or political economy, rather than philosophy of science, were better suited for examining its state and future (Zhao et al., 2020). Thus, his book presents various indicators for evaluating academic institutions, the efficiency and size of scientific societies, the distribution of scholars across disciplines and institutions, and data collected in these domains. Inspired by the Soviet Union’s scientific accomplishments, where science was treated as an institutionalised, material, and productive endeavour, Bernal used his insights to suggest ways to strengthen science’s position in capitalist societies and to address the fundamental crises it faced in the West. As an opponent of resource and energy waste and recognizing the rapid growth of science, Bernal expressed concern for the scientific communication system. He identified two related problems arising from increased publication: the possibility of parallel research, or “multiples” (Merton, 1973), and the risk of significant discoveries going unnoticed due to journal fragmentation. To address these issues, Bernal proposed rationalising the publication distribution system by creating a central publisher and indexer that would distribute photocopies of articles—an innovative, cost-effective, and faster solution—to subscribers interested in specific fields. This centralised control aimed to counteract waste and anarchy in the journal market. Additionally, Bernal introduced tools for systematic and central oversight of scientific information flows, which later inspired Eugene Garfield (2007), as well as other Marxist lines of inquiry. 6.2.4   Atomism of Early Scientometrics Continuing increases in the productivity of academic labour (in terms of producing research) posed a substantial challenge to the science system. So new measurement methods emerged to help science cope with the crisis born out of its seeming success. Derek De Solla Price’s Little Science, Big Science (1963) was a landmark in popularising his diagnoses of the progressive exponential growth of the scientific sphere (see. his earlier take on the problem, Price, 1951). In a series of short lectures, Price launched

134 

K. SZADKOWSKI

a systematic proposal for the science of science in the West, formulated compelling diagnoses, and presented methods for further study and measurement of scientific effectiveness. As Robert Merton and Eugene Garfield wrote in the preface to the expanded edition of the book, “As is often the case with innovative inquiry, the methods of investigation have proved to be rather more consequential for an understanding of the subject than the provisional results reached by use of those methods” (1983, p. vii). Undoubtedly, Price’s book contributed to the ongoing reflection on science and represented a significant breakthrough. It has been a crucial source of inspiration for contemporary bibliometrics. However, Price’s ideas are marked with the fundamental limitations when applied to measuring academic labour. These limitations have not only persisted in modern times but have also been amplified and disseminated, leading to intensified negative consequences. Price’s ontological perspective on science is atomistic; he views it as composed of individual scientists, or “molecules,” each behaving distinctively. Consequently, scientometrics, in Price’s view, aims to determine meaningful averages from the entirety of these behaviours. His primary unit of analysis is the individual scientist, focusing on eminence, productivity, and understanding talent distribution topography. Like Cattell before him, Price drew inspiration from Francis Galton, and the influence of eugenic thinking—identifying, preserving, and fostering exceptional talent—is evident in his work. The fundamental unit for tracking scholars’ activities is the article, which Price believes emerged from the solidification of the intellectual property rights regime. He regarded authorship and prestige through publications as “a social device rather than a technique of evaluating the quanta of information” (Price, 1963, p. 65), asserting that scientists were more driven to write papers than to read them (Price, 1963, p. 70). To ensure the successful continuation of their research, scientists aimed to join what Price, inspired by Robert Boyle (Merton & Garfield, 1983, p. viii), referred to as “invisible colleges”—peer-assessed eminence-­ based academic communities. Price attributed a vital role to invisible colleges in science, as they provided a more efficient means of establishing and securing prestige and priority than traditional journal publication (Price, 1963, p. 70). In the context of science’s exponential growth, the “invisible college” concept serves a crucial function by limiting the scope of information required for individual scientists to actively engage at the forefront of their fields amidst the rapid increase of published papers.

6 MEASURE 

135

Garfield’s Science Citation Index aimed to visualise and objectify relations within these invisible colleges by indexing references, thus helping scientists manage information overload. 6.2.5   Science Citation Index: Visualising Relations in Science The origins of what came to light as the Science Citation Index began back in the 1950s. One of Garfield’s primary practical sources of inspiration was the case citation index in the US legal system created as early as 1873 by Frank Shepard in Illinois (Wouters, 1999, p.  22). Precedent-setting US law and the lawyers functioning within it required an efficient system to identify cases and judgments that cited specific court decisions easily. In Shepard’s handmade index, Garfield saw a way of showing relations within social and intellectual production that he wanted to apply in the context of science. Although he had communicated his idea in Science as early as 1955, it had not met with a positive response (Pendlebury, 2020). As a result, Garfield spent the following years in further experiments and fundraising efforts for the costly creation of the first index. It was not until 1963, preceded by an experimental index for genetics, that the first version of the Science Citation Index was published. Explaining the operation rules of his invention, Garfield wrote more than a decade later: The concept of citation indexing is simple. Almost all the papers, notes, reviews, corrections, and correspondence published in scientific journals contain citations. These cite—generally by title, author, and where and when published—documents that support, provide precedent for, illustrate, or elaborate on what the author has to say. Citations are the formal, explicit linkages between papers that have particular points in common. A citation index is built around these linkages. It lists publications that have been cited and identifies the sources of the citations. (Garfield, 1979, p. 1)

The index was developed in response to the crisis of scientific communication caused by the rapid growth of publications. The tool aimed to provide American scientists with detailed and accurate information about scientific work, giving them an edge in the competition with the Soviet science production. Garfield assumed that the flood of information caused by the proliferation of science could be tamed and fully controlled with tools like his index. To make the construction possible and financially

136 

K. SZADKOWSKI

feasible, he based the construction of the index on Bradford’s law, assuming that a small percentage of journals account for a large percentage of the articles published in a specific field of science. It was an underlying principle for constructing the index itself, and Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information found that the patterns indicated by Bradford’s law operate in every field they studied. Therefore, the assumption was initially that 500 journals were responsible for 50% of all articles produced. The potential geopolitical concerns over the inclusivity of the index were not part of the equation. One of the Garfield’s goals was to create a tool that would aid the historical and sociological study of science (Zuckerman, 2018). At the same time, the creator of the index himself protested from the very beginning against the use of the index to evaluate individual scientists or to objectively determine the value of specific publications or contributions to science deserving of, say, a Nobel Prize. However, history has developed somewhat differently than Garfield initially wished. As Paul Wouters rightly claimed, “citation is the product of citation indexer, not scientist” (1999, p.  4), it is a second-order representation of science, “a mirror image of the reference” (1999, p. 11). In measuring and visualising the system of referencing in science, the actual helpful practice of scientists, Garfield, with his Science Citation Index, contributed substantially to the establishment of the actual political economy of science—the domination of the abstractly expressed and quantified value over the use value in scientific communication. Only the subsequent history of the development of Science Citation Index and the later products of the Institute for Scientific Information were to show the actual utility of his inventions for capital. We shall later return to this thread. 6.2.6   Path Not Taken: Scientometrics and the Common of Science This common element shown by the citation, to which Garfield referred, made possible by the creation of the Science Citation Index, was taken up in the work of some forgotten Soviet scientometricians. Vasilly Nalimov and Zinadia Mulchenko, Moscow-based Soviet researchers, contributed to the reflection on measuring science by publishing the relatively obscure book Naukometria in 1969, which was quickly translated into English by the CIA, then covered by dust and nearly forgotten. The authors claimed

6 MEASURE 

137

that Price and Garfield played a vital role in their project. Both figures are heavily present in their book to the degree that sometimes one can feel that they take away from the significance of the authors’ own ideas and contributions. The approach to scientific reality and its measurement developed by Nalimov and Mulchenko (1971) differs markedly from Price’s. First, at a basic ontological level, science is understood relationally as a self-­organising system steered by information flows. The task of scientometrics is to inquire about the directions and developments of these flows. Contrary to Price’s work, Nalimov and Mulchenko’s research was inspired by mathematics, biology and cybernetics, emphasising the relationality and totality of the relational web instead of the individual atom-like elements. This differentiation was evident in the basic unit of analysis used by the Soviet duo. The focus was not on the individual scientist but on information flow, networks and relations formed through communication practices. Nalimov and Mulchenko’s vision of the medium of communication, the scientific article, also differed markedly from Price’s. They saw its genesis in the need to accelerate information flows, thus making the article the medium of this flow. The authors propose an alternative approach to understanding the collective dimension of science, emphasising the role of invisible collectives rather than invisible colleges. Invisible collectives reproduce over time in a less restrictive manner, with substantive contributions to scientific discussion serving as the entry pass, rather than social proximity, prestige, or initiation rituals required for an actual membership in an invisible college. At first glance, Nalimov and Mulchenko’s vision may seem somewhat idealistic. After all, they developed it on the assumption of science’s self-­ organising and autonomous potential (Wouters, 1999, p.  87), able to develop outside the market, the state and systems of hierarchical prestige. However, it constitutes an unrealised potential for thinking about a measure of the common in science. Indeed, it expresses a belief in the inevitably shared and relational nature of value signalling in scholarly communication. The measures and ways of measuring planned by the authors assumed freedom from the appropriating function of individual authorship. The Science Citation Index allowed them to think about the potential and importance of relations in science, yet the actual social function of Garfield’s invention was only about to emerge.

138 

K. SZADKOWSKI

6.2.7   Journal Impact Factor: Culmination Point Although Garfield had already used the phrase “impact factor” in his 1955 article, developed later into a tool (Garfield & Sher, 1963), it was not until 1975 that the Science Citation Index first incorporated Journal Citation Reports—a list of indexed journals presented with a calculated “journal impact factor” (JIF), a breakthrough in dealing with the information crisis in journal selection by US librarians (Archambault & Larivière, 2009; Larivière & Sugimoto, 2019). Merely measuring the number of citations of a journal is inadequate for determining its standing in the academic literature (Garfield & Sher, 1963, p. 200). Therefore, the JIF needed a slight modification. Hence, its modern version consists of “the ratio of the number of citations received in a given year by papers published in a journal in the previous two years, divided by the number of positions” (Larivière & Sugimoto, 2019, p. 5). Garfield’s index allowed the identification of the most citable journals and quickly became the subject of harsh criticism. As Archambault and Larivière (2009, pp. 636–637) argue, historically, criticism from the academic community arose because of the qualities inherent in the JIF.  The continued use of the JIF for research evaluation has divorced it from its original purpose, which was to support US librarians in purchasing journal subscriptions during times of shrinking budgets. This was meant to aid public universities in navigating new, increasingly capitalist realities. Moreover, due to the its arbitrary design, with its two-year window, and the ease with which editors have been able to manipulate it, the JIF has lost credibility. Nevertheless, introducing the JIF into the academic landscape changed it permanently. It was primarily because Garfield succeeded in constructing a quantitative index that showed the hierarchy between the journals he included and allowed it to be objectified as a hierarchy of contributions to science and, thus, a quantitative scale of prestige. Thus, within the framework of a seemingly simple index, a specific procedure for the homogenisation of values in the field of science came to a close. The JIF encapsulated in the abstract measures certain social relations in global science, reinforcing the impetus for treating citations as the proper and almost sole currency within the field. It was supported not only by the line of reflection on the measurement of academic labour that preceded it but also by concrete social processes of creating and disseminating metrics in higher education and science systems. The design and implementation of the JIF was the culmination of efforts to develop measures of the science and higher

6 MEASURE 

139

education landscape, which opened the door to its further capitalist subsumption. The development of measures and metrics in science and higher education has changed significantly since the introduction of the first JIF. As a quantitative measure designed to assess the relative importance and impact of scientific journals, the JIF was a pivotal point in the development of metrics in science and became an essential tool for measuring the scientific impact and prestige of journals and, by extension, the researchers who published in them. The growth and adoption of JIFs stimulated an explosion in the development and implementation of various indicators and metrics aimed at assessing and evaluating academic work. These include the Hirsch index, which measures the productivity and impact of an individual researcher, and the Eigenfactor score, which assesses the overall importance of a journal in its field. Other notable metrics include the SCImago Journal Rank, Source Normalised Impact per Paper and Altmetrics, which measure the online attention a scholarly work receives. As government and capital demands for more comprehensive evaluation tools increased, so did the complexity of metrics. The proliferation of different indicators allowed for a more granular examination of different aspects of academic work. Nevertheless, the emergence of the JIF as the cornerstone metric for evaluating journals controlled by capitalist publishers has done capital a favour. 6.2.8  Summary The history of successful and failed attempts to measure academic labour and its institutional context gives us a starting lesson on academia’s current predicament. It also helps us to understand where, from the point of view of capital, the processes that allow the value of academic labour to be expressed can be located. Moreover, historical efforts to capture and develop appropriate measures of the productivity of academic labour, reconstructed above, allow us to understand where the limits of capitalist subsumption lie. The rather crude procedures proposed by Cooke were quickly rejected as they proved inefficient in the complex sphere of intellectual production with its strong attachment to autonomy. The issue was similar with Suvorov’s proposed quantitative approach to measuring the time efficiency of academic research. Although here we had an attempt to discern the categories of the output produced by academics, there was a lack of quantifiable criteria for grasping quality. The university is not a

140 

K. SZADKOWSKI

factory, and thus Taylorism, principally concerned with reducing the time span of each activity, cannot constitute a sole route to raising its productivity. In contemporary public higher education, one can observe a clear trend towards the acceleration of academic labour, particularly related to the capital mediating its circulation in its specific fragments (mainly the sphere of publications and their preparation). Similar trends are even more pronounced in the private for-profit sector described in the Chap. 4, where the acceleration of work, as well as the technologically mediated scaling up, is the key to commercial success. Rather than the Taylorist organisation of the workplace, which dominated the best part of the twentieth century, today, bibliometrics constitute a central reference point in addressing the effectiveness of academic labour and the higher education context. The scientific study (and measurement) of scientific dynamics and productivity has contributed to the development of the capitalist mechanisms currently in place for measuring scientific labour rather than the simple transplantation of Taylorist, industrial, direct-time-based methods of measuring and controlling labour productivity. Other histories of the spread of mechanisms for measuring science and higher education can be identified. However, the genealogical line reconstructed above has been dominant in transforming higher education. It allows the relationship between academic labour and capital to be shown in the context of higher education systems understood as social systems of capitalist production.

6.3  Autonomist Marxism and Academic Labour Beyond Measure With the context established for measurement procedures in higher education and science, we can now address Marxist theory. A central issue in recent Marxist debates concerns the expansion of capital to immaterial and biopolitical sectors of production, such as the creation of affects, ideas, knowledge, codes, and symbols. The key question is whether this process undermines the Marxian labour theory of value, leading to a crisis of the “law of value” as a self-regulatory rule of capital and rendering Marxist theory obsolete. As Hardt and Negri assert in Commonwealth, the critique of political economy, including the Marxist tradition, has generally focused on measurement and quantitative methods to understand surplus value and exploitation. Biopolitical products, however, tend to exceed all quantitative measurement and take common forms. (2009, p. 135)

6 MEASURE 

141

The thesis on the common ontology of biopolitical products, which is beyond measure, accompanies Hardt and Negri from Empire to Assembly. It implies that intellectual production, the basis of academic endeavour, cannot be effectively measured through the amount of direct labour time spent in production. This is and has been evident when one refers to the realm of higher education and science, as we have studied already. For the same reason, those who attempted to develop the measurement procedures for science were urged to go beyond the crude Taylorism and at least supplement it with other means of controlling and measuring academic labour. The invention of the bibliometrics analysis of scientific production was one of the first “successful” attempts to quantify quality and the social dynamics of this field of production. However, how is this immeasurability of immaterial (including academic) labour to be understood? There are at least two ways to approach it. Firstly, it can be read in a purely ontological context. The immeasurability referred to by Hardt, and Negri (2009) can be understood as the non-homogeneity of a heterogeneous reality, e.g. in relation to mathematical measures of spatial or temporal relations. Lukács wrote about this in his Ontology of Social Being as follows: However, all the marvellous successes achieved through rationalisation or abstraction do not change the fundamental ontological fact that geometry and mathematics are reflections of and not parts of ‘elements of’ etc. physical reality. Because they reflect its moments of fundamental importance, [namely] purely spatial relations or purely quantitative relations, they are an excellent tool for learning about any reality insofar as spatial or quantitative relations constitute its essence. With all these stunning results, however, one must always bear in mind the simple truth that such representations can reflect only certain moments of reality and that reality existing in itself is still composed of an infinite multiplicity of other components. (Lukács, 1982, p. 71)

Measures, similarly, are not an element of reality, but a reflection of it, a reflection of some aspect that we recognise (synecdoche) as essential and defining to the whole. What might have seemed controversial in the context of Lukács’ deeply philosophical considerations—the possibility of knowing reality as such, concrete, in its naked material immediacy—in the case of the reality of science does not seem to be in doubt. We are still mindful of the fact that citations are, as Paul Wouters (1999) put it, “the

142 

K. SZADKOWSKI

mirror image of reference”, they are merely a representation of the communicative practices of science. To know the reality of science and higher education through the prism of the citation system is a radical reduction. Such statements are completely uncontroversial. Negri brings similar thinking into the consideration of measure by stating that ultimately, in extending the reign of abstract and homogeneous measures into immaterial labour, “measure begins to measure itself” (Negri, 1996). In this process, valuing what is measured comes about—or in other words, the abstract measure applied to social reality, in the end, reflects nothing more than the level to which the heterogeneous reality is already subsumed under it. It is through the implementation of homogeneous measures into the otherwise heterogeneous reality that measures reinforce themselves through the very act of measuring. This has been observed in many spheres of social reality, leading to the formulation of common laws ruling social practices, like Campbell’s law, highlighting that the more the measure is used to steer the social reality, the more it distorts it. This occurs because capital operates on a principle similar to the neo-­ positivist reason, which Lukács criticises, leading a constant effort to homogenise, to castrate reality of its heterogeneous concreteness, its historicity. This movement also cuts out of things their genesis; it decontextualises them. It provides a logical template for how many modern devices operate, e.g., measure, value, quantity, reason, chronological time, and capital. Understanding the immeasurability of academic labour through the lens of ontological specificity, however, is not the only way. The other way is political. It has its roots in Marx’s so-called Fragment on machines, where he points to the contradiction that (in the course of the development of industrial production based on fixed capital) occurs between the involuntary reduction of the time of indispensable labour to a minimum and its replacement by complex social labour, and the constant and conscious imposition of the law of value and direct labour time as a measure of these activities. In other words, the more productive forces develop, the less time is required for laborious activities. The amount of social time freed in this way can be allocated to creative and socially productive activities. The more general production becomes social and, for example, dependent on science or creativity, the less the direct time spent in production is an adequate measure. Therefore, by virtue of this fundamental contradiction, the value becomes less and less an adequate measure of social or ‘real wealth’ [das wirkliche Reichtum] (Marx, 1973, p. 708). Here we come to the most controversial and yet a most important

6 MEASURE 

143

moment, namely the undermining, in the course of the development of production based on the appropriation of social productive forces by capital, of the validity of direct labour time as a measure of social wealth and value as its form. The realisation of the potential produced involuntarily by capital must presuppose the abolition of the value-form. Marx leaves no doubt about this, saying that: As soon as labour in its direct form ceases to be the great source of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and therefore exchangeable value [ceases to be the measure] of use-value. (Marx, 1973, p. 705)

This opens up possibilities for sketching a vision of the socio-economic organisation that could emerge after positive abolition of labour time as a measure of value. Its basis would be the development of the “social individual” (Marx, 1973), made possible by the reduction of non-necessary labour time and the social distribution of leisure time. However, the mere rise of scientific knowledge and technology and its application to production will not suffice. Rather, the horizon of alternatives sketched by Marx is a “possibility” present at every moment, emerging on the basis of this expanding social contradiction. Although the direction of capitalist development offers the possibility of a new, emancipatory social structure, its general realisation is not possible under capitalism, especially within the tight embrace of the artificial measurement procedures its rule imposes. Despite the numerous critiques over the years that have attempted to refute the ontological thesis articulated by Hardt and Negri in Empire, examining it from historical (Caffentzis, 2013), philological (Heinrich, 2013), or sector-specific perspectives (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009), the fundamental insights of the Italian-American duo remain valid. First, at an ontological level, the reality is composed of heterogeneous relations, elements and the common, while processes calculated to abstract and homogenise this complexity and subsume it under a common denominator are as old as human history (Lukács, 1982). Moreover, the processes of constructing and imposing a heterogeneous reality on a homogeneous measure are a constantly renewing element of human reality (Kula, 1986). It is only through the stabilisation, coagulation and naturalisation of measures that we lose sight of the social processes of a struggle between classes leading to the creation and imposition of specific ways of measuring. Second, by identifying that capitalist development processes foster the (potential) liberation of social time resources and their allocation to social

144 

K. SZADKOWSKI

creativity, this does not automatically assume a transition to an alternative to capitalist relations. Capital will continue a process of imposing familiar measures and abstractions of a complex reality. However, as events unfold, the politically imposed measures will appear increasingly irrational. In the growing social sense of the irrationality of measures and the inherent reduction of a complex reality, theorists like Hardt and Negri see the potential for an organised opposition to the rule of capital. The irrationality of the reduction of the complex reality of science and higher education to simple performance measures is almost self-evident to most participants in the sector. Capital continues its march of abstraction by effectively developing a complex architecture for stabilising measures in higher education.

6.4   Measurement Apparatuses in Higher Education As is already clear, to dominate and control a particular sphere of activities, capital has to establish a system of measuring labour inputs and outputs. This is its standard mode of operation. In different areas subsumed under capital, measure is introduced in order to unify the variety of activities into a single abstraction, to control them, and, most importantly, to distinguish the productive from the unproductive ones. Capitalist production depends on a high form of abstraction (Pasquinelli, 2014b). For a sector of material, industrial production, an abstract measure refers to a single unit of homogenous time with a permanent relation to socially necessary labour time as its abstract framework. For the general sphere of immaterial and biopolitical production (academic production included), measure refers rather to the scale and intensiveness of social relationships as established by the activity in question. However, this capitalist environment within which universities around the world operate (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on their geographical location) is not in itself a sufficient condition for capitalist subsumption. What is necessary is an element of political stability of measure in the system. For, contrary to what the exceptionalists discussed in Chap. 2 seem to argue, the political projects developed by national governments do not provide sufficient protection against the penetration of higher education and science by capital. On the contrary, it is precisely the race for prestige that intensifies from year to year, along with the coercion of academic labour in national systems to fulfil specific measures of progress within this race, that successive national governments aim for. In this way, the state,

6 MEASURE 

145

ceases to function as a tool to support what exceptionalists would like to see as the public good, and it begins to act as a political tool to impose and stabilise capitalist measurement in science and higher education (Krzeski, 2022). This kind of state form, the evaluative state, is a historically developed form of the political apparatus imposing the law of value on academic labour. Taking this into account, we will now move on to discuss metrological stability as it is produced within the measurement apparatuses in higher education, where the relation between the state and capital—far from taking the form of contradiction—becomes condition of this stability. This process takes us back to the late 1970s in Western Europe, where concurrently to the emergence of knowledge-driven capitalism, the state itself underwent a process of transformation. The concept of the evaluative state marks a shift in this history in the context of changing modes of higher education governance (Neave, 2012). The expansion of higher education—very much an effect of the broader transformation of capitalism itself—led to a crisis of its mode of governance (Neave & Van Vught, 1991). Coordinating the sector through centralised bureaucracy proved ineffective. Taming the sheer scale and dynamic of the sector required a new approach. In effect, a crucial change was made to how the state evaluates activities within the sector. A process of gradual reorientation of assessment of inputs necessary to achieve a given goal towards performance-­ based evaluation, that is, an assessment of the extent to which an institution has met the established criteria, was initiated. In other words, the emergence of the evaluative state is driven by the shift from ex-ante to ex-post evaluation (Neave, 2012, p. 48). This gradual process encapsulates three moments, all crucial from the perspective of the developed argument and stabilisation of the measurement apparatuses in higher education. First, state-led coordination of higher education becomes dependant on all sorts of quantitative data gathered on the sector. Thus, the emergence of the evaluative state begins with what Neave refers to as “statistical sophistication” (Neave, 2012, p. 21), that produces an up-to-date visualisation of a dynamic and changing sector. Yet, numerical data is merely a precondition of the development of the evaluative state. The production of data led to an avalanche of numbers and again the need for ordering them arose. Hence, the second crucial moment emerges—the crystallisation of what Neave calls “evaluative homogeneity”, the very instrumentality of the evaluative state, which produces stratification and differentiation within the national systems (Neave, 2012, p.  51). This instrumentality

146 

K. SZADKOWSKI

acts as great leveller. It reshapes the sector as a space of shared criteria that each institution has to meet. In turn, the degree to which a given institution meets these criteria determines its place in the vertical stratification of the sector. One can recognise in this process what we already referred to as commensuration, i.e., reducing heterogeneity and bringing both institutions and activities within the sector under common denominator. The importance of the concept of the evaluative state for the developed argument lies precisely here. Because of the evaluative homogeneity and levelling of the sector that follows, it becomes possible for capital to penetrate the sector and establish its relations within it (Krzeski, 2022). But the story does not end here. The interdependence of the evaluative state and capitalist data-providers deepens once the third moment enters the picture. Although, the evaluative state links the stratification with the levels of funding, money constitutes only one nexus of the evaluative state. Neave is very clear that it concurrently has a second crucial nexus, which consists of standing and reputation (Neave, 2012, pp.  191–192). Therefore, adapting to the imposed criteria is not driven solely by competition for funding, but at the same time it becomes entwined with competition for prestige. As such, the evaluative state solidifies the process in which capitalist measurement apparatuses instrumentalise prestige competition and merge with it. The place of the evaluative state in the measurement apparatuses in higher education echoes Marx’s own general argument about capitalist accumulation and its origins. The great quest of synchronisation of the world market cannot do without the state and its bloody legislation. Even if in our case the violence employed by the evaluative state restricts itself to much more subtle means—the violence of abstraction—the state nonetheless plays a crucial role as it is at the forefront of the commensuration process. Without this process, it would be hardly possible to think about synchronisation of different national systems on a global scale. But as such, the evaluative state forms only one of the backbones of this architecture. Thus, Marxist analysis has to venture further and ask about the interdependence of the evaluative state on other elements of the measurement apparatuses in higher education, namely, global university rankings and the oligopoly of academic publishers. Although each of these elements could be approached from the historical perspective, through the discussion of its emergence, here we are rather preoccupied with establishing relations and a loop between them that holds each of the elements of this architecture in place. Statistical sophistication and the two axes of money and prestige that emerge in the course of

6 MEASURE 

147

establishing the evaluative state provide an interesting entry point for inquiry about the relations between elements of the measurement apparatuses in question. It is interesting because the state’s increased focus on all data and indicators of activity in the sector is accompanied by the simultaneous growth of commercial entities eager to respond to this need. Global university rankings are one of them, thus forming the second backbone of the contemporary measurement apparatuses. Having their origin in the work of James McKeen Cattell, which we have already touched upon, they did not truly rise to power until 1980s (Hazelkorn, 2015), which was the very same period when the process of establishing the evaluative state in Western Europe began to accelerate. Due to their prevalent role in the contemporary higher education landscape and their long history (Hammarfelt et al., 2017; Wilbers & Brankovic, 2021), rankings were widely discussed in higher education research. In fact, the majority of the contemporary discussion on measurement apparatuses in higher education focuses predominately on this element, especially from a policy perspective and a sharing of “best” practices. However, in the course of this discussion, the critical discourse on global university rankings has also been widely developed, most often in the form of pointing out shortcomings of the methodologies behind the rankings. This critique has been quickly co-opted by the rankings themselves, making them even more resilient (Hamann & Ringel, 2023). Nonetheless, despite their persistent presence, the negative effects that they have on the global higher education landscape are well documented. First and foremost, they are recognized as key drivers of competition in academia (Brankovic et al., 2018; Münch, 2014), as well as a source of hegemony and geopolitical inequality between different national systems (Marginson & Ordorika, 2011). Without belittling the accuracy of these diagnoses, however, we seek a different perspective. The persistence of global university rankings stems from being the keystone of capitalist production within the sector, rather than from neoliberal discourse. Within the contemporary measurement apparatuses, global university rankings and the evaluative state go hand in hand, furthering the commensuration process on a global scale. They not only force institutions to produce extensive data to feed their algorithms, but by establishing their criteria, rankings produce an effect of reactivity, that is recreating the world in the image contained in the imposed measure (Espeland & Sauder, 2007). Many comply because, once again, just like in the case of evaluative state, the issues of funding and status become interdependent in this

148 

K. SZADKOWSKI

context. More often than not, status and prestige are the currency that institutions exchange with state agencies for funds that allow them to continue operating. This does not mean, of course, that the status-­ multiplication-­oriented activities inherent in the academic field cannot, as it were, be subsumed under the logic of capital accumulation. This problem, however, will be dealt with in more detail in Chap. 7. Here we merely point out that, before all else, the rankings enact a far-reaching centralization on a global scale of the previously dispersed area of regulating positional games and status struggles in academic fields. As a result of the operation of global university rankings, the academic world is reduced to two complementary spheres (Marginson, 2009)—the sphere of an institution’s performance, most often measured by the number of publications and citation patterns, and the sphere of institutional status. As the two spheres become increasingly identified with one other in the face of the operation of rankings, the only thing that begins to matter in everyday academic work is publishing, especially in the “right places”. After all, the vast majority of global rankings, if not focused entirely on the publication performance of the ranked institutions, make significant use of them. At this point, however, the question arises as to how we can identify these right places for publication? The answer comes in the form of the third element of the measurement apparatuses. Namely, commercial academic publishers and data providers and the scale to which they all dominate scholarly communication. Over the past two decades, and as a result of intensive journal buyouts from small publishers and academic societies, five major players have emerged in this market, effectively forming an oligopoly. As a result, there is now a situation in some scientific fields where fifty percent or more of all scientific articles are published by one of these major players (Larivière et al., 2015). This process has numerous consequences for the political economy of academic publishing, of which rising prices and forcing universities to buy access to journals in a form of large packages are just two. However, from the perspective of the metrological architecture in question, it has to be viewed together with the process of strengthening the position of various suppliers of metrics for measuring and evaluating scientific publications (Wilsdon et  al., 2015; Posada & Chen, 2018). Taken together one can see an emergence of a powerful mediation—the products of small number of commercial entities take part in coordinating academic labour on a global scale. As the scholarly communication practices of academics all around the globe are channelled towards publication in the venues controlled by the academic publishing

6 MEASURE 

149

oligopoly and indexed in databases that became identified with the highest prestige, we can finally see a loop forming within the measurement apparatuses. Those same publications are the ones sought by both the evaluative state for the purpose of national evaluation and global university rankings for the purpose of benchmarking institutions from around the globe. The stability of measure and in fact the whole metrological architecture is possible precisely due to the circular and reciprocal nature of relations between each element of the measurement apparatuses. From the perspective of capital, what is important within higher education is that which falls within the established framework of measurement, that is, only that which is visible and countable. Here lies the true purpose of measurement apparatuses in higher education: relentless transformation of the heterogenous wealth of social relations into quantitative and homogenous forms and directing the energy contained in those relations in such a way that it can be entirely encapsulated within those forms. The evaluative state, the global university rankings and academic publishers and data providers each play their respective role in this process. Moreover, taken together, the three backbones of the measurement apparatuses in higher education attest to the growing interdependence of capital and the state in the process of hybridization of the private and the public. It follows that any attempt to overcome capitalist control over measurement apparatuses in higher education and science has to break the relation between the state and capital, rather than simply pin its hopes on state control and regulation of capital presence within the sector.

6.5  Standardisation and Synchronisation of Academic Labour The operations of the state-driven architecture of measuring academic labour in higher education cannot be taken for its subsumption under capital. The intensification of measurement and the concomitant progressive standardisation of academic labour worldwide, and the synchronisation of the pace and rhythms of work in different parts of the global system, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for speaking of purely capitalist relations in the public sector of science and higher education. All too often, however, they are read as synonymous with capitalist subsumption (Arboledas-Lerida, 2023). One of the classic Marxist works that helped to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms for stabilising the law of value and socially necessary labour time in higher education was

150 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Massimo De Angelis and David Harvie’s (2009) article on the British higher education system. By looking at the concepts developed by the authors, as well as pointing out their limitations, we will be able to better understand the mechanisms by which the measure of academic labour is constituted in a particular system. The process of politically constituting the measurement of academic labour is the starting point and binding moment for further relations between academic labour and capital. De Angelis and Harvie’s starting point involve debates on the immeasurability of immaterial labour, with capital on one side and academic labour, an exemplar of immaterial labour, on the other. The whole article is played out in a counter-dialogue with Hardt and Negri, especially their Empire, and the assumption that immaterial labour transcends measurement, which we discussed earlier in this chapter. From a very early point in their analysis, De Angelis and Harvie touched upon the core issue, describing the ongoing situation in the higher education and science sector, when they wrote that “Armies of economists, statisticians, management-­ scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract—that is, to link work and capitalist value.” (2009, p. 3). This is precisely what is at stake in the sector globally, and it is a process with a long history, as this chapter aimed to show. Measuring and valorising academic labour is a complex process that never occurs spontaneously; it has to be planned and orchestrated. It is a science-based social undertaking, similar in its scale to the historical attempts at changing the rhythms of physical labour through its subsumption under the rule of the mechanical clock (Thompson, 1967). The necessity of a “political” stabilising measure in the field of immaterial labour, pointed out by Hardt and Negri, is indirectly demonstrated by De Angelis and Harvie. Their argument, however, moves almost exclusively at the level of considering political processes and their consequences rather than ontology. Indeed, they capture the process of standardisation in higher education from the perspective of the changes in state policy towards the sector in the UK, as well as the changes that accompany the implementation of these policies at the level of individual institutions. Measure, in turn, is read by them as a category of struggle that can be waged in two directions. For it consists of not only the process of establishing and stabilising the measure by the state and its agendas but also the bottom-up acts of opposing these processes and going beyond the measure.

6 MEASURE 

151

Contrary to Hardt and Negri’s argument that immaterial labour is beyond measure in general, the authors primarily focus on showing that effective processes of measuring academic labour do occur and have a significant impact on academic labour. However, they do not go beyond understanding measure as direct labour time. The task De Angelis and Harvie set for themselves boils down to “uncover[ing] capital’s attempt to measure immaterial labour and thus (re)impose value and the law of value” (2009, p.  9). This task is important; however, it is hard to find in the authors’ text any manifestation of capital that would stand behind the measurement processes they describe. This is because they make the tacit assumption that it does not really matter in which relation labour remains with capital—measured, compared labour is already subordinated. As they state, “Capital is indeed pervasive, and its means of measurement often appear distant and elusive. But they nevertheless contribute to the constitution of the norms and modes of production—the how?, how much?, how long? and how many? that delimit our social doings” (De Angelis & Harvie, 2009, p.  8). However, this is a somewhat paradoxical positioning of the issue. Finally, they point out that increasingly universities are “emulating” business (2009, p. 9). This point is where I find their proposal most problematic. The situation described is more akin to the ideal subsumption of academic labour under capital, which I have referred to in Chap. 5. Here, it is sufficient to reiterate Marx’s notion that, in societies dominated by capitalist production, even non-capitalist producers find themselves subject to the influence of capitalist imagination. This is essentially Marx’s fundamental insight, which in my reading is related to his notion of ideal subsumption—an imaginary order that influences actors in a society with capitalist relations of production, regardless of whether they are oriented towards the production of surplus value and the valorisation of capital. This is how we can look at public institutions of higher education that organise their internal labour relations. Standardisation processes occur according to this logic even in formally not subsumed under capital, public and state-subsidised higher education institutions. The observation of this fact, even in an insufficiently in-depth form, is nevertheless a fundamental merit of this text. How academic work is standardised under conditions of ideal subsumption is the forerunner of a further deepening (or rather its very conditions of possibility) of the actual subsumption of labour in the sector in question. However, mere subsumption to the “needs of capital” is insufficient. In a society dominated by capital, every

152 

K. SZADKOWSKI

moment serves to satisfy its needs. This is not a distinctive feature of capitalist relations in the higher education sector. Harvie and De Angelis introduce two concepts, which are intended to help them conceptualise the process of stabilising the law of value, the socially necessary labour time in higher education: (1) the diachronic (standardisation) movement—the process of reducing the time of intangible work components forced by the establishment of (top-down) standards; and (2) the synchronic (standardisation) movement—the process of establishing conditions for comparability and measurability according to a single standard of different heterogeneous work. According to the authors, diverse and dispersed measures establish socially necessary labour time in higher education. As they argue, “there does not appear to be any universal measure” (2009, p.  25) and historically, this observation is correct. However, the process of slowly establishing a universal measure and the proliferation and ossification of global university rankings and their powerful supporter—the evaluative state—seem to be progressing. Regardless, the authors rightly point to three different levels of manifestation of the processes of measuring, standardising and comparing academic performance: institutional (with local indicators of labour efficiency and institutional procedures of academic labour assessments), national (with general statistics employed to steer the systems), and global (with rankings stimulating the competition between the nation countries). Moreover, “the processes and tools we have described as operating within higher education clearly have counterparts in every other sector of the economy” (2009, p. 28). It is undoubtedly to De Angelis and Harvie’s credit that they show how standardisation and synchronisation of academic labour occur at different levels of the academic enterprise under conditions of ideal subsumption of labour under capital. However, more is needed to formulate how the academic law of value functions.

6.6  Valuation and Valorisation of Academic Labour As we have discussed at the beginning of this chapter for higher education and science, a measure of academic value can be grasped not only in terms of socially necessary calculable output per unit of time (e.g. five articles per year) but also in terms of output in specific venues (journals with calculated indicators and included in specific databases, like Web of Science or

6 MEASURE 

153

Scopus), and in the end, as an output characterised by a particular impact per time ratio (e.g., accumulation of a specific number of citations). In other words, there are specific characteristics that academic output needs to meet in order to be qualified as valuable. This is how the law of value operates in higher education and science. Academic production is bound to socially necessary impact/time—that is, the time required to produce a use value of a certain impact (a published output that counts within a given national or institutional evaluation procedure) under the conditions of production that are considered “normal” for a given higher education system and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent in the working process of that system. Mediated through the global university rankings criteria, Clarivate Analytics and RELX’s databases create a template for the measurement of the value of social relations in global academia, at the same time, they are used as a strict point of reference during national and institutional processes of evaluation of higher education systems, institutions and individual academics (Krzeski, 2022; Krzeski et al., 2022). This process reveals the twofold nature of contemporary metadata as a “source of surplus value and an apparatus of social control” (Celis, 2015). It brings the two regimes together: the economic and the political. Thus, as Matteo Pasquinelli has rightly observed, metadata becomes the “measure of the value of social relations” and a mechanism of social control (Pasquinelli, 2015, pp. 63–64). Capital can no longer organise a top-down cycle of cooperation and deliver its schemas (Roggero, 2010). For this reason, in the academic field, its efforts have to concentrate on establishing and universalising measurement criteria for global academic labour—that is, on the organisation of the processes of capturing rather than producing value. This is an immensely complicated task. A system of interconnected mechanisms of global rankings based on bibliometric tools for metadata extraction, as seen from the perspective of publishing capital, is a complex instrument devised to enable access to value generated initially elsewhere. We see then that the merchant faction of capital in higher education gets the opportunity to carry out processes of valorisation through its capability to set and oversee the conditions for the functioning of the entire global system of institutions. This global system comprises the more important productive capacity, “centres”, and the less relevant, yet rather important when it comes to consumption, “peripheries”. In this intricate and dynamic arrangement, it is a measure that enables social, and socially produced, heterogeneous wealth to appear as “value” in the eyes of the capital. The

154 

K. SZADKOWSKI

complex social, state-mediated mechanisms for counting enable heterogeneous social energy to be channelled to produce what can be measured and, ultimately, presented as homogeneous value. The broader academic debate in social sciences recently discovered big data capitalism and the fact that monitoring social behaviour could, if conducted within a stable infrastructure connected with some enforcing stimuli for action, provide the large-scale behavioural surplus (Zuboff, 2019) that private companies can easily capitalise. The scientometricians have been experimenting with this strategy since the times of Eugene Garfield and Derek De Solla Price’s reflection on indexing and expansion of science. Garfield developed the first infrastructure and first algorithms on which the expansion of science could be not only monitored but also, to a certain degree, predicted and in certain aspects, influenced and controlled. Recently, Pooley (2022) came back to this story to connect the process and discuss some small practical and empirical details on the expansion of data-extracting companies in academic publishing. It all serves him to present the phenomenon as resembling Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism”—but in academic publishing. From Pooley’s point of view, Zuboff’s conception is far too concentrated on expanding the advertisement market. Therefore, he wants to expand the concept to include activities that resemble the analysed sector (publishing) much better. As he puts it, in the publishing industry, the core business strategy is the same: extract data from behaviour to feed predictive models that, in turn, get refined and sold to customers. In one case, it is search terms, and in the other, abstracts and citations, but either way, the point is to mint money from the by-products of (consumer or scholarly) behaviour. In place of Google’s propensity to buy, Clarivate is selling bets on future scholarly productivity and impact, among other academic prediction products. (Pooley, 2022, p. 3)

Nonetheless, Pooley’s definition of the surveillance publisher is far from being satisfactory: “We can call a company a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fuelled by data extracted from researcher behaviour.” (2022, p.  5). He focuses on the revenues and the form of data extraction. Therefore, like in Zuboff’s book, no sign of exploitation or antagonistic relation connects academic labour and capital in surveillance publishing. Academic labour is not subsumed, just skilfully cheated and robbed of the data it produced as a side-effect of its actions.

6 MEASURE 

155

What is important, however, is that Pooley, who is not a Marxist scholar, rightly emphasised the distortion of the academic signalling system by the capital actors in the field of science publishing. This is how capital subsumes the area of scholarly communication and funnels academic labour into the channels where it could be validated as valuable. He rightly pointed at the moment of the Elsevier’s first substantial expansion— merger with Pergamon Press—“Both firms hiked their subscription prices aggressively, making huge profits off the prestige signalling of Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor.” (2022, p. 6). This is how the companies started to gain momentum in the process of developing their dominance over the field of academic publishing. The JIF formulated by Garfield initially gave impulse to the expansion. Garfield’s tool not only allowed librarians to identify worthy journals, but it first and foremost helped the already big players in the publishing market by indicating which journals were worth buying, and so it accelerated the process of acquisitions, opening the doors to further capitalist subsumption of the whole field. It supported the acquisition and further oligopolisation of the academic publishing sector (Larivière et al., 2015), but the process did not end there. We know that the success of the merchant capital faction is highly dependent on its skill to present its circuits as the only academic circuits of “objective” prestige distribution. This endeavour relies on developing bibliometric indicators, global university rankings and nation-states that seek to join the global race for prestige and academic excellence. The more the academic prestige game coincides with the profit project of oligopoly of academic publishers, the more academic “production for production’s sake” accelerates as the logic of speeding up the capital turnover time takes over. Metadata providers play a decisive role in subordinating academic labour to the interests of academic publishing merchant capital. If the “impact factor” or similar indicators are nowadays a capitalist indicator of socially necessary impact/time for academic labour, the capitalist law of academic value is empty or unanchored. It is a politically imposed form, just like the law of value that stabilises the capitalist economy overall (Negri, 1996). The chief pursuit of capital in the academic sphere is, therefore, making the heterogeneous products of the human mind countable and comparable. On the one hand, the measurement practices in higher education extract value from the relations; on the other hand, they indicate what is directly productive for capital. We can even say, as Matteo Pasquinelli claims (2014a, b), that capital as such is a process of counting. The

156 

K. SZADKOWSKI

companies dealing with the processing of bibliometric data (such as Clarivate Analytics or Elsevier) constitute centres of calculation that work in the service of merchant capital involved in academic publishing, conducting activities focused on profit themselves, and comprising one of its factions. Pasquinelli, who has long been interested in the mechanisms of transforming the general intellect into a network surplus value, focuses on various algorithms and mechanisms for generating metadata. Pasquinelli (2015) distinguishes two types of information machines and algorithms: (a) those enabling the translation of information into information; and (b) those enabling the accumulation of information and the extraction of metadata, i.e. information about information. The mechanisms that Clarivate Analytics uses in its Web of Science database, especially in its flagship product, JIF, are algorithms of the latter type. As Pasquinelli writes, “Metadata is the ‘measure’ of information, the computation of their social dimension and the potentiality of their transformation into value” (2011, p.  22). From our perspective, one of the aspects of the functioning of algorithmic machines that generate and accumulate metadata is interesting. Pasquinelli writes that “metadata are used to measure the value of social relations. At the first level, information accumulation reflects and measures social relations’ production to transform them into a commodity value” (2011, p. 23). The mechanism that may shed some light on how such bibliometric indicators function in relation to academic labour is the logic behind Google PageRank, which according to Pasquinelli, is a diagram of cognitive capitalism. In 1998, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page laid down the foundations for the PageRank algorithm, noting that its fundamental logical matrix was derived from citation-counting mechanisms within academic bibliometrics. Google PageRank allows a hierarchy of results to be produced to extract the most relevant ones. It can thus transform collective knowledge (such as that produced by the citation system) into a proprietary scale of values—in a hierarchy that is then transformed into a proprietary product. PageRank is a “machine for the capture of living time and living labour capable of transforming the general intellect into network value” (Pasquinelli, 2009, p. 2). A similar way of determining values—as indicated by Pasquinelli—can be applied to any cognitive object: “In the case of both academic publications, as well as commercial brands or internet rankings, equivalent processes of condensation can be assumed” (2009, p. 5).

6 MEASURE 

157

As part of this algorithm: “the value is determined by both the quantity and the quality of incoming links. In particular, a link coming from a high-­ ranking node has more value than a link coming from a lower-grade node” (Pasquinelli, 2009, p. 3). In the case of index databases like Web of Science or Scopus, the question of node value is defined as a threshold condition (the very possibility of being included in a given database)—journals that are indexed are determined (through existing references to them in other ‘visible’ journals) as having ‘high rank’—the remaining ones are excluded from the sphere of visibility. In this way, the hierarchy of references is flattened in the database. However, in contrast with Pasquinelli’s view, it should be noted that in the case of academic labour in relation to merchant capital involved in academic publishing and mediated by metadata providers, it is not that the value is captured but that the measure allows a social and socially created heterogeneous wealth of relations (the common) to be revealed as value. Mechanisms of capture simply allow targeting—often with the help of state institutions, as we have seen in the case of state procedures for the evaluation of academic labour, which De Angelis and Harvie (2009) described with reference to the British case (for an updated picture see. Woodcock, 2018)—of heterogeneous social energy to produce what can be measured and shown as value. One example is the algorithms that fuel the contemporary global university rankings, which are mechanisms for determining prestige within the field composed of higher education institutions. However, mediation is done on two levels—rankings are a second-degree algorithm. The first is the distribution of citations in specific databases and journal positions calculated on their basis. Within these databases, the positioning of academic journals is first made by the activity of individual researchers (not only their contribution in the form of articles but also bibliographic references used within them); then, the data and the results of the comparisons constructed on their basis feed the engines of ranking algorithms. To paraphrase Pasquinelli, one can say that what “impact factor” or “source normalized impact per paper” “recognises and measures are the network value in its quantitative form” (2009, p. 6). While Google achieved, through the use of the PageRank algorithm, not only “the dominant position in network indexing, but also a monopoly on the production of this network value” (Pasquinelli, 2009), in the field of scientific production and bibliometrics, the struggle for the monopoly is taking place between Clarivate Analytics, with its patented

158 

K. SZADKOWSKI

JIF product, and RELX, with its various indicators (like CiteScore) calculated based on data from the Scopus database. However, the importance and the rate of success of each of the private companies is demonstrated by the role they play in the context of data delivery for the global rankings of universities (where the balance is slowly shifting towards the dominance of RELX), as well as for the national evaluation procedures and institutional assessments of individual academics. It is such rankings and evaluation procedures that focus the attention of legislators, societies or the management of academic institutions around the world, contributing to the intensification of competition between researchers and institutions, and as a result, to even more absolute submission of the research results to journals indexed in these databases. It is in these two contexts (the production of data transformed by database owners into metadata supplying global and national rankings and publishing the results of their research work, primarily in commercial journals indexed in these databases) that the measures of productivity of academic labour for capital should be considered today.

6.7  Conclusion In this chapter, I have undertaken a rethinking of the measurement of academic labour and its relevance to the possibility of its subsumption under capital. I began with an overview of historical theories of measure in science and higher education, pointing out the limitations of those based on the measurement of direct labour time. In both the West and the Soviet Union, a Taylorist approach to the organisation of academic production and its measurement was developed. Nowhere, however, did this type of approach become the sole and dominant way of organising work in science. It was only the mediation of the development of measures in the specific practices of the academic field—the mutual referencing of participants in scientific discussion—that led to the creation of metrics that were adopted in the processes of measuring the productivity of academic labour. Central to this process was the possibility of creating a specific tool, the Science Citation Index, and, in subsequent years, an indicator to estimate the value of the journals indexed in it, the JIF. The foundations were thus laid for the gradual emergence of what I have called in the chapter measurement apparatuses in higher education. The constant and multi-level measurement of academic labour is a fact of life in the academy today. But this does not alter the fact that academic labour (like all labour in general),

6 MEASURE 

159

in its ontological heterogeneity, transcends the framework imposed on it by an abstract and necessarily reductive measure. Whatever irrationalities this incompatibility generates, a solution to it is only possible through political contestation. Finally, I have shown that the measurement apparatuses in higher education, by translating or contributing to its progressive standardisation and acceleration, lead to the sanctioning of a particular coercion—they sanction the channelling of productive efforts in the sector into specific journals controlled by a faction of merchant capital. They also provide the key to understanding the hybrid subsumption of academic labour that this faction brings about. But if the capitalist measure is an integral part of the stabilisation of capitalist relations in a given sector of production, is it possible to imagine an alternative to it? Is it possible (and desirable) to go beyond the measure? As Godin has suggested, “like concepts, statistics are not given, but flexible and malleable, according to the aim and program of its user.” (Godin, 2009, p.  573). This introduces the possibility of formulating measures/metrics that would serve the development of the common, responding to human needs and the shaping and functioning of a social individual rather than the subsumption of labour under capital. This does not entail the advent of a “post-quantified” condition but instead developing an approach that could, through a dialectical movement (both restricting and maintaining the potential of speed and connectedness that metrics provide), form the ground for academia’s temporal autonomy. Several scholars have called for the invention and development of metrics that could measure global public goods in higher education. However, they face widespread criticism among academics who are oppressed by metric power. In this context, David Beer’s rigorous approach to metrics is revealing. He claims that they are “the means and mechanisms by which competition can develop and spread across different spheres of society” (Beer, 2016, pp. 16–17) as well as “the means by which data can be used to ascertain value.” (Beer, 2016, p. 10). If a necessary connection of metrics and procedures of measuring with valuation and valorisation seems legitimate, would fostering competition be an inevitable outcome of measurement and metricisation? Value is a form filled and shaped historically, imbued with different meanings (Kula, 1986). The construction of measurement procedures and sets of metrics oriented towards fostering and rewarding cooperation, solidarity and mutuality in science does not seem to be an unthinkable project. Metrics should be seen as mechanisms that dynamically stabilise a given system around specific values. Examples of

160 

K. SZADKOWSKI

such efforts can be found in commons-based peer-production economies, where the mechanisms of measuring non-market, non-capital, and commons-­based value are successfully developed (De Filippi & Hassan, 2015). Any attempt to propose here a ready-made solution for such a new common-based set of metrics would sound like mere speculation. However, imaging such a project should undoubtedly be oriented towards promoting a different set of values than those that define the current system and emphasise individualised competition and quantitative progressive accumulation (Krzeski, 2021). Its backbone could be the disintegration of the individualised function of authorship, abolition of corruptive mechanisms of prestige distribution in science, and detachment of measure from individuality and eminence. Instead, the aim would be to advance the metrics’ potential for fostering connectedness in the name of the common goal of transcending the limits of existing knowledge, like the direction that emerged from the unrealised projects of scientometrics by Nalimov and Mulchenko (1971). The present analysis expresses a conviction that while resisting the domination of merchant capital over academic labour, academics and the societies their labour is intended (or at least presumed) to serve need to elaborate new and globally disseminated mechanisms, first, for measuring the common and, second, for making transparent capital’s efforts to appropriate the common. Such mechanisms should relate to the accumulation process, expanding and deepening opportunities for commoning and distributing our collective power to develop research and education that is free, cooperative, and compliant with our needs. Alternative measures of academic labour will not become possible without addressing the issue of capitalist capture of academic prestige.

References Arboledas-Lerida, L. (2023). Science Communication, Competitive Project-Based Funding and the Formal Subsumption of Academic Labour Under Capital. In R. Hall, I. Accioly, & K. Szadkowski (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan. Archambault, É., & Larivière, V. (2009). History of the Journal Impact Factor: Contingencies and Consequences. Scientometrics, 79(3), 635–649. Beer, D. (2016). Metric Power. Palgrave Macmillan. Bernal, J. D. (1939). The Social Function of Science. Routledge. Brankovic, J., Ringel, L., & Werron, T. (2018). How Rankings Produce Competition: The Case of Global University Rankings. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 47(4), 270–288.

6 MEASURE 

161

Caffentzis, G. (2013). From the Grundrisse to Capital and Beyond: Then and Now. In R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, & P. D. Thomas (Eds.), In Marx’s Laboratory (pp. 265–281). Brill. Celis, C. (2015). The Machinic Temporality of Metadata. tripleC, 13(1), 101–111. Cooke, M. L. (1910). Academic and Industrial Efficiency. A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. De Angelis, M., & Harvie, D. (2009). ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race. How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism, 7(3), 3–30. De Filippi, P., & Hassan, S. (2015). Measuring Value in Commons-Based Ecosystem: Bridging the Gap Between the Commons and the Market. In G. Lovink, N. Tkacz, & P. de Vries (Eds.), The MoneyLab Reader. Institute of Network Cultures. Espeland, W.  N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40. Garfield, E. (1979). Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities. Wiley. Garfield, E. (2007). Tracing the Influence of JD Bernal on the World of Science Through Citation Analysis. In BACG/IACG Conference & Bernal Symposium on Protein Crystallization, University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland (pp. 3–4). UCD Press. Garfield, E., & Sher, I.  H. (1963). New Factors in the Evaluation of Scientific Literature Through Citation Indexing. American Documentation, 14(3), 195–201. Godin, B. (2006). On the Origins of Bibliometrics. Scientometrics, 68(1), 109–133. Godin, B. (2007). From Eugenics to Scientometrics: Galton, Cattell, and Men of Science. Social Studies of Science, 37(5), 691–728. Godin, B. (2009). The Value of Science: Changing Conceptions of Scientific Productivity, 1869 to Circa 1970. Social Science Information, 48(4), 547–586. Graham, L. R. (1967). The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932. Princeton University Press. Hamann, J., & Ringel, L. (2023). The Discursive Resilience of University Rankings. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-­022-­00990-­x Hammarfelt, B., De Rijcke, S., & Wouters, P. (2017). From Eminent Men to Excellent Universities: University Rankings as Calculative Devices. Minerva, 55(4), 391–411. Handschin, C.  H. (1911). Academic and Industrial Efficiency. Science, 33(858), 892–893. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Belknap Press.

162 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Harvie, D., & De Angelis, M. (2009). ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism, 17(3), 3–30. Hazelkorn, E. (2015). Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence. Palgrave Macmillan. Heinrich, M. (2013). The ‘Fragment on Machines’: A Marxian Misconception in the Grundrisse and Its Overcoming in Capital. In R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta, & P. D. Thomas (Eds.), In Marx’s Laboratory (pp. 195–212). Brill. Krzeski, J. (2021). How to Imagine a Non-Capitalist Measure? Going Beyond the Value Production with Spinoza’s Concept of Expression. Critique, 49(3–4), 325–342. Krzeski, J. (2022). Power and Agency Within the Evaluative State: A Strategic– Relational Approach to Quantification of Higher Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2162388 Krzeski, J., Szadkowski, K., & Kulczycki, E. (2022). Creating Evaluative Homogeneity: Experience of Constructing a National Journal Ranking. Research Evaluation, 31(3), 410–422. Kula, W. (1986). Measures and Men. Princeton University Press. Kulczycki, E. (2023). The Evaluation Game: How Publication Metrics Shape Scholarly Communication. Cambridge University Press. Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C.  R. (2019). The Journal Impact Factor: A Brief History, Critique, and Discussion of Adverse Effects. In W.  Glanzel et  al. (Eds.), Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicators (pp. 3–24). Springer. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502. Lukács, G. (1982). Wprowadzenie do ontologii bytu społecznego. Cz. 1. Współczesny stan badań. PWN. Marginson, S. (2009). Open Source Knowledge and University Rankings. Thesis Eleven, 96(1), 9–39. Marginson, S., & Ordorika, I. (2011). ‘El Central Volumen de la Fuerza’: Global Hegemony in Higher Education and Research. In D. Rhoten & C. Calhoun (Eds.), Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University (pp. 67–129). Columbia University Press. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Random House. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Vol. 1). Penguin. Marx, K. (1998). Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 37: Marx: Capital III. Lawrence & Wishart. Merton, R.  K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. Merton, R. K., & Garfield, E. (1983). Foreword. In I. D. J. Price (Ed.), Little Science, Big Science—And Beyond (pp. vii–xiii). Columbia University Press.

6 MEASURE 

163

Münch, R. (2014). Academic Capitalism. Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. Routledge. Nalimov, V. V., & Mulchenko, Z. M. (1971). Measurement of Science. Study of the Development of Science as an Information Process. Foreign Technology Division. Neave, G. (2012). The Evaluative State, Institutional Autonomy and Re-Engineering Higher Education in Western Europe: The Prince and His Pleasure. Springer. Neave, G., & Van Vught, F.  A. (1991). Prometheus Bound: The Changing Relationship Between Government and Higher Education in Western Europe. Pergamon Press. Negri, A. (1996). Twenty Thesis on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today. In S.  Makdisi, C.  Casarino, & R.  E. Karl (Eds.), Marxism Beyond Marxism (pp. 149–180). Routledge. Pasquinelli, M. (2009). Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect. In K. Becker & F. Stalder (Eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google (pp.  152–162). Transaction Publishers. Pasquinelli, M. (2011). Machinic Capitalism and Network Surplus Value: Notes on the Political Economy of the Turing Machine. Unpublished Paper, Delivered at the Joy Forever. Political Economy of Social Creativity Conference in Warsaw. [@:] https://bit.ly/2Dui9AH Pasquinelli, M. (2014a). The Number of the Collective Beast: Value in the Age of the New Algorithmic Institutions of Ranking and Rating. Unpublished Paper, Delivered at the New Industries Conference: Money and Debt in the Post-­ Industrial World, Curated by Inke Arns and Fabian Saavedra-Lara in Dortmund, Germany. [@:] http://matteopasquinelli.com/number-­of-­the-­collective­beast/ Pasquinelli, M. (2014b). The Labour of Abstraction: Seven Transitional Theses on Marxism and Accelerationism. Fillip Magazine, 19. [@:] http://fillip.ca/content/the-­labour-­of-­abstraction Pasquinelli, M. (2015). Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3), 49–68. Pendlebury, D.  A. (2020). Eugene Garfield and the Institute for Scientific Information. In R. Ball (Ed.), Handbook Bibliometrics (pp. 27–40). De Gruyter. Pitts, F. H. (2020). Value. Polity Press. Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance Publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1), 39–49. Posada, A., & Chen, G. (2018). Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers. Journal d’Interaction Personne-Système, 1, 1–21. Price, D. J. (1951). Qualitative Measures of the Development of Science. Archives Internationales d’Historie des Sciences, 14, 86–93. Price, D. J. (1963). Little Science, Big Science. Columbia University Press.

164 

K. SZADKOWSKI

van Raan, A. (2019). Measuring Science: Basic Principles and Application of Advanced Bibliometrics. In W.  Glanzel et  al. (Eds.), Springer Handbook of Science and Technology Indicatiors (pp. 237–280). Springer. Raymond, M.  G. (1911). Academic and Industrial Efficiency. Science, 34(865), 120–121. Roggero, G. (2010). Five Theses on the Common. Rethinking Marxism, 22(3), 357–373. Sokolov, M. (2021). Can Russian Research Policy Be Called Neoliberal? A Study in the Comparative Sociology of Quantification. Europe-Asia Studies, 73(6), 989–1009. Thackray, A. (1977). Measurement in the Historiography of Science. In Y. Elkna, J. Lederberg, R. K. Merton, A. Thackray, & H. Zuckerman (Eds.), Toward a Metric of Science: The Advent of Science Indicators (pp.  11–30). John Wiley & Sons. Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present, 38, 56–97. Wilbers, S., & Brankovic, J. (2021). The Emergence of University Rankings: A Historical-Sociological Account. Higher Education, 1–18. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10734-­021-­00776-­7 Wilsdon, J., Allen, L., Belfiore, E., Campbell, P., Curry, S., et  al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. HEFCE. https://doi.org/10.13140/ RG.2.1.4929.1363 Woodcock, J. (2018). Digital labour in the university: Understanding the transformations of academic work in the UK. tripleC, 16(1), 129–142. Wouters, P. (1999). The Citation Culture. Doctoral Dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Zhao, Y., Du, J., & Wu, Y. (2020). The Impact of JD Bernal’s Thoughts in the Science of Science Upon China: Implications for Today’s Quantitative Studies of Science. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(3), 959–968. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Ingram Publisher. Zuckerman, H. (2018). The Sociology of Science and the Garfield Effect: Happy Accidents, Unanticipated Developments and Unexploited Potentials. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 3(20), 1–19.

CHAPTER 7

Prestige

7.1   Introduction The previous chapter illustrated how the potential for commoning academic labour in science and higher education remains largely unrealized. This is due to the way in which measurement processes intensify, accelerate, segment, and divide academic labour both locally and globally. However, this problem is further complicated when we acknowledge that the process of measuring academic labour, which reduces it to a common denominator, is intertwined with exclusionary discourses of prestige and academic excellence. (Fyfe et al., 2017; Flink & Peter, 2018; Jong et al., 2021; Krzeski, 2022). This chapter aims to explore the meaning and transformations of prestige in contemporary science and higher education, as it is a crucial component of the ideological framework that operates within higher education subsumed under capital. While some Marxist theorists discussed in the previous chapter emphasised that academic labour goes beyond measurement, which makes it an ideal area for resisting capital (similar to other sectors of immaterial labour), for exceptionalists, discussed in Chap. 3, the inherent intermingling of the higher education sector with the mechanisms of prestige distribution was supposed to account for the inadequacy of capitalist relations for organising the sector. Universities are considered to be “prestige-­maximizers” (Leslie & Slaughter, 1997; Marginson, 2009; Blackmore, 2015; Kwiek,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_7

165

166 

K. SZADKOWSKI

2021) and are therefore assumed to always put reputational gains above direct financial benefits. Thus, purely economic efficiency criteria do not lend themselves to stimulating action in the sector, and profit-­driven actors have no chance of making it to the top of the academic hierarchy. This conclusion was extended to the motivations of individual scientists. Prestige is supposed to be the primary mechanism for motivating actions in science and higher education, and for evaluating their effectiveness. I must acknowledge that, contrary to the exceptionalist position, prestige not only fails to protect the sector from capitalist relations but rather serves as an entry point for establishing those relations through its instrumentalisation. The combination of prestige and measure serve to deepen and reproduce existing divisions in higher education. Controlling not only the measurement apparatuses (databases like Scopus or Clarivate’s Web of Science), but also the lion’s share of journals that meet the criteria of inclusion into the databases, capital taps directly into the academic community’s value-signalling and prestige distribution mechanisms. The use of measurement apparatuses, with the global university rankings as their pinnacle, helps to sanction the existing divisions in global science and higher education, perpetuating separations not only between centres and peripheries, dominant and subordinate scientific systems, and elite and mass institutions, but also between academics employed for teaching and for research (Ordorika & Lloyd, 2015; Lim & Øerberg, 2017). Elitist discourses, combined with divisive measures, find their application in the organisation of the capitalist landscape of higher education. Capital, as I have already shown in Chap. 5, thrives through both controlling the process of measurement (Lim, 2021a; Brembs et  al., 2021; Pooley, 2022), and promoting discourses of inequality produced by privately controlled, for-profit ranking organisations like QS or Times Higher Education (Lim, 2018, 2021b; Brankovic et al., 2018). To understand how capital controls both measurement apparatuses and the exclusionary discourses that are spread within global higher education, it is essential to examine the role of prestige in the internal dynamics of science and higher education. Various mechanisms for estimating prestige instead of helping to bring order to science, subsumed it, becoming a self-­ referential game where epistemic stakes got replaced by an infinite accumulation of marks of academic distinction (Kulczycki, 2023). Prestige within and beyond the academic field is usually presented as serving, first and foremost, as an information system (English, 2005), − a value-­signalling device—just as the market and prices in neoclassical economics perform

7 PRESTIGE 

167

this function for the economy at large. Regardless of where we place our emphasis or which element we point to as having primacy, information systems in the various subsystems (and cutting across them, as well as linking them) appears to be necessary in the case of high complexity and high intensity of production. By focusing on prestige, we can better understand how capital reproduces itself by multiplying divisions, differences, and boundaries and by securing that resulting separations cannot be overcome (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Capital is the grave enemy of the common, and it is important to recognize how measuring academic labour in science and higher education for indicating its “elite factions” serves to reinforce and justify existing divisions, rather than opening up its common potential. But what exactly is “prestige”? The etymology of the English word “prestige” is telling. It comes from a Latin word praestigium, which is the result of the combination of two words: prae meaning “before” or “in front of” and stigium, which is likely related to the verb stinguere meaning “to extinguish.” The meaning of praestigium is therefore something that appears to be in front of you, but then suddenly disappears or vanishes. Over time, praestigium came to refer more generally to illusions, tricks, or deceptions, particularly those involving sleight of hand or other forms of misdirection. The word “prestige” can also refer to a sense of awe or wonder that arises from witnessing something seemingly miraculous or inexplicable. Prestige is tied to appearances and the game of positioning, taking on a phantom-like quality. Given this it is hardly surprising, that so much effort has been devoted to understanding prestige’s logic. Blackmore’s (2015) analysis of prestige in academic life highlights some of its defining characteristics. It is a social and psychological phenomenon, appearing as a scarce and often intangible quality that cannot be possessed by all. It takes time to gain and generally to lose. It exists within groups that share a sense of what is prestigious. This sense may define and limit the group, which is highly likely to have defined what it holds to be prestigious. (Blackmore, 2015, p. 171)

As a socially signalled value for a given community, prestige is exclusive in principle, as its possession by all no longer fulfils its function. Blackmore also observes that “to be perceived as prestigious is itself a resource, tending to validate everything that one does” (2015, p. 52), strengthening and securing existing power structures. Prestige is inherently conservative, allowing for the speeding up of decision processes and reducing conflicts.

168 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Therefore, it is unsurprising that “prestige exists most comfortably at times of stability rather than change” (2015, p.  2), serving to conserve and control the status quo rather than allowing for the growth and development of social systems. Prestige and reputation represent opposite poles in the spectrum of distinctions. While reputation is earned through concrete achievements in service to a particular community or group, prestige is a set of qualities that sets certain individuals or institutions apart from others. Reputation is inclusive and anyone can have a “good reputation”, whereas prestige is exclusive and serves as a mark of belonging to a certain elite group. Higher education systems and institutions that prioritise the pursuit of quantified prestige over building strong reputations in their relevant communities are at risk of reproducing and exacerbating existing divisions and inequalities, ultimately leading to stagnation. In this chapter, I explore the conceptualisation of prestige in sociological reflections on science, without dwelling on the detailed history of ideas. Understanding this genealogy can clarify how capital operates in this field, given the close intersection between sociologists of science and the constructors of measurement tools. Robert K. Merton and his Columbia group are particularly relevant in this regard. As I argue in the next section, the challenge facing capital is to adapt to existing labour dynamics and its patterns. Subsequently, I delve into various conceptualisations of prestige in science and its relation to the assumptions of citation and quality. I trace the development of this reflection within the Mertonian school. Finally, I discuss the contemporary use of prestige analyses that justifies economic inequalities in science and higher education. It is crucial to have a Marxist reflection on the implication of prestige distribution mechanisms in capitalist valorisation to overcome the analytical and political impasse generated by those who naturalise and praise existing structures of prestige distribution in science.

7.2   Marx and the Internal Articulation of Science Dynamics As Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital Volume Three, merchant capital is a form of capital that was historically responsible for initiation of the contact with the productive sectors that laid outside of the sphere of regular, market-­ mediated exchange. What for Marx was an historical

7 PRESTIGE 

169

argumentation, for this book is a logical one: merchant capital is the force that prefigures the moment of establishing a relationship between capital and academic labour. Its task is to open the new production process for the rhythms and the logic of capitalist production per se. Therefore, merchant capital is not only a substantial faction of capital as discussed in Chap. 4, subsuming academic labour around the world but, in addition, it “is originally merely the intervening movement between extremes which it does not control, and between premises which it does not create.” (Marx, 1981, p. 447). Establishing a relationship between a specific labour (here, academic labour) is a short-term situation, however, because, as Marx pointed out: Commerce, therefore, has a more or less dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation, which it finds at hand and whose different forms are mainly carried on with a view to use-value. To what extent it brings about a dissolution of the old mode of production depends on its solidity and internal structure. And whither this process of dissolution will lead, in other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself. (Marx, 1981, p. 449)

This means that while establishing the first contact between the realm of capital and the positivity of labour in a given, new sector of production, capital needs to take into the account “the solidity and inner articulation of this mode of production” that it has to subsume. It needs to adapt to it and transform it along its logic, not just impose its abstract rule over it. The university and more broadly the academic community are among the oldest institutions in the Western world: they are defined by a strong internal organisation and are relatively resistant to change. One of the features of the internal structure of the academic field is the importance of prestige distribution mechanisms that serve as a value signalling system of a given subject or object for either the academic interior, or its wider social exterior (Bourdieu, 2004). Various mechanisms of value signalling existed historically in science and higher education, from the certification of skills by diplomas, through peer-review, to a system of prizes and distinctions. Most of these were operating according to the logic of unmediated contact between the parties of the academic field (or its social exterior). Historically speaking, the value of a given output of higher education or science has never been assessed through a simple scale of time needed for its production.

170 

K. SZADKOWSKI

In the previous chapter, we saw that the Taylorisation of academic labour as the sole solution to measurement and control has proved to be a dead end. While academics are undoubtedly subjected to constant time pressures and peer and institutional competition, which intensifies the need to overwork and reduce activities to the shortest possible interval (Vostal, 2016), squeezing out extra work by increasing its time-measured efficiency is not the only criterion for assessing the value of academic labour. It is essential to note the differences in this area between the for-­ profit and public sectors, as well as between academics dedicated primarily to education and those focused on research. In the former case, Taylorist methods of organising work in production may sometimes be applicable, and academics may be required to deliver as many courses, materials, marked papers, etc., as possible in a given time interval. However, in the latter area, time efficiency criteria alone are clearly insufficient. Controlling and speeding up the pace of academic labour requires broader social mechanisms of stimulation and assessment. Therefore, it is evident that capital cannot simply aim to decompose academic production, but rather it needs to adjust to existing methods of articulation within the academic community and harness them for its own purposes.

7.3   Mertonians and the Invention of Citation-Based Prestige This section does not aim to reconstruct and report on the “objective” patterns within the academic community system, including the mechanisms of recognition and prestige distribution. While there has been a great deal of competing and mutually exclusive work on this topic (e.g. Bourdieu, 2004; Latour & Woolgar, 1986), I am not interested in arguing about the “correct” account of these dynamics, and I will assume that, to a certain degree, all existing sociological theories of dynamics of science grasp its functional aspects, simultaneously constructing and imposing on it a specific ontological frame. The section is instead driven by historical ontological reflection, whose premises I discussed in the Chap. 2. Looking at it from this angle, the value of Merton and his followers, who are the central focus of this chapter, is their ability to base the distribution of prestige on an ontology that is consistent with the fundamental assumptions that underlie capitalist relationships. Namely, the primacy of individual. I therefore do not focus on the historically variable and geographically diverse ways in which academic life takes place within higher education

7 PRESTIGE 

171

systems. I suggest that capital’s recognition of these patterns, and subsequent stabilisation and operationalisation for developed processes of valorisation, occurs through a certain mediation. Essential elements in the transformation of social reality and its subsumption under capital are the creation of a specific body of knowledge about a phenomenon or social subject to be penetrated by capital, and the subsequent coagulation of this knowledge in technological practice and discourses around this practice. In the case of the question of prestige in science, we can see a similar phenomenon in the parallel development of the Science Citation Index created by Eugene Garfield, discussed in the previous chapter, and the functionalist sociology of science developed by Robert K. Merton and the Columbia group. One could say that Merton and his disciples (Stephen and Jonathan R.  Cole, Harriet Zuckerman and many others) created a specific ideological framework for the functioning and legitimacy of measures of academic labour. While the functionalist approach in sociology of science experienced a crisis and was marginalised in this sub-discipline (Sztompka, 1985; Calhoun, 2010; Cole, 2004), it is now experiencing a renaissance in the work of apologists of the current inequalities in global academia, as well as that of the exclusionary economics of prestige in science (Kwiek, 2021). This approach is particularly suited to explaining (and often legitimising) the effects of the proliferation of Science Citation Indexderived measures for objectifying the prestige (or lack thereof) of institutions and researchers worldwide. The concepts of Merton and his disciples experienced a specific “obliteration by incorporation”, being incorporated into the internal logic of the measurement apparatuses that spread in science due to, among others, the global university rankings. For this reason, in what follows I will focus on Merton’s and Mertonians’ conception of the role and modus operandi of the reward system and the distribution of recognition and prestige in science. But first, let me say a few words about how the Columbia Group and Garfield’s project came together. In 1962, Garfield endeavoured to establish contact with Merton, recognising his position as a well-established sociologist of science and seeking to persuade him of the potential usefulness of the index he was producing for future historical research (Wouters, 1999; Merton, 2000). Notwithstanding the fact that a direct meeting between the two did not occur until 1969, Merton recognized the significance of Garfield’s invention and the potential it held for investigating topics of interest to him. His students, in the meantime, had managed to use the index to deepen their existing research, or to test some of Merton’s theses (Cole & Cole,

172 

K. SZADKOWSKI

1967). As Merton pointed out years later, regardless of the fact that the sociology of science of the 1940s and 1950s was able to define the contours of a rewards system in science, without a concrete tool, it was unable to move its deliberations forward (Cole, 2000, p.  290; Merton, 2000, p.  440). Garfield almost intuitively recognised the “composite communications-­intellectual-property-reward system” (Merton, 1971, p. viii) and designed the infrastructure to make it visible. In consequence, the Columbia group quickly and spontaneously became “members of an unplanned invisible college […] that linked citation analysis and the sociology of science.” (Merton, 2000, p. 437). Merton’s sociology of science sought a way in which to move beyond the criterion of the sheer number of articles produced in analyses of the social organisation of science. Seeing citations as “the most routinised form of peer recognition” (Merton, 2000, p. 437), placing them at the centre of a functioning reward system in science, allowing for the simultaneous distribution of rewards (recognition and prestige and its benefits), securing intellectual property relations (the question of priority in scientific discovery), as well as providing a source and incentive for further productivity (Zuckerman, 2018), members of the Columbia group became the first systematic users of the Garfield’s tool in the study of science (Cole, 2000). By making citation an indicator of the quality of scientific work, and understanding quality as the original contribution to science underpinning the system of prestige distribution in the sector, justifying positions held, access to resources and power, members of the Merton school permanently changed the face of science in the US and beyond. The Columbia group, in the words of Jonathan R. Cole, became the best index advertisers Garfield could get (2000, p. 291). The association of the new tool with a group at the height of recognition and fame in the field of the sociology of science allowed for the progressive legitimisation of the tool as an instrument for studying the dynamics of science. The use of Science Citation Index generated exclusions from the outset—not everyone could study science with its help due to its prohibitive price. Science Citation Index became the technological foundation for the sociology of science’s recognition. However, it retained its commercial character to the end. Notwithstanding the close relationship—scientific, but also social—as Cole (2000) writes, the group could never count on free use of the index, despite the fact that Garfield offered educational discounts. He did not let the researchers forget that the tool he had created was first and foremost intellectual property that was intended to provide profit for its creator.

7 PRESTIGE 

173

7.3.1   Merton and the Reward System in Science But why exactly could J. R. Cole claim that Garfield found in Columbia group the best possible advertisers for his index? The answer lies precisely in Merton’s conceptualisation of prestige. In his work, Merton developed in parallel a general theory of society and a general theory of science in both its social and cognitive dimensions. The elements of the system of science that he identified, such as the set of norms by which scientists were to be guided in the ideal world (universalism, ‘communism’, disinterestedness, organised scepticism), not coincidentally constituted the ‘perfect micro-model of liberal democratic polity’ (Sztompka, 1985, p. 40; Turner, 2007). Merton’s development of a political ontology of science from his earliest independent work was influenced by a desire to distinguish himself clearly from Marxist propositions (‘externalism’ by Hessen, or science as communism—without inverted commas—by Bernal), or, as Stephan Turner (2007) points out, by a desire to intercept and decry the subversive potential of Marxist critique. Although Merton did not profess externalism, he recognised the importance of social context in shaping scientific practice (Shapin, 1988; Calhoun, 2010); “nothing could be further” from his perspective than idealistic “internalism” (Sztompka, 1985, p.  36). Rather than attributing the content of scientific ideas to external influences, Merton argued that certain social and cultural contexts could create a favourable environment for the development of a scientific ethos and subjectivity, as in the case of the Puritanism discussed in his doctoral thesis, which fostered the development of a new scientific subjectivity, as well as providing science with the prestige that allowed it to uniquely flourish (Cole, 2004). Merton treated science as “a complex totality of variable and variously interrelated components” (Sztompka, 1985, p. 45). There were interrelationships and interconnections between science in both its cognitive dimension (the development of scientific ideas) and its social dimension (the way scientific life was organised), and its economic, political or religious exterior. For the issue of prestige in science discussed here, the question of the interrelationship between the cognitive structure of science (the contribution to its development) and its social organisation (the distribution of roles, rewards and recognition) was of the greatest importance. In a series of classic articles collected in one volume under the title The Sociology of Science. Theoretical Empirical Investigations by Norman W. Storer, one of Merton’s followers, we find a coherent system of thought (Sztompka, 1985) concerning the self-regulating social institutions of

174 

K. SZADKOWSKI

science. Their main goal is to enable the continued certification of scientists’ inventions and thereby facilitate the advancement of human knowledge. The main mechanism regulating social relations in science, according to Merton, is the competition for priority in scientific discoveries and the concomitant recognition of the knowledge-creating and knowledge-­ certifying community (Merton, 1973, p. 329). In the context of this fundamental and fierce competition, the reward system, that is, the way in which prestige and recognition are distributed in the scientific community, played an important role. Merton viewed the reward system in science as a key mechanism for regulating and incentivizing scientific behaviour (Merton, 1973, p. 323). In his view, the reward system helped to reinforce scientific norms and values, encouraging scientists to pursue research that was rigorous, original, and useful—as the reputation of an individual scholar was always at stake in case of any deviance from the established norms. Merton argued that the reward system included both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, such as the satisfaction of making a discovery or the professional recognition that came with the development of significant and useful results. He believed that the reward system played an important role in maintaining the autonomy of science by providing scientists with the resources and recognition necessary to pursue research that might not be immediately applicable or commercially viable. The reward system in science formed a critical component of the social organisation of scientific practice. Later in his career, inspired by the still at that time unpublished work on Nobel laurates by Harriet Zuckerman (1977), Merton coined the concept of the Matthew Effect in science, also known as the “cumulative advantage” principle (Merton, 1973, p.  457) which is important for understanding the prestige dynamics in science. It meant to describe the way in which in the context of the race for priority, the scientific discoveries tend to be ascribed to those who are already well-established in the field—bringing them even more recognition and resources. The name “Matthew Effect” comes from the Gospel of Matthew, which states that “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In the context of science, this principle suggests that scientific success tends to spawn further success, or as expressed by Zuckerman (1977, p.  207) “prestige begets prestige”, as those who have already achieved

7 PRESTIGE 

175

recognition and prestige are more likely to be recognized for new discoveries and given opportunities to pursue further research. Equating prestige and quality, Merton aimed at understanding the Effect’s function in the general dynamics of multiple discoveries in science (1973, p. 451), or in other words, he was interested in the factors which determine that some multiples go unnoticed and unrewarded. However, one may say that overall, the Matthew Effect, or the rewards system in science in general, in Merton’s theory was supposed to operate like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, seemingly combining individual’s interests and benefits with the possibility of realising a greater good—the development of science. Therefore, while identifying the social mechanisms that produce and reproduce inequalities and stratification in science, he withdrew from criticising it in principle. As Sztompka wrote, Merton developed the sociology of science as an “empirical sociology of scientific communities, as producing, selecting, and distributing scientific knowledge” (1985, p.  40), the task of which was the “nomological understanding of social patterns” (1985, p. 11) and the formulation and clarification of concepts to deepen insights into the phenomenon under study. Today, within the sociology of science, Merton and representatives of his school are quoted mainly ritualistically—to distinguish oneself from the rejected approach (Calhoun, 2010, p. 12). This was determined, on the one hand, by the thorough critique of functionalism, of which Merton was a prominent representative, carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. It is true that, in looking at Merton’s approach, it is easy to see many of the ills pointed out by his critics. Particularly problematic from the point of view of prestige analysis seem to be ahistoricism (the belief in the universal validity of the mechanisms identified), the functional explanation of the phenomena studied (the naturalisation and legitimisation of the mechanisms analysed) or the excessive focus on the social order in science and the consensus allegedly inherent in it (the refusal to analyse the dynamics of conflict in the social organisation of science). On the other hand, in the 1970s and 1980s, in the context of the ongoing constructivist turn in American sociology of science, Merton and his school were side-lined (Cole, 2004), seeing in the struggle for prestige one element of the social game for the stabilisation of meanings and positions in the field of science. Despite this unmasking, Mertonian ideas are still alive today, as a result of the aforementioned marriage between measurement and developed conservative theory.

176 

K. SZADKOWSKI

7.3.2   Mertionian Experimentators and Equating Prestige with Quality The contemporary survival of Mertonian views on reward systems, and Merton’s sociology of science in general, happened in part thanks to his students. It was Merton’s students who directly linked citation analysis based on Science Citation Index to the sociology of science. A model example in this area is the already classic Social stratification in science by Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole (1971), who set out to see how the social structure of science works and how it determines the behaviour of scientists. Already in their early work, they formulated the assumption that the number of citations could represent the scientific relevance or quality of a given work (Cole and Cole, 1967, p.  379). One of the issues that troubled their research was whether the reward system described by Merton promotes “excellence” in science or undermines it. The Coles were convinced that citation is an indication that a work is being used by others within a community. In this way, citation can be used not only as a proxy for contributions to science (Cole & Cole, 1971, p. 45), but also for the recognition that follows (Cole & Cole, 1971, p. 34). The stratification of science analysed through this prism created with the help of citation analysis (i.e., the separation into haves and have-nots), is therefore, according to the Coles, based on merit and thus fully legitimised. So too is the prestige flowing from measured achievements. As they wrote: We must make it quite explicit that it is the value system of science which determines the prestige accruing to various scientific positions. Of all scientific activities, original contribution to knowledge is the most highly valued. With few exceptions, the prestige attached to a man or a position is a function of the extent to which they have or are expected to make original ­contributions. Contribution to scientific knowledge is the underpinning of the stratification system. Concern with “prestige” is not empirically separable from concern with the people contributing to scientific advance. (Cole & Cole, 1971, p. 45)

In addition to identifying citations with quality, and then justifying the hierarchy in the scientific field reproduced by the social mechanisms of the organisation of science that prestige and its distribution preserve, the Coles used their research to ‘demonstrate’ yet another conservative belief. Firstly, using a quality-based conception of prestige, they sought to justify the rarity of conflicts and controversies whereby the existing hierarchy in science would be undermined. In their argumentation, they referred to Marx among others in proving the impossibility of an upheaval

7 PRESTIGE 

177

undermining social relations in science. As the Coles argued (1971, pp.  82–83; 88), in view of the absence of exploitative relations in science—that is, the relatively rare appropriation of others’ achievements (sic!)—it is hard to speak of the possibility of rational resistance. They saw a similar paradox in the possibility of conceptualising exploitation through the unprovable attribution of credit, as they wrote “Even if the audience does misallocate credit, it would be difficult to view this as exploitation. It would be equivalent to saying that the consumers rather than the capitalists are the exploiters of the proletariat” (Cole & Cole, 1971, p.  89). Secondly, their beliefs stemmed from a perception that differed from Merton’s regarding how the Matthew Effect works (Cole, 2004): they assumed that for works of equal quality, the effect does not hold since good work always gets due recognition in time (Cole & Cole, 1971, p. 214). In a sense, this only highlights the positive aspect of the generation and acceleration of inequalities in science, which are driven by the distribution of prestige. Finally, a third specific issue of the Coles’ approach to prestige was their conviction about the ungroundedness of the generalised belief, common in the scientific community, that “every scientist in his own way contributes to scientific advance” (Cole & Cole, 1971, p. 84). While this assumption, according to the Coles, protects the community from conflict, it is not based on facts. In their study, mistakenly attributing this belief to a seeming anti-elitism on the part of Ortega y Gasset, who was known for his elitist views (Száva-Kováts, 2004), they set out to disprove it by demonstrating that scientists making breakthroughs only cite other relevant and citable works—not contributions to the debate that are unknown to anyone. Although not without controversy, their study was intended to serve as a means of justifying even more clearly the existing hierarchies in science. 7.3.3   Prestige, Referencing and the Common Finally, there is one additional matter that, from the point of view of understanding contemporary capitalist use of prestige distribution mechanisms, needs clarification. Paradoxical as it may sound, Merton (1988) was able to combine referencing, prestige mechanisms and the common in another praise of the aspects of the reward system in science. Late in his career when he came back to the discussion of the Matthew Effect he addressed the issue at length, pointing out both the instrumental and symbolic function that referencing in science plays in the broader knowledge

178 

K. SZADKOWSKI

ecology. Referencing practice, on which the citation system grows, in its core allows us, on the one hand, to discover new knowledge and to connect with the long-forgotten authors. On the other hand, it is an act of acknowledging the contribution of an author, whether negative or positive, to the growing pool of human knowledge. As in his earlier contributions, here Merton emphasised the function of allocating recognition and prestige to those who came before us, as if it is a form of repaying one’s debts (Merton, 1973, p.  303). For Merton, citing from the archives of science plays the role of a guard of a specific system of property that dominates the knowledge ecology in science, and that is enforced by its necessarily public and transparent character. In this, Merton’s view of managing knowledge through prestige reminds us of the rule-based use of common-­ pool resources (Ostrom, 1990). As he emphasised, Intellectual property in the scientific domain that takes the form of recognition by peers is sustained, then, by a code of common law. This provides socially patterned incentives, apart from the intrinsic interest in inquiry, for attempting to do good scientific work and for giving it over to the common wealth of science in the form of an open contribution available to all who would make use of it, just as the common law exacts the correlative obligation on the part of the users to provide the reward of peer recognition by reference to that contribution. (Merton, 1988, p. 622)

For Merton, by providing a socially patterned incentive for scientific work, the system of prestige helps to maintain both the autonomy of science and the open, common form of knowledge, which is accessible as a common pool resource to those who create it. In the next chapter we will see how this entanglement of prestige and the common form of knowledge, that is so rightly indicated by Merton, will be operationalised and fully realised by capital. But before that, we have to confront a contemporary form of “prestige economy” that emerged in the course of the development of quantification of prestige and the imposition of citations as a primary measure of academic quality.

7.4  Contemporary “Prestige Economy” The representatives of Merton’s Columbia group would not support a system in which the internal social mechanisms of self-regulation in science are transformed into external mechanisms used by state and capital. However, recent developments, such as the growth in importance of JIFs

7 PRESTIGE 

179

as measures of quality in science, the control of important journals by publishing oligopoly (Larivière et  al., 2015), the use of citation-based measures in research evaluations, and global university rankings, have transformed internal signals of academic quality into external stimulators for specific actions by academic labour. For the capitalist knowledge economy to function effectively, it must simultaneously operate as a status economy (Münch, 2014; Reitz, 2017). As such, this has substantially changed the rules of the prestige game, making it unfit for advancing science. This understanding of internal dynamics of distribution of prestige that Mertonians offered has become an implementation manual for stratifying and justifying all related pathologies, instead of being used as a diagnostic starting point for solving specific problems that the system of science and higher education might face. The portrayal not only of scientists, but also of entire academic institutions as “prestige-maximisers” caught up in the global race for top positions in the rankings, serves for some to essentialise prestige and to present it no longer as recognition flowing from actual contributions to science, but as a cumulative result of the publication process in the highest impact factor valued academic journals. As Marek Kwiek, developing this kind of understanding of prestige, writes, “seeking prestige by publishing in top academic journals is central to the so-called prestige economy in higher education” (Kwiek, 2021, p. 494). This activity is not so much a mechanism to motivate researchers to compete for priority in discoveries, but rather to accumulate prestige as a quantified resource that can be translated into other—primarily material—benefits in connection with the increasingly unequal allocation of resources in national systems based on bibliometric criteria (Krzeski et  al., 2022). Participation in this race, although marked by inequality, seems necessary to some (Kwiek, 2021, p. 499). Here one could contrast such an approach with an insightful observation by Blackmore (2015) who contrasts the current development of the capitalist instrumentalisation of prestige distribution mechanisms in higher education with what was originally meant by prestige, indicating that institutions that are considered prestigious “are focused more closely on their own internal values rather than on meeting external standards and needs” (2015, p.  5). Once universities’ race for prestige becomes replaced by striving for meeting particular performance-related criteria, its real goal stops meeting the original requirements of the prestige game. As truly appearance-like, once defined and measured it actually stops being

180 

K. SZADKOWSKI

“prestige” in its original sense. This is what ideologists of the capitalist metricised race for prestige usually forget. Yet, notwithstanding isolated instances of institutions refusing to participate in the pursuit of places in global university rankings, the system of “prestige economy” continues to operate and expand. As Fyfe et al. rightly observed “commercial publishers adopted strategies, including peer review and the use of the journal impact factor, that made their publications into key elements of the academic prestige economy” (2017, p. 17). They exploit the internal mechanisms and rules regulating the life of the academic community. The conceptual tools developed by the Merton school, especially the Coles’ view of quality in science being based on citation, have justified existing hierarchies of prestige. This view, combined with the use of bibliometric tools like Garfield’s indexes and RELX’s Scopus database, has aided the formation of the ideology of the contemporary capitalist field of science. By examining what impact that Merton and his followers’ notion of prestige had on science, we can gain a better understanding of the potential consequences of transferring it to a higher level of regulation of social relations between scientists, institutions or national systems, no longer by producers of science themselves, but by concrete political and economic actors. The spread of capitalist modulation of academic prestige entails the deepening of the pacification of conflict, the reinforcement and justification of existing hierarchies, the shoring up of the power of specific factions in science, the undermining of the productive contribution to science of the ranks of the system by reducing productivity to the sphere of high-citation publications only. It is in the social mechanisms of the reproduction of prestige relations in science that we are able to find the reigning ideology of capital-subsumed science and higher education and, at the same time, the main source of motivation of the actors operating within them—both individual and institutional. However, the development of a Marxist theory and history of the mechanisms of prestige distribution in capitalist science and higher education, as an ideology that regulates relations of production and determines possible forms of subjectivity, still remains a task to be carried out. The above discussion and brief genealogy of the link between prestige and measurement in science is only a modest contribution to this task.

7 PRESTIGE 

181

7.5  Conclusion The instrumental capitalist modulation of the prestige distribution mechanisms in higher education and science is done dominantly by the representatives of the faction of merchant capital: owners of big data bases and indexes of journals; producers of global university rankings; and the oligopoly of academic publishers. These profitable activities are founded on the internal practices of valuating academic labour, and have reciprocal impact on them, as well as on the overall state of the academic sector. Consequently, the reward system in the academic field undergoes capitalist mediation and modulation. While recognition-driven status is a relational category—an indicator used by a given community in order to understand where one stands in relation to others—prestige is an illusion created with reference to someone’s personal merit or importance in a given field. Capital, in order to instil its own logic into higher education, needs to posit itself as the mediator between the participants of the academic field, as well as between them and their environment. Something that once was fully in the hands of communities is now becoming further and further removed from its original meaning and alienated, and, as a result, it dominates those whom it was supposed to serve while simultaneously magnifying its harmful and hierarchical features. Chap. 6’s discussion of measure and this chapter’s discussion of prestige shed light on how capital commandeers the logics governing social production in science and higher education. This understanding is crucial to comprehending two further phenomena. First, it illuminates how capital exercises control and domination over academic labour, which is not in a direct wage relation or direct subsumption under capital in a specific workplace. By infiltrating the very logic of value-signalling within the academic community and by controlling the necessary institutions involved in expressing these relations in abstract measure, capital can exploit whole systems of science and higher education to seize their energies and resources. Second, capital’s control over defining measures and the distribution of “prestige” as expressed through measure—on local, national, and global scales—enables its march of self-valorisation even in the absence of private property. In the next chapter, we will examine how capitalism transforms the form in which knowledge is produced.

182 

K. SZADKOWSKI

References Blackmore, P. (2015). Prestige in Academic Life: Excellence and Exclusion. Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (2004). Science of Science and Reflexivity. Polity. Brankovic, J., Ringel, L., & Werron, T. (2018). How Rankings Produce Competition: The Case of Global University Rankings. Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 47(4), 270–288. Brembs, B., Huneman, P., Schönbrodt, F., Nilsonne, G., Susi, T., Siems, R., et al. (2021). Replacing Academic Journals. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo,5793611 Calhoun, C. (Ed.). (2010). Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science. Columbia University Press. Cole, J. R. (2000). A Short History of the Use of Citations as a Measure of the Impact of Scientific and Scholarly Work. In B. Cronin & H. B. Atkins (Eds.), The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield (pp. 281–300). Information Today. Cole, S. (2004). Merton’s Contribution to the Sociology of Science. Social Studies of Science, 34(6), 829–844. Cole, S., & Cole, J. R. (1967). Scientific Output and Recognition: A Study in the Operation of the Reward System in Science. American Sociological Review, 32(3), 377–390. Cole, J. R., & Cole, S. (1971). Social Stratification in Science. The University of Chicago Press. English, J. F. (2005). The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard University Press. Flink, T., & Peter, T. (2018). Excellence and Frontier Research as Travelling Concepts in Science Policymaking. Minerva, 56, 431–452. Fyfe, A., et  al. (2017). Untangling Academic Publishing: A History of the Relationship Between Commercial Interests, Academic Prestige and the Circulation of Research. St Andrews: University of St Andrews. [@:] https:// doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.546100 Jong, L., Franssen, T., & Pinfield, S. (2021). ‘Excellence’ in the Research Ecosystem: A Literature Review. RoRI Working Paper Series, 5(5). https://doi. org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16669834.v1 Krzeski, J. (2022). Power and Agency Within the Evaluative State: A Strategic– Relational Approach to Quantification of Higher Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2162388 Krzeski, J., Szadkowski, K., & Kulczycki, E. (2022). Creating Evaluative Homogeneity: Experience of Constructing a National Journal Ranking. Research Evaluation, 31(3), 410–422.

7 PRESTIGE 

183

Kulczycki, E. (2023). The Evaluation Game: How Publication Metrics Shape Scholarly Communication. Cambridge University Press. Kwiek, M. (2021). The Prestige Economy of Higher Education Journals: A Quantitative Approach. Higher Education, 81(3), 493–519. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press. Leslie, L. L., & Slaughter, S. A. (1997). The Development and Current Status of Market Mechanisms in United States Postsecondary Education. Higher Education Policy, 10(3–4), 239–252. Lim, M.  A. (2018). The Building of Weak Expertise: The Work of Global University Rankers. Higher Education, 75(3), 415–430. Lim, M. A. (2021a). Governing Higher Education: The PURE Data System and the Management of the Bibliometric Self. Higher Education Policy, 34, 238–253. Lim, M.  A. (2021b). The Business of University Rankings: The Case of Times Higher Education. In Research Handbook on University Rankings (pp. 444–453). London: Edward Elgar Publishing. Lim, M. A., & Williams Øerberg, J. (2017). Active Instruments: On the Use of University Rankings in Developing National Systems of Higher Education. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(1), 91–108. Marginson, S. (2009). Open Source Knowledge and University Rankings. Thesis Eleven, 96(1), 9–39. Marx, K. (1981). Capital. Volume Three. Penguin. Merton, R.  K. (1971). Foreword. In E.  Garfield (Ed.), Citation Indexing (pp. vii–xi). John Wiley & Sons. Merton, R.  K. (1973). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press. Merton, R. K. (1988). The Matthew Effect in Science, II: Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property. Isis, 79(4), 606–623. Merton, R.  K. (2000). On the Garfield Input to the Sociology of Science: A Retrospective Collage. In B.  Cronin & H.  B. Atkins (Eds.), The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield (pp.  435–448). Information Today Inc. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. Münch, R. (2014). Academic Capitalism: Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. Routledge. Ordorika, I., & Lloyd, M. (2015). International Rankings and the Contest for University Hegemony. Journal of Education Policy, 30(3), 385–405. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

184 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance Publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1), 39–49. Reitz, T. (2017). Academic Hierarchies in Neo-Feudal Capitalism: How Status Competition Processes Trust and Facilitates the Appropriation of Knowledge. Higher Education, 73, 871–886. Shapin, S. (1988). Understanding the Merton Thesis. Isis, 79(4), 594–605. Száva-Kováts, E. (2004). The False ‘Ortega Hypothesis’: A Literature Science Case Study. Journal of Information Science, 30(6), 496–508. Sztompka, P. (1985). Robert K.  Merton: An Intellectual Profile. Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, S. (2007). Merton’s Norms’ in Political and Intellectual Context. Journal of Classical Sociology, 7(2), 161–178. Vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating Academia. The Changing Structure of Academic Time. Palgrave Macmillan. Wouters, P. (1999). The Citation Culture. Doctoral Dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Zuckerman, H. (1977). Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. Transaction Publishers. Zuckerman, H. (2018). The Sociology of Science and the Garfield Effect: Happy Accidents, Unanticipated Developments and Unexploited Potentials. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 3(20), 1–19.

CHAPTER 8

Knowledge

8.1   Introduction This chapter examines how open access operates in capitalist science and higher education. It offers three main arguments. First, it refutes exceptionalists’ claim that establishing capitalist relations in higher education is impossible due to the peculiar character of knowledge, which makes it difficult to privatise. Modern capitalist open access, a growing source of revenue in academic publishing, shows that capital can adapt to this sector’s unique features. Second, the chapter challenges Marxist theorists of cognitive capitalism, who saw the contradiction between the common form of knowledge and the private form of appropriation as the basis for sublating the capitalist system. By discussing the main contradictions of cognitive capitalism pointed out by Italian and French Marxists, I show how capital assimilated each of them, leading to a communism of capital rather than to its demise. Third, the chapter explores the distinction between relations of exploitation and relations of appropriation in the context of academic labour. The transformation of research results into a commodity has been the basis for interpretations that speak of the dominance of relations of dispossession in the publishing industry. However, capitalist open access has altered the relations in this area. Knowledge indeed has a fundamental ontological property—it is deeply rooted in the common—it is pointless to think of it as something private. It is impossible to know in separation as a lone individual (Hardt & Negri, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_8

185

186 

K. SZADKOWSKI

2009). Just as there is no private language, there is no private knowledge. Its efficacy and value fundamentally depend on our ability to transmit it among ourselves. This observation seems quite apparent. The consequences it points to highlight the limitations of contemporary “knowledge-­ based” capitalism. Cognitive capitalism, which is how I refer to the current stage of capitalist development, holds an inherent contradiction. The more it depends on knowledge-based products, the more the wealth of modern developed societies depends on the free production, distribution and consumption of knowledge, and the more inadequate the nineteenth-­ century strategies used to privatise it seem (Rekret & Szadkowski, 2021). This chapter is devoted to examining how this fundamental contradiction is inscribed in the functioning of a capital-subsumed higher education. To do this, I will first show how capital continually tries to evade the constraints imposed by this contradiction. As we have already seen in the pages of this book, capital is a flexible force that seeks to transform each of its limits into a barrier and then to transcend it (Lebowitz, 2009). The chapter focuses on how knowledge functions in higher education systems subsumed under capital. However, the object of my interest is only a specific aspect of knowledge—knowledge taking the simplest form of a commodity. I focus on the system of publishing scientific articles and books. A substantial part of previous chapters dealt with the capital in the academic publishing industry (merchant capital). Here I look at the operation of the merchant capital faction even more closely. Of course, this is not the only area in which the capitalist circulation of knowledge in the higher education system manifests itself, nor is it the most critical aspect of this circulation. On a daily basis, knowledge is transmitted primarily as part of the massive and self-paced processes of education and self-­education in all higher education institutions. Nevertheless, the commodified component of knowledge in the form of scholarly articles or books published by large academic publishers has a crucial aspect that must be addressed when trying to understand the functioning of capital in the system. As we showed in the Chap. 6, it is in relation to the measurements of knowledge circulation that the global estimation of value in higher education is made possible (Szadkowski, 2019; Krzeski, 2021). An academic article is an elementary form of this circulation; the relations in which it arises and functions are fundamental to the totality of capitalist relations in the system. I specifically focus on this form of knowledge to show how capital encounters limits in its march into higher education systems and how it

8 KNOWLEDGE 

187

seeks to overcome them. One of these limits is the desire of many actors to make knowledge accessible and to facilitate its sharing and circulation. When faced with this limit, capital adapts to both the demands of intraand extra-university movements struggling for open access to knowledge and to sector-specific patterns of behaviour. Additionally, capital has developed ways in which this newly established capitalist open form of knowledge can be beneficial and help address its other problems. Even in capitalist open access, where knowledge preservation as open has been achieved, the foundations of capitalist presence and its smooth functioning remain unchanged: domination and development based on the self-­ valorisation and capture of surplus value. Capital can still develop mechanisms that are detrimental to academic labour, controlling its energy and diverting resources from public systems into its own pockets. In the next step, I will outline contradictions identified by theorists of cognitive capitalism. Since the formulation of these diagnoses, capital has had significant success in overcoming these contradictions. While the diagnoses of cognitive capitalism theorists were perceptive, today, the tensions that they identified may help us to recognise capitalist strategies for overcoming them rather than offering us hope that they will burst capital from within. We will then examine the communism of capital, which refers to the form of capitalist development that integrates the socialisation of production advocated by social movements. This will help us to understand how the communism of capital manifests itself in the functions of capitalist open access. We will also consider the exceptionalist postulates discussed in Chap. 3 and come to terms with the Marxist conceptualisation of the relationship between academic labour and capital in publishing, given the widespread adoption of open access. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the two models of this relationship.

8.2  Contradictions of Cognitive Capitalism The Marxist understanding of the contemporary knowledge-based economy reached a significant milestone with the hypothesis of cognitive capitalism—a research programme for contemporary capitalism where knowledge is at the heart of the processes of capital valorisation. But what exactly is cognitive capitalism? Monnier and Vercellone (2010, pp. 75–76) emphasise the duality of the term, which must be viewed from at least two perspectives: critical and historical. The critical emphasis is on the constancy of the “capitalist” features of the mode of production, including

188 

K. SZADKOWSKI

wage relations, labour dependency, and capital domination over labour that facilitates surplus value extraction. The “cognitive” aspect emphasises the importance of communicative, intellectual, or affective capacities in the newly created division of labour. The historical perspective underscores that cognitive capitalism represents a specific historical phase in the development of capitalist relations, where the control and transformation of knowledge into commodities become crucial. However, are we operating under a different production regime today? Although knowledge was of great importance in industrial capitalism (Jacob, 2014), capital’s attitude towards it was characterised by at least three tendencies, which today, according to cognitive capitalism theorists, can hardly be considered dominant. Firstly, there was an evident social polarisation in the sphere of knowledge and access marked by a clear separation of competencies and access to knowledge regarding production processes. Supporting these processes seemed unquestionable. Secondly, capital sought to impose a separation of manual and intellectual labour. The symbol of this separation was the work process conducted at the factory conveyor belt and the reduction of the worker to a meaty appendage at worst or a mute supervisor at best. Thirdly, capital sought the total incorporation of knowledge into fixed capital, separating it from the producers in the form of a giant automated system of machines. In contrast, cognitive capitalism supposedly transcends the limitations of industrial capitalism and offers an alternative beyond simple opposition. Today, we can see that the diagnoses of the essential difference between industrial and cognitive capitalism and their relationship to knowledge were only temporarily valid. When the diagnosis was formulated (in the 2000s and 2010s), capital was still in transition; however, today we can observe its completion. With the development and dominance of artificial intelligence and algorithmic management of intellectual production (Preston, 2022), we see the solidification of a new and gradual separation of knowledge from living labour (Hall & Winn, 2017). The hegemony of living knowledge is a transhistorical state—fragile and temporary. It manifests only in moments of triumph of labour over capital and is not a settled state. As scholars have pointed out (e.g., Alquati, 1961; Pasquinelli, 2015), under industrial capitalism, too, the clear division between intellectual and manual labour has always been a capitalist illusion since both incorporate elements of the other. The cognitive capitalism research programme provided a penetrating diagnosis of a brief period in the history of the development of capitalism,

8 KNOWLEDGE 

189

during which hopes grew about fostering the rupture of the capitalist relationship. Various representatives of this tendency were optimisitc, especially with regard to the emancipatory potential of the ontological openness of knowledge. Classical theories of cognitive capitalism were still being formulated in a period of relative antagonistic articulation of openness of knowledge vis-à-vis capital. From the high dependence on the productivity of capitalist systems of knowledge creation and capitalisation, conclusions were drawn about the general contradiction between the new, openness-based production and capitalist mechanisms of extraction. This comes out clearly in the assumptions about the specificity of cognitive capitalism indicated by, for example, Antonela Corsani (2012). The contradictions that Corsani discusses regarding the functioning of cognitive capitalism can be reduced to the following three: (a) between value creation under conditions of openness and a private form of ownership; (b) between the requirement of a rapid and constantly accelerating circulation rate and the lengthiness of the creative process; and (c) between the uncertainty of the outcome of creative processes and the aversion to risky investments. As we shall see in this chapter, capital concentrated in capitalist academic publishing can creatively transcend these constraints imposed by the specificity of knowledge as a source of value and make productive use of them in its proper actions. Corsani was not alone in identifying the core contradictions of cognitive capitalism. Yann Moulier-Boutang (2011), discussing the new contradictions of cognitive capitalism, wrote about the threat of new enclosures and the expansion of a form of private property into the sphere of knowledge. He pointed to a significant problem of producing knowledge goods: new information technologies that contribute to the free circulation of knowledge are preconditions of effective knowledge production, but they undermine the former mode of market modes valorisation. Thus, intellectual property rights stand in the way of successful capital expansion. Many theorists of cognitive capitalism emphasise the integrity of “living knowledge” and the resistance that it offers to the expropriation of these competences. They contrast the situation of cognitive capitalism and the dominance of living knowledge in the production process with industrial capitalism, which had a predominant tendency to embody knowledge in fixed capital that manifested in a system of machines. In order to effectively produce knowledge and value, the cognitive worker, according to Moulier-Boutang (2011, p. 118), must possess specific high capabilities and competencies. This requirement does not pose a problem to scholars

190 

K. SZADKOWSKI

such as Hardt and Negri (2017), who appear to overlook contemporary processes that separate knowledge producers from their means of production; they develop their analysis as though the two were inherently and inseparably connected with knowledge production schemes and corresponding skills. This tendency is also visible in Monnier and Vercellone, who writes that “the main feature of cognitive capitalism is the hegemony of knowledge embodied in living labour, over dead knowledge embodied in fixed capital and the managerial organisation of the firm” (2010, p. 76). With the development of capitalist-driven AI, such diagnosis proved to be at least short-sighted (Dyer-Whitford et  al., 2019; Preston, 2022), as increasingly, the vast capitalist infrastructure dominates and shapes the potentialities of producers. Ultimately, Fumagalli and Lucarelli (2007) point out the tension arising from the fact that, unlike material commodities, knowledge does not exhaust itself in a direct and individualised process of consumption. Regardless of how I come to know an idea, you, the reader, can also know it to the same extent. The scale of knowledge production, and thus the scale of return and profit, is not increased by multiplying copies of a given unit of knowledge (the number of which—with digital media—has no limit) but by the speed with which it can be circulated. The faster the knowledge circulates, the greater the return on its dissemination. Thus, it is inherent in knowledge-centred capitalist strategies of self-valorisation to remove barriers to access it, rather than to impose restrictions. The perspicacity of this observation by the theorists of cognitive capitalism cannot be denied, particularly when it comes to recognising the fundamental contradictions generated by the mediation of the core processes of capital’s self-valorisation in knowledge. Knowledge production eludes easy explication through the prism of the dialectical trinity: value, use-value and exchange-value. At least, this is how it seemed to the theorists of cognitive capitalism. In formulating their objections, they seemed to forget that, also in the case of labour subsumed under capital in the industrial age, the very subjection and measurement of labour to the abstract government of the time was not something “natural” but rather a violently imposed, politically and scientifically sanctioned process. Thus, for theorists like Corsani (2012) or Hardt and Negri (2017), knowledge cannot be reduced to an abstraction, as is the case with labour and time, or the exchange value of knowledge can hardly be determined. However, after going through the argumentation in the Chap. 6, we know that capital in the sphere of knowledge production—specifically in the context of

8 KNOWLEDGE 

191

higher education—has little problem imposing both abstraction and measure. As for the other tension that Corsani, Moulier-Boutang and Hardt and Negri point out—the contradiction arising from the need to disseminate knowledge to increase its value versus a private form of appropriation—this issue will be addressed in the remaining part of this chapter.

8.3  Communism of Capital Capital copes with the contradictions inherent in cognitive capitalism. In science and higher education, we can witness its efforts as it gradually integrates models of open access to knowledge into its expansion and value extraction strategies. Here, we are dealing with the formation of communism of capital. This seemingly self-contradictory phrase points to stabilising a paradox inscribed in cognitive capitalism. The more open models of access to knowledge become widespread, the more capitalist practice develops in their area (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014). Progressive demands for open access in science have resulted in the massive spread of fees for their publication, so-called Article Processing Charges (APC). In consequence, genuinely free access to knowledge is provided, while severe limitations for publishing in leading periodicals are imposed on researchers from economically unprivileged systems or institutions. The communism of capital, or in other words, the socialisation of production and property running according to the interests of capital, is a phenomenon with a long genealogy. As early as the nineteenth century, in Das Kapital Volume Three, Marx pointed to the gradual spread of shareholding, which increased the possibilities for the concentration of capital while changing the nature of its ownership. For Marx, a specific progressive promise was inscribed in the process—the possibility of a gradual dissolution of capital and the emergence of a new mode of production. As he put it, the development of shareholders’ ownership of capitalist companies is the “abolition of capital as private property within the very capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1998, p.  434). However, looking at this process from a longer historical perspective, we see that not only has capital never been abolished, it has actually undergone socialisation—the granting of access to the control and ownership of capital to those who have the means to purchase its shares—which has opened the door to a series of dangerous processes (Marazzi, 2008). While we can utilise some insights from the original formulation of communism of capital to analyse

192 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the situation of the spread of the capitalist open access form, they require some modifications. Paolo Virno (2003, pp. 111–112) deepens the insight, pointing to a dangerous parallel process underway that makes up the formation of the communism of capital, that is, the gradual incorporation of the demands of progressive movements into the capital’s imagination and strategies. Virno points to three vital aspects. Firstly, the struggle against wages and for a break with the regime of wage labour is returned to the workers through the spread of precarious forms of employment or inclusion into a fluid reserve army of the unemployed. Imposed flexibility is not the same as liberation from the compulsion of wage labour. Secondly, the struggle against the oppression of the state and the oppression of the bureaucracy has been transformed by capital into a neoliberal state, fulfilling only functional tasks concerning further capitalist expansion. Thirdly, the critique of alienation, and the demand for individual freedom, has been returned by capital as a “fetishistic cult of difference”. As Beverungen et  al. (2013, p. 485) write, “In doing so capital hijacked ideas traditionally considered communist and morphed them into something recognisable yet uncanny”. Similarly, as we will see in the context of open access, capital hijacked, transformed and returned to the academic labour ideas that were initially associated with progress and liberation from the tightening embrace of private property form. Nevertheless, this opaquing of the social demands is not the only aspect of this process. For instance, Dyer-Whitford, Kjøsen and Steinhoff (2019) pointed out a crucial phenomenon in capital’s relationship with open-source production. As they note, we have arrived at a situation where there are “corporations actively fostering a bottom-up, diversified and often free production of goods, and then harvesting this fecundity by commodifying its most successful fruits” (2019, p.  56). While discussing “real existing AI-capitalism” they point to the massive reliance of the AI-industry on the government-supported programmes of AI-research development along with a reliance on the government-driven expansion of the availability of AI infrastructure. Regardless of whether access to the benefits of AI activities becomes more democratic, capital still controls the core algorithms that drive the searches or stimulate user interactions. Zuboff (2019) emphasised a similar point in her work on surveillance capitalism and the generation of the behavioural surplus. The more the products are open for the users’ interaction, the more behavioural surplus they for the companies. Likewise, the stronger and smarter the AI tools get, the more likely

8 KNOWLEDGE 

193

it becomes that powerful prediction data on users could be provided by the companies as a product for sale. In other words, capital relies on open access to knowledge, data and information. It stimulates its development and allows it to be congealed into AI tools—modern machines that compile the living knowledge of the general intellect into death knowledge of the capital (Hall & Winn, 2017). As major academic publishing companies (like Springer Nature) gradually enter the realm of AI products, offering services such as automatic translation of research published in other languages, they increasingly rely on data provisions and data products (Komljenovic, 2022; Posada & Chen, 2018). At the same time, they develop their network-like infrastructure that covers nearly the entire cycle of knowledge production in higher education (Brembs et al., 2021), establishing context for extracting the behavioural surplus of academics all around the world (Pooley, 2022). The research article, as a commodity in private property form, is no longer the only product of companies like RELX (Elsevier); however, access to it is crucial for accelerating the users’ movement within the system that generates the behavioural surplus. Within the academic system, this takes the form of citations and different metrics calculated and reported to be sold as commodity stocks (Preston, 2022). Understanding the communism of capital as a logic that capital uses is crucial for grasping the dynamics of the subsumption of scholarly communication in higher education. In the following section, I will focus on how capital utilises and exploits specific aspects of existing academic activities to support its own inverted “communist” system.

8.4  Development of Open Access in Science and Higher Education The open access movement can be traced back to the 1990s and the revolution brought about by the spread of the internet. The sphere of scientific publishing occupies an important place in this area. Over the last three decades, various initiatives advocating for open access have sought to make scholarly research and literature freely available online to anyone who wants to access it. The movement, which is far from unified (Moore, 2017), is based on the general belief that the dissemination of knowledge and information is a fundamental human right, and that the barriers to access to that knowledge, such as subscription fees and paywalls imposed by capitalist publishers, and copyrights that prevent the free use of

194 

K. SZADKOWSKI

knowledge, are detrimental to society as a whole. However, there is no direct anti-capitalist sentiment in the mainstream parts of the open access movement taken as a whole. One of the earliest open access advocates was mathematician and computer scientist Paul Ginsparg, who, in 1991, created the arXiv preprint server to disseminate research in physics, mathematics, and computer science. The service, currently owned by Cornell University, is still in operation and has become a template for similar initiatives over the years. A significant development in establishing the vast ecology of open access infrastructure was the opening what became known as the first open access mega-journal, PLOS One. PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2001 to promote the open access model of scientific publishing. PLOS provides a platform where researchers can publish their work openly and make it freely available to readers (through the payment of an APC by the author). The founders of PLOS believed that this would help to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and make knowledge more widely available. Soon the APC model became widespread and was incorporated into the portfolios of the oligopoly of academic publishers. In the years that followed, the activities of open access advocates gained momentum with the launch of several open access repositories and the emergence of open access journals. In 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative was launched, which called for the creation of a global open access infrastructure that would make scientific and scholarly research freely available to all. Since then, the open access movement has continued to grow and evolve. In recent years, open access has been promoted in all disciplines. Many funding agencies and research institutions now require that the results of the research that they fund be made openly available. One of the most striking examples is the establishment of “Plan S”. The “Plan S” initiative is a policy developed by a consortium of research funders that aims to accelerate the transition to open access publishing in the scientific, technical, and medical fields. The initiative, launched in 2018, aims to ensure that all research funded by participating organisations is made freely available to readers as soon as it is published and to encourage the adoption of open access policies by other research funders and institutions. Plan S firmly aimed to reshape the scientific communication infrastructure, especially in the US and Europe (Smits & Pells, 2022). In this context, capitalist open access (APC-based models) has gained momentum and state-driven supporters.

8 KNOWLEDGE 

195

Samuel Moore (2017) highlights that the open access movement has a complex genealogy that cannot be portrayed as one emerging from the actions of a coherent or homogenous “movement”. There are two separate lineages of OA—one originating from the “openness”/open-source movement and the other from academic efforts to provide access to research—with numerous motivations and understandings within these lineages. Moore sees the development of open access in a conflictual category, conceiving it as a boundary object representing a multitude of positions and strategies. Approaches like Moore’s underline that the shift towards capitalist open access has not happened in a social vacuum, since alongside general open access advocacy that continued lobbying for expanding the access to publicly funded research, there was also an actual and active resistance towards capitalist academic publishing. On the one side, the emergence of capitalist open access overlaps with the broader crisis caused by big deals cancellations (Butler et al., 2022). In response to the so-called “serials crisis” (i.e., the continuous increases in the prices of journal subscriptions in the face of fixed budgets at public institutions), the resistance on the side of university libraries and whole academic systems led to renegotiation and cancelation of the existing arrangements. One of the many examples is Germany and Projekt DEAL that seeks fair access for a fair price for all the institutions in Germany. As result of this project, more than 60 German institutions cancelled their Elsevier contracts at the end of 2016. On the other side, there was a growing wave of the non-legal spread of providing access to paywalled academic materials led primarily by Sci-Hub and Alexandra Elbakyan. While the oligopolist publishers were successful in combatting the Sci-Hub founder in courts, her resistance project continued providing researchers all over the world with access to articles. This chapter is not designed to provide a detailed history of the open access movement. Instead, it is intended to draw attention to the complexity and conflictual nature of its genealogy, which mixes together state policies to ensure public access to publicly funded research, efforts to counter the drain on public budgets caused by rising subscription costs, the neoliberal ideology of openness inherent in the open-source movement, and overtly anti-capitalist initiatives against the publishing oligopoly. Capturing this complex genealogy allows for a better understanding of the contradictions generated by the capitalist form of open access, a kind of communism of capital in the sphere of knowledge production, which is developing in science today.

196 

K. SZADKOWSKI

8.5  Three Areas of Capitalist Openness We will now examine how capitalist strategies rely on open knowledge development to better understand characteristics of communism of capital and the contradictions arising during its establishment. This analysis will enable us, in subsequent sections, to address both the exceptionalist arguments and Marxist critiques of the relationships formed between capital and academic labour in the context of academic publication. 8.5.1   Oligopoly of Academic Publishers Move to Capitalist Open Access The emergence of capitalist open access and the production of APC-based publications does not mean that capital will locate its highest hopes for profit here. Open access still accounts for a relatively small proportion of the revenue of the academic publishing oligopoly (Butler et al., 2022). In 2016 (Haigh, 2016), approximately 68–75% of the revenues of commercial academic publishers came from university libraries, although this number is constantly changing as the share of the APC-based income from open access journals grows. Butler et  al. (2022), calculated that in the period between 2015 and 2018, the revenue from APC-based articles among oligopolist publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, MDPI, Taylor & Francis, Willey) amounted to US $1.06 billion. Elsevier got a substantial piece of the pie ($221.4 million) and extracted profits mostly from APCs in so-called hybrid journals. Hybrid journals are journals to which the publisher sells regular subscriptions but which also allow for the publication of individual articles in open access upon payment of an APC, resulting in double-dipping (i.e., charging both for OA and the regular subscription). Meanwhile, the leader is Springer Nature, which, at $589.7 million, more than doubled the amount brought in by Elsevier. Indeed, Springer Nature generated substantial APC-based income from its two leading megajournals, Scientific Reports (more than $105 million) and Nature Communications (more than $71 million). It is evident that the Nature brand, a mark of prestige in science, pays off substantially. While Springer and other big players make up an essential part of the open access market, they are not the only actors in this field. In recent years, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) has gained an increasing share of the APC market by offering a reduced time to publication (Oviedo-García, 2021; Csomós & Farkas, 2023).

8 KNOWLEDGE 

197

Formerly known as “Molecular Diversity Preservation International”, MDPI was founded in 1996 by Dr. Shu-Kun Lin, a chemist. MDPI has become a publisher of growing importance in the global academic publishing market. With 5700 employees and 115,000 journal editors, it publishes 412 scientific journals. In 2020 approximately 160,000 peer-reviewed articles were published in MDPI journals, and in 2021 alone, the publisher reached 235,000 peer-reviewed articles recording a nearly 50% volume increase year to year. An important aspect from the publisher’s point of view is the process of indexing journals in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. Information about the specific indexes calculated is highlighted on journal websites. MDPI’s “pricing” policy for publication fees in the respective journals is closely correlated to their impact factor (JIF) level. The higher the JIF, the higher the APC. This ranges from CHF 500 for newly established journals without a calculated JIF to CHF 2400 for those with indices reaching JIF levels of 6 and above. The “successes” demonstrated in the form of yearly increases in journals’ impact factors are also consistently highlighted. While in the case of the already recognised oligopoly of large publishers, this behaviour seems to be somewhere on the margins, in the case of MDPI, it comes to the fore. That is, MDPI is openly instrumentalising the value signalling mechanisms internal to the scientific community to strengthen and expand their products and services. Indeed, MDPI’s market success relies primarily on offering its authors several services that make the “production” strategies used by the publisher look more similar to the industrial rather than the academic knowledge production model. First, MDPI proposes a solution to the peer-review problem. The median average time from article submission to publication in MDPI journals is 38 days, and gradually decreases. The same applies to the time from article submission to the first review, which has a median average time of 17 days. This compares to around six months and three months, respectively, for publishers like Springer Nature. MDPI has unlocked a review system in crisis, making extensive use of AI to manage the search and selection of reviewers. Even though the acceptance rate of articles on average in MDPI journals is around 50% (one of the company’s values is to increase the availability of publishing opportunities and move away from the repressive nature of the review process), the foundation on which the company’s vision is supported is scientific peer review. This is crucial because we are experiencing exponential growth in the number of publications, and each year the number of peer-reviewed articles published

198 

K. SZADKOWSKI

increases by 4%, which equates to the amount of 2.5 million per year (indexed in Web of Science) or over 4.7 million (according to Dimensions). Reviews take time. Moreover, reviewing a growing number of articles takes a vast amount of time. In 2020 alone, it is estimated that researchers worldwide spent 130 million hours (or 15,000 person years) reviewing scientific articles (Aczel et al., 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed enormously to academics declining opportunities to engage in the peer-review process. MDPI has devised an ideal solution to the problem, one which also secures the stability of expansion of its enterprise: a voucher system that provides reviewers with partial or full discounts on APCs for their future articles published in MDPI’s journals. This approach appears to compensate reviewers’ work while simultaneously maintaining or even increasing authors’ interest in publishing in this publisher’s journals. Second, MDPI addresses pricing and publication turnover-time. Open access has been the company’s operating model from the beginning. MDPI is a strong player with a substantial share of the open access market. In 2021, 14% of the APC-based open access articles that were indexed in the Scopus database were published in MDPI journals. The expansion of MDPI in countries such as Poland has led to a successive depletion of the APC-based or so-called “gold” open access market share of the other main players in the field (i.e., Springer Nature and Elsevier). This is despite years of lobbying and strong institutional agreements that these players have established with Polish ministries and institutions. For MDPI, the publication and production speed, relatively low price, high impact factors, accessibility and inclusivity all play an essential role in its commercial success. MDPI is a purely capitalist entity that realises massive profits—which have been steadily increasing in recent years—in a completely unorthodox way for capital in publishing, paving the way for others to follow the model. MDPI is a trendsetter in the sector. Firstly, it does not sell scholarly articles by subscription, and its model is entirely based on open access. Secondly, capturing the mechanism for measuring the outputs produced is crucial. In an environment dominated by a particular way of measuring academic labour, MDPI has identified this model and adapted its strategy to it, seeking to ensure that the journals it offers are appropriately valorised in terms of specific indicators—JIFs. At the same time, MDPI is a company that uses purely industrial methods to manage the production process itself. That is to say, on the one hand, it builds its advantage on a

8 KNOWLEDGE 

199

continuous reduction of the turnover-time for a product of interest to buyers (APC-paying authors)—i.e. one that fits the form of a highly valorised open access article form. On the other hand, within the framework of its internal organisation of production, it automates the work of the editorial department to the largest extent possible, subordinating it to artificial intelligence. It treats knowledge products as if they were typical material commodities. This is because MDPI combines sensitivity to the specificities of the sector within which it wants to develop its capitalist strategies with the ruthless efficiency of the capitalist mode of production—based on machines and the ever-decreasing socially necessary labour time required to produce an appropriately valorised commodity. 8.5.2   From Sellers to Data-Providers The transition to a new model—capitalist open access—also involves a significant shift that is taking place in parallel. Increasingly, the focus of the major players in the market, particularly the giant Elsevier and its parent company, RELX, is on the creation and sale of data (Chen & Chan, 2021). In the case of RELX, the effective combination of Elsevier publishing with the simultaneous development of the Scopus database and its various associated analytical tools, which form the basis for numerous rankings and comparisons, accounts for the effectiveness and growth potential of their business model. The data collected on publications, authors and journals are sold not only to ranking companies but also to national ministries responsible for the development of the higher education and science sector, as well as to individual institutions, which use them to plan their development and staff remuneration policies based on their performance. The data, its accessibility, and the transparency of the panels for creating simple summaries and analyses (SciVal) allow for even tighter discipline and control over the academic workforce. The open form of article publication does not interfere with the interests of capitalist companies, as long as they are able to control the capture of behavioural surplus and the data analytics based on it. As Gigi Roggero (2011) soberly pointed out years ago, capital can quietly relinquish the private property relationship. However, it will never give up exercising domination over living labour. Data-driven business models present a way for capital to further extend its domination over academic labour.

200 

K. SZADKOWSKI

The openness of data published elsewhere makes it possible to increase the completeness and pervasiveness of the analyses offered through capitalist analytical tools. In order to emphasise the visibility of published articles, the capital located in large academic publishers seeks to make the process as transparent as possible while mediating every moment of the process (Posada & Chen, 2018). By extracting data on publications, publishers monitor the frequency with which published articles appear in applications like Mendeley. This popular bibliography manager technically equips academic producers with a tool that facilitates the production of articles and allows for a rapid circulation of citations by easing the task of managing references. Moreover, the dissemination processes of papers in channels other than regular academic periodicals are closely monitored and metricised. This is conducted, for example, through Altmetrics or PlumX Metrics, which show the frequency of mentions of publications in social media, the blogosphere, classical media or Wikipedia. All this is done in an effort to estimate the value of the products even more precisely and to strengthen the competitive advantage of the publishers offering the best exposure. In academic publishing, a shift is occurring from selling articles (which are not being abandoned as a revenue-generating model) to selling data and acting as analytical companies. This is in line with the trend described by Roggero (2011)—a shift to the communism of capital in the sphere of publishing—while at the same time establishing convenient conditions for the reigning in of this whole area. In addition, this process reinforces the greatest of capital’s imperatives—it aids the circulation of commodities by making this happen smoothly, and in so doing, it accelerates and expands with the completion of each cycle. Therefore, the measurement system is a dream come true for capital in publishing. Firstly, capital has succeeded in saving itself from dependence on workers, which is important since the relationship with academic labour is so mediated that capital gains only the final effects of long-term and cost-intensive labour. In addition, capital has succeeded in transforming the production relationship—in which it has hitherto been responsible for the “production” of publications, at least to some extent—into a relationship of selling a service that entails the possibility of displaying a publication in an appropriate place. Moreover, by moving to tight control over the highly metricised process of circulation of scientific publications, it has enabled itself to extract value in the form of rent by securing an unavoidable place within the process. However, the turn towards data is not the only tool in capital’s repertoire.

8 KNOWLEDGE 

201

8.5.3   AI-Generated Research and Nooscope On the 2nd of April 2019, Springer Nature, one of the biggest capitalist academic publishers, announced that it had released its first machine-­ generated book. Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research was written by an algorithm called Beta Writer (2019). The whole undertaking was done in collaboration with the Applied Computational Linguistics lab of Goethe University Frankfurt/Main in Germany. The AI has reviewed, summarised and synthesised more than 150 peer-reviewed articles available on the platform SpringerLink on the theme of lithium-ion batteries, a hot topic for the electric-car capitalist industry. Springer Nature declared that it “plans to expand this pilot project by developing prototypes for content from other subject areas as well” (Springer Nature, 2019). The book itself was published in open access and was well received by the academic community in chemistry as it might help researchers in the field to get on top of the fast-developing literature (Addison, 2019). A recent careful review of Lithium-Ion Batteries (Lombardo et al., 2022) stated that, while this form of AI-generated synthesis is still an example of weak AI, and while the emergence of robust AI algorithms may bring numerous ethical problems, it nonetheless provides substantial support to increase the researchers’ creativity. Several problems can be discerned through a careful look at this small case. Beta Writer could be described as what Pasquinelli and Joler (2021) referred to as nooscope (from the Greek skopein ‘to examine, look’ and noos ‘knowledge’), an instrument to see and navigate in the vast space of knowledge. The authors apply at least three functions to AI nooscopes: pattern recognition, pattern extraction, and pattern generation (Pasquinelli & Joler, 2021, p. 1269). We are living in a period of rapid acceleration of knowledge production. While in the 1960s, Derek De Solla Price discussed the exponential growth of science, today, we are facing a capital-driven acceleration of production of scientific outputs—a speed-up caused solely by a capitalist form of producing articles. When the peer-reviewed article became the basic unit of academic assessment, and its publication channels started to be nearly entirely controlled by the academic publishing oligopoly (Larivière et al., 2015), we saw even more AI-driven exploration of the vast pools of knowledge as a remedy to that problem, as seen from the point of view of capital. Capital is facing here a contradiction that was caused by itself. Capital in academic publishing, which accelerates the production of academic

202 

K. SZADKOWSKI

outputs for its self-valorisation, also undermines the capacity to quickly identify the state-of-the-art useful knowledge faced by the productive capital in the industry. The example of lithium-ion batteries is telling. It is a research frontier for the expanding industry of electric cars, among other industries, with Tesla as the most striking example. Automating the pattern recognition of the frontier topics and predicting the fruitful directions to be taken is a valuable asset for the productive capital that does not want to invest in long-term, high-risk basic research (Mazzucato, 2013). Nevertheless, this shows only one side of the problem. The other is the problem of openness. In order to be the most effective, such machine-­ generated synthesis needs nearly unlimited access to the content of state-­ of-­the-art knowledge. Moreover, to teach algorithms like Beta Writer, capital in AI needs open access materials as its training ground. The problems have only scaled up with the recent emergence of OpenAI’s GPT-4.0 and multiple products based on it.

8.6   Beyond Exceptionalism At this point, we can pause for a moment and return to the arguments of the exceptionalists. Marginson (2013, p. 363) pointed to the contradiction of cognitive capitalism that we have discussed above: the difficulty of maintaining a regime of exclusionary access in the “relational setting” of knowledge production, especially in learning processes and education or intensive research work. By treating the commodified form of knowledge as a necessary and inalienable element of the capitalist market, Marginson rightly pointed out the difficulty of maintaining such a model and mechanism in a higher education setting that is permeated with the common, based on constant, open horizontal communication. While the theorists of cognitive capitalism have seen in this difficulty the potential for liberating the processes of knowledge production—and more broadly, social production—from capitalist oppression (Moulier-Boutang, 2011; Hardt & Negri, 2017), Marginson and higher education scholars who share his assumptions see more of the sector’s resilience to capitalist penetration, giving aspersion to the re-assumption of the state-driven, public curatorship over it. By going through examples of capitalist use of open access to knowledge and research as part of capital accumulation and valorisation strategies, I have shown how both in the immediate environment of higher

8 KNOWLEDGE 

203

education and science, as well as in the capitalist knowledge economy at large, there has been a shift from an enclosure-based model of production to profiting from openness (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020). This new and now widespread model of capitalist production, by moving away from a massive reliance on a private form of knowledge ownership and the mass sale of goods in this form, makes necessary adjustments to the previous strategies of capital. Capital continually seeks to transform all limits it encounters into its barriers (Marx, 1973; Lebowitz, 2009), metamorphosing and absorbing even seemingly the most contradictory mechanisms into its logic. Given this, will higher education, liberated from proprietary forms of knowledge (by the hands of capital itself), shake off capitalist relations once and for all and become based on the common good, as exceptionalists want? We cannot hold out such hope. Coupled with the logic of capital, open access to knowledge becomes an effective tool for adjusting the mechanisms for extracting surplus value from academic labour rather than fulfilling the liberal dream of democratic access to knowledge. The three areas of capital’s activity in relation to open knowledge that were sketched out in the previous section provide clear evidence. First, an increasing number of academic publishers are developing their APC-based open access publishing service projects. The example of Springer Nature, which controls a huge part of the capitalist open access market, shows that the greater and more established (in a quantified way) the prestige of the publication, the greater the chances of success. The case of MDPI, on the other hand, demonstrates an instrumental approach to metrics and the quantification of prestige through the efficient acquisition of high-impact factors journals combined with a fast and constantly shortened publishing process and an effective low price-per-service policy, which offers the possibility of almost infinite expansion. Caught in the clutches of efficient measurement apparatuses within their own systems, multitudes of academics are interested in an efficient process of publishing the results of their research or often simply fulfilling evaluation requirements just by “having a publication”. Second, the shift towards operating on data, collecting all visible publication traffic within capital-controlled databases, makes it possible to reap benefits regardless of the form of ownership that the publications take. The case of RELX and the range of analytical products based on the Scopus database leaves no doubt here about the effectiveness of this practice and its importance for the sector.

204 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Finally, the very opening up of the vast reservoir of specialised knowledge produced by science systems around the world makes it possible to develop and use technologies to identify relevant knowledge more and more efficiently. Indeed, as the example of Beta Writer shows, it is even possible to automate the processes of synthesising valuable knowledge from the point of view of capital located in the sphere of production. All these capital activities take place with formal respect for the key elements of science and higher education architecture that are so dear to exceptionalists. Not only do they fit into the “race for prestige” as well as into the framework of national public policies, but they ultimately operate outside the necessity of locking knowledge into a private form of intellectual property. However, it is not only the exceptionalists who have problems confronting the dynamically changing reality of capitalist knowledge production; in Marxist theory, capitalist open access presents an apparent conceptual and political deadlock. An adequate theory of the exploitation of academic labour is at stake in its solution.

8.7   Beyond Dispossession: Capitalist Open Access and Exploitation Academic publishing, particularly capitalist open access, poses a challenge to Marxist theory. Since Marx’s comments on productive labour from Theories of Surplus Value, where he discussed a productive worker delivering books for a for-profit publisher, the issue has largely remained on the fringes of Marxist debates. It has never gained significant traction, and as a dynamic phenomenon, it has not been offered a clear theoretical solution. The emergence of controversies over capitalist open access has only compounded the problem, resulting in two distinct poles of debate: one that focuses on relations of dispossession and the other that examines the relationship between capital and academic labour in publishing in terms of exploitation. However, the boundaries between these camps and concepts are porous. While the proprietary publishing regime allowed for straightforward interpretations in terms of dispossession, the shift to capitalist open access poses a challenge, revealing something about the nature of the capital-labour entanglement. To address the issue of open access from a Marxian perspective that moves beyond the limitations of the “dispossession” approach, we must first connect a few pieces.

8 KNOWLEDGE 

205

8.7.1   Dispossession Without Private Property Form? In a recent analysis, John Welsh (2020) explored the aesthetic distinction between expropriation (dispossession) and exploitation, drawing upon the insights of Jacques Rancière. Rancière perceives aesthetics as the realm responsible for rendering particular aspects of reality visible while simultaneously concealing others, thus governing the spectrum of the visible. Welsh posits that exploitation-related relationships possess a more discernible nature, while dispossession-oriented connections are characterised by a degree of secretiveness. As Welsh puts it, in the context of capitalist production, the methods of exploitation rest on a direct separation of surplus value from the value-generating labour within the production process, and through its later actualisation during commodity exchange (2020, p. 356). In contrast, relations of appropriation dispossess workers of their surpluses outside of the immediate circuit of capital, the wage contract form, and the commodification of labour […] Such work is therefore not sufficiently integrated into metrical measurement to be capitalisation proper, it remains officially unquantified, and so is not valorised systematically as ‘abstract social labour’. (Welsh, 2020, p. 356)

The distinction is deepened further. While an exploitation relation gives surplus the value-form, appropriation serves only as a condition of further production of value. The surplus it acquires is pumped into value-­ producing paid wage labour. Welsh, therefore, emphasises that “it is only the form of paid work, restricted to a minority, that is the economic pivot of capital, and allows the valorisation into measurable, observable, and governable form, of socially necessary labour time” (2020, p. 357). Here we reach a major problem. Welsh’s categories do not allow us to grapple with the problem of the relationship that academic labour has with capital in large capitalist academic publishers. Exploited labour can be measured and, at the same time, performed within a formal wage relationship. Unpaid labour, whose effects are subjected to capitalist appropriation, on the other hand, is outside the relationship and the possibility of actual measurement. The problems, however, multiply as we delve deeper into this proposition. While in the first category, in the context of academic labour, Welsh subsumes all those employed in universities and institutions of higher learning (irrespective of their status—public or private), into the second category fall all relations in which a wage does not link academic

206 

K. SZADKOWSKI

labour and capital. Moreover, this second category that Welsh utilises offers an understanding of academic labour producing commodified articles for capitalist publishers. Welsh refuses the idea that academic labour contributes to the process of valorisation through submitting the results of its work to publishers, pointing out that: only when the article is subsequently commodified, given a monetary expression, and exchanged in the market, does it acquire value-form. This occurs between the journal and those institutions or individuals who purchase it through subscriptions, not between the journal and the producer/ labourer, who is effectively dispossessed. (Welsh, 2020, pp. 357–8)

The main thrust of Welsh’s argument is that no form of remuneration or participation in the surplus appears on the part of the academic. Workers transfer intellectual property rights to their creations, which only become commodities in the next step and can then be realised on the market. This is an example of a common theoretical procedure within the Marxist analysis of academic publishing. Firstly, the situation of the relationship between capital and labour in the context of scientific publishing is defined as a one-off, rather than as continuous. That is, the relation is seen from the perspective of a single act, not the systematic, ongoing process of continuously supplying the articles. Secondly, we have again based the understanding of this relationship on transforming the product of labour into a commodified form, for which the private property form is fundamental. When intellectual property relation disappears, the problem ceases to be intelligible for this frame, similarly to other representatives of this current of reflection. A classic example is Wilhelm Peekhaus (2012), who interpreted contemporary transformations in scholarly communication in Marxian terms of dispossession and alienation. Although Peekhaus’ contribution is not limited to this issue, his main argument is based on the assumption that, in parallel with cuts in public budgets for science combined with the promotion of a discourse supporting the commercialisation of research results, the academy has been transformed into an area of capital accumulation. Owing to the central place that scientific journals occupy in the knowledge production process, capital has taken it upon itself to master this area gradually. The control of capital over the outlets for research results is one of

8 KNOWLEDGE 

207

the elements of stripping academic labour of control over its production and reproduction conditions. It thus has the character of a fundamental expropriation. The two forms of alienation about which Peekhaus writes (2012, p. 587)—that is alienation from the product of one’s labour (through the form of intellectual property), as well as alienation from the material conditions of disseminating the effects of one’s labour (through control over the system of journals suitable for valorising academic labour)—are responsible for the success with which capital thrives in this sector. Peekhaus remains relatively optimistic, as he concentrates only on the fragment of higher education transformed by capital and sees a potential for resistance. He consciously addresses that the constant struggle for open access to publication is a constraint imposed on capital that it constantly tries to overcome (2012, p. 587). Because the capitalist open access model was only in its infancy when Peekhaus penned his arguments—and today, ten years on, it is slowly taking on a mature shape—Peekhaus objects to defining open access (without an explicitly anti-capitalist agenda) as an alternative to capitalist domination of the scholarly journal publishing sector, still identifying some of its emancipatory potentials. Nonetheless, he rightly points to the conservative prestige and metrics system based on it as the main barrier facing the possibility of reclaiming the scholarly communication infrastructure. As he put it, “the extensive control that commercial publishers exercise over the major citation indices could be leveraged to exclude open access journals not published by the major corporate players.” (2012, p. 592). One can agree with Peekhaus that open access, even if it is anti-capitalist in nature, cannot be seen as the solution to the issue of capitalist dominance over the sector. Instead, a blow should be delivered to the measurement system and the prestige distribution on which it is based, either by abolishing it altogether or by establishing a system of measurement that helps to transcend the limitations of the capitalist form (Szadkowski, 2019; Krzeski, 2021, 2022). Finally, in his elaborated essay, David Golumbia (2016) looked at the emergence of an initial discourse on the need to develop open access through the lens of the Marxian category of labour. Golumbia argues against the ideological demand that, regardless of discipline, research work’s effects should be free. He makes several pertinent observations. The first is that open access becomes, in a sense, a tool for depriving intellectual workers of control or ownership of the results of their work. In this

208 

K. SZADKOWSKI

way, capital transforms itself so that, although it does not possess these effects, it at least depletes workers’ control over them. Secondly, Golumbia shows how discourses of this kind—discourses derived from the free culture movement and the creative industries—are imbued with right-wing ideology. This, precisely by emphasising the need for freedom of information, smuggles in a large number of mechanisms responsible for disseminating inequality and subordinating the position of workers in the workplace. However, the most crucial thing Golumbia emphasises is that if labour does not produce a concrete effect, the worker is in a weaker bargaining position and is ultimately reduced to a servant. Through this prism, Golumbia views academic labour, which hands over its products in open access to capital. For example, it is important in the vast pool of open access materials needed for teaching AI algorithms. This axis also allows him to understand the problem of disciplinary specificity, specifically the academic labour in the humanities. He sees this deterioration of many workers in the humanities through the prism of losing the opportunity to earn from the effects of their labour. Unlike the sciences, humanists have often been able to sell their books. If intellectual property rights protect them in some perspective, they can count on deriving some share of the surplus realised by the publisher. On a global scale, it is an argument favouring the relatively privileged. However, Golumbia provides a more sober line of argument by pointing out that peripheral countries forced to publish the results of their research only in open form also put themselves at risk. Although, in my view, this is an argument that happens to work in the realm of science—not the humanities—where open access offers some form of increasing the visibility of otherwise invisible research from the periphery. Despite this, it would be unwise to dismiss Golumbia’s conclusions. He convincingly proved that capital might dispossess academics without necessarily imposing its propriety control over their products. 8.7.2   Profiting from Openness As mentioned at the beginning of this section, a second group of Marxist theorists aims to interpret the relation between academics and capitalist publishers in terms of exploitation. In their pioneering Marxist book, Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness: Profit for Free?, Arwid Lund and Mariano Zukerfeld (2020) devoted some attention to the business model of publishing companies, including Elsevier, which they interpret as platforms. According to the authors (2020), platforms play a central role in

8 KNOWLEDGE 

209

the current capitalist mode of production. They facilitate exchanges between various groups, such as producers, service providers, creators, and consumers (Srnicek, 2017). In this process, platforms often extract value from these exchanges. There are different ways to understand this context. On the one hand, some Marxist analyses of platform capitalism focus on rent extraction. Platforms are proprietary capitalist infrastructure, similar to the aristocracy in early capitalism, that grant rights of use to their infrastructure in exchange for a portion of the surplus in the form of rent. On the other hand, as the authors suggest that we can view platforms as a return to the system of putting-out labour (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020). In this perspective, platform capitalists would be seen as merchant capital, selling goods they do not produce directly but contract out. The emerging producers within the platform would be responsible for creating these goods using their tools, means of production, and production schemes (Banaji, 2020). Such a situation resembles that of hybrid subsumption, that we discussed in the Chap. 5. The authors contrast two models of profit in cognitive capitalism, on the one hand, profit from openness, which “emerged from the coming of the ideology of openness and the limits of the profit from enclosures model—which copyright expansion was based on” (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020, pp. 7, 36). On the other hand, there is the model based on enclosures. The differences between the two models are deftly characterised. While the objectives of the two models are the same and boil down to achieving profit from commodities that can be copied at close to zero marginal cost, the means that are used are the opposite. Whilst the enclosure model pulls up the price of outputs, pricing copyright-based products highly, the openness model uses the opposite strategy and pushes down the price of inputs, such as by relying on crowdsourced and open labour of contributors or “produsers”. The primary sources of value are also strikingly different. While the enclosure model relies on waged workers and their products, the openness model relies on massive crowds of unwaged produsers. Different also is the way that the companies developing these two models generate their revenues. While corporations that develop products in the enclosure model get revenues from fees, the revenues in the openness model come primarily from advertisements or certification, to which we can now add the sales of analytical or targeted data products that are based on the produsers ongoing crowd activities within the platforms. The differences are also visible in other aspects, with the legal frame being one of the most obvious. While the first model is based

210 

K. SZADKOWSKI

on copyrights, the second uses various creative commons licenses or copyleft rights. Lund and Zukerfeld go further, noting that additional differences are reflected in the ideologies of the two models, where one is based on praising property and private ownership, while the other underlines freedom, communities and openness. Finally, the substantial difference between the models is based on the fact that the first is based on labour time exploitation, while the second relies more on non-measured leisure time. At the same time, Lund and Zukerfeld distinguish between the approaches to profit, indicating that these may be based on either rent or exploitation. The authors raised several important issues. First, they rely on Vercellone’s (2007) diagnosis indicating the evaporating boundaries between profit and rent. They also emphasise the aspect of rent as a form for extracting the value produced elsewhere, especially as they consider unpaid activities of various “produsers” to be crucial for the contemporary form of capitalism. What gets highlighted in their approach to rent is that by relying on this concept, one does not have to redefine such activities as productive labour. Alternatively, as we know, one can use a broad biopolitical approach to the productivity of labour (Hardt & Negri, 2017) and assume that all social activities are productive for capital. Therefore, what is essential is to be able to focus on how the surplus value that is produced is then extracted. Rent fits into this picture as a perfectly suitable instrument. Moving to the issue of exploitation, the authors rely on Fuchs’ (2014) assumption that wage relation is not necessary to define labour as exploited and contributing to the surplus, since the essence is not the formalised relationship but the socially necessary labour time encapsulated in the commodities that are produced. The formalised relationship then, which was crucial for Marx in defining the productive character of labour, has disappeared, which risks blurring the picture. While analysing the exploitation in digital platforms may seem helpful, it requires more attention in the context of academic labour, as will be shown in Chap. 9. Finally, Lund and Zukerfeld suggest three modalities of capitalist exploitation. First, “exploitation through alienation” means that “determined knowledge only by the exploited actors is objectified during work time in a product which is alienated by the Exploiter” (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020, p. 66). Second, “exploitation through reproduction” assumes that “determined knowledge borne by the exploited is codified by the Exploiter, who becomes the owner of this knowledge”. This is the mode of

8 KNOWLEDGE 

211

exploiting academic labour in the academic publishing industry, where capital is codifying (or in this case certifying) given knowledge; without this certification, it is not valid as valuable knowledge within the circuit of scholarly communication. Capital is not paying sufficient compensation, and in the case of open access publications, it is even receiving an additional fee. Third, “exploitation through attention” is when “determined knowledge transmitted by the exploiters is subjectivised toward the exploited”. This describes the situation of advertisements in the social media environment. The authors also offer an excellent systematisation of the various digital platforms, categorising them along a double axis with for-profit and not-­ for-­profit on the one side and enclosed and openly accessible on the other. Elsevier, as analysed in the pages of this book, uses the strategies of for-­ profit character in both enclosed and openly accessible forms of knowledge commodities (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020, p.  85). While it is not a landmark observation, it is a useful categorisation. Admittedly, the authors do not explain the reasons for the dominance of companies like Elsevier over academic labour. They start from the assumption that the situation simply occurs, so that when they summarise how the exploitation of academics in the context of open access takes place, they speak of “unpaid academics that have to pay for being published open access” (2020, p. 280). Manfred Knoche provides another insight into analysing the academic labour that produces open access articles for capital. This Austrian scholar argues for understanding the production of open access knowledge as a transitional form to capitalist production, in the classical Marxian sense, where academic producers “work for a common merchant capital, the publisher; a relation which has nothing to do with the capitalist mode of production proper and is itself not yet formally subsumed under it” (Marx 1861–1863b, pp.  143–144, quoted in Knoche, 2020). Therefore, he emphasises that as transitional forms, we can consider situations where “direct producers from outside the capitalist production process supply capitalist enterprises against payment or free of charge partly with semi-­ finished products that are technically processed in these enterprises, and partly with finished products that merchant capital sells.” (Knoche, 2020, p. 524). However, while the way in which Knoche understands the specificity of the relation established between capital and academic labour is correct, there is a blind spot in his approach.

212 

K. SZADKOWSKI

We can find traces of this limitation when Knoche explains “de-­ capitalisation” as a proposal for the dissolution of the capitalist rule over academic publishing. Here, he touches on an important point: “In concrete terms, this boils down to academics no longer publishing with commercial (large) publishers” (2020, p. 522), as if this is only the decision over the outlet for publications. There are conditions for this decision to be made and re-made every time an article is submitted. Knoche refers to that further in his argumentation, yet he never touches the core of the problem, saying, “Paradoxically, however, these privileged academic producers seemingly voluntarily—in reality mostly under the pressure of the prevailing regime of academic qualification—cede their copyrights to commercial, academic publishers” (2020, p. 527). It is a “magic moment” that no Marxist scholar to date wants to explain—how this pressure is constructed, how it is enforced on academics, what are the conditions of this decision, why academics are voluntarily delivering what they are delivering, and why they are ceding their copyrights or are so willing to pay the APCs in particular journals held by the oligopoly of academic publishers. Although Knoche’s article provides a tremendous Marxian framework for explaining that the production of the outputs for merchant capital does not occur in the conditions of direct subsumption of this labour, he remains silent on the structure of this situation, and his critique of the ideology does not provide us with the tools needed to grasp the phenomenon. Nevertheless, Knoche offers an approach to viewing the academics working for merchant capital: “Capitalist academic publishers have perfected this extremely profit-increasing production method by appropriating the products of the immediate small-scale academic producers and their intellectual property rights as valorisation rights free of charge or only by paying small fees. This method is a form of exploitation, even if the producers do not work directly as wage earners in the publishing houses.” (Knoche, 2020, p. 525). Relying on Marx’s insights from Theories of Surplus Value, Knoche emphasises the productive character of labour employed indirectly by capitalists, which is to deliver the final product to the producer. Furthermore, Knoche addresses a vital aspect for understanding all capitalist relationships with the public sector—the relationship is established whenever capital cannot profitably valorise, such as where the costs are too high, and the investment is too risky. Knoche observes that “This accumulation of capital would not be possible at all based on academics working directly as wage earners in the publishing houses, i.e. it would be counterproductive, since the publications, most of which are

8 KNOWLEDGE 

213

based on many years of research work, would be ‘unaffordable’ for the publishing houses.” (Knoche, 2020, p.  525). For the same reason, Puehringer et al. (2021) see general public spending on research and science (which forms the base of each knowledge input in the commodified form of a research paper) as the most considerable uncovered input to capitalist production in academic publishing.

8.8  Conclusion Understanding the limits of capitalist open access requires returning to Marx. In Das Kapital Volume Three, when discussing the contradictions of the law of the falling rate of profit, Marx develops an instructive commentary on the dialectic between barriers and the limits of capitalist production, which I will quote here in extenso: Capitalist production seeks continually to overcome these immanent barriers but overcomes them only by means which again place these barriers in its way and on a more formidable scale. The real barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. […] The limits within which the preservation and self-­ expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move—these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means—unconditional development of the productive forces of society—comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production. (Marx, 1998, pp. 248–249)

I began this chapter with a discussion of the internal contradictions and barriers that are encountered during the initial phase of developing cognitive capitalism, such as capital using industrial methods of approaching knowledge and restricting it in the form of intellectual property rights. In the next step, we have seen that capital does not retreat from abandoning a form of ownership; rather, it moves into a phase of communism of capital. This step enables it to operationalise the open form of access to knowledge for its own needs while at the same time entering a higher stage of

214 

K. SZADKOWSKI

development—the possibility of using the vast and free knowledge resources from all over the world as a training ground for its AI tools. Unlike in the passage quoted above, however, I do not think that capital will accomplish the development of the material forces of production into a form that would enable its removal. The only limit to the capitalist mode of production is an organised and antagonistic working class, putting an end to the capital once and for all. However, in order to effectively strike and stop the endless movement of capital, the working class must identify the mechanisms that drive this movement, as well as point to those moments where a blockage can bring it to a halt. The result of applying the method of the critique of the political economy, which in this book I have proposed in relation to higher education subsumed under capital, is a map identifying the necessary contradictions. Indeed, the task of the critique is not to demonstrate the inevitability of either the decline or the continuance of capital, but to enable hope and open up spaces for action. In order to understand the specificity of the relationship established between academic labour and capital located in oligopolistic publishers (in both their proprietary and open access strategies), we need to reconstitute the components of the ideal types of this relationship. For this reason, I have developed two simplified and ideal type models that encapsulate the relations between academic labour, capital and the broader public. The first model includes the ideal form of this relationship in the context of transfer of the intellectual property to the content submitted to the publisher. The academic article in its proprietary form is the cornerstone of this process. It is created by academic labour. Unpaid, it delivers to a capitalist publisher, who obtains the intellectual property rights to the work in the same movement. Deprived of monetary remuneration, however, it receives at least two benefits under most academic systems. Firstly, the academic journal system, as we discussed in the previous chapters, is at the centre of validating the knowledge produced by academic labour. For the piece of research to have general cognitive value, it traditionally has to go through a peer-review process and be published in a journal recognised by the scientific community. A journal, therefore, has a fundamental function in the process of knowledge becoming scientific knowledge. Secondly, linked to this epistemic recognition, we also find recognition by the community of academics—prestige—of which, as I wrote in Chap. 7, the quantification processes are currently taking place on an unprecedented scale under the leadership of capital and the state. Prestige is the currency

8 KNOWLEDGE 

215

of capitalist science. This dynamic is instilled in national and international systems of evaluation of academic labour where measurement apparatuses operate. For this reason, by producing for the capitalist and relinquishing ownership rights over the commodity produced, academic labour is rewarded, as it were, in a currency specific to its field of practice. This is the primary mechanism that drives and reproduces the relation of the transfer of products and the rights to the content. In academic publishing, the form of private ownership of the academic article enables capital to profit from selling access rights to articles through paid subscriptions. These subscriptions are purchased by academic libraries, universities, ministries, and individual users. In this simple exchange (sale), capital realises the value of the commodity, which is almost entirely its surplus value (since the contribution of the labour force employed by the capitalist in producing the commodity is minimal). However, this proprietary model is gradually giving place to a new one—the capitalist open access model. Here enters the second model. It contains a similar situation of the production of a scientific article for a capitalist publisher, however, with a changed form of ownership of the publication effect. Indeed, we are dealing with publishing an open access article in a capitalist publishing house based on APC. In this situation, the academic labour no longer transfers the property rights to the result of its research to capital but contributes funds (usually public funds) as a publication fee for publishing service. Although there is no transfer of ownership rights, these, however, also largely escape the control of the academic labour itself as the results enter the public domain, becoming part of the knowledge commons (depending of the type of the licence). This situation means that the public sphere (but also capital) does not have to pay directly for access to the knowledge created by academic labour. However, the state (most often) and its agencies indirectly bear the cost of open access fees by funding the science and higher education system. However, capital, deprived of control over the proprietary form of knowledge, enables itself to control the steady flow of material (and the APC fees that go with it) for publication by further controlling the system of knowledge validation and the distribution of prestige within the academic community. Once again, the two aspects of communication processes fundamental to scholarly communication (validation of knowledge by the community and measurable prestige) are the primary motivators of academic labour for a steady supply of material for publication in given outlets (controlled by the oligopoly).

216 

K. SZADKOWSKI

By losing proprietary control over the scientific article that previously existed as a commodity, capital shifts to the service provider position—selling the service of validating the knowledge submitted. It shifts to the position of a platform (Srnicek, 2017), managing the meetings and the exchanges of academic labour external to itself. The shift to capitalist open access makes it difficult to interpret the relationship between academic labour and capital in terms of dispossession. The removal of the proprietary commodity form of the academic article means that we cannot speak of this form of alienation of labour from its product. The categories of deriving rent from the provision of a publishing platform seem much more appropriate. However, theorists focusing on the wage relationship overlook the actuality and permanence of exploitation by neglecting permanence, reproducibility and the impossibility of omitting capital from the publishing and knowledge validation process. Indeed, we can perceive the structure of exploitation in this situation by looking at the capture by capital not so much of the direct effects of academic labour (the results of research in the form of articles), but of the entire system of collective means of production (the mechanisms crucial to the validation of knowledge and the structures for distributing prestige in the academic field). The positioning of capital in the process is also an important issue. In establishing a relationship with academic labour, capital is located outside the production process. It does not directly provide the patterns of production and cooperation intended to lead to the production of a given output. Although it must be admitted that we are dealing here with a far-­ reaching standardisation of the same form in which the process of product (article) creation takes place, capital does not interfere, either in the content or in the very process leading to the production of the effects that are to be encapsulated in the product. It thus occupies a position analogous to that historically established between merchant capital and labour within the framework of hybrid relations of subsumption.

References Aczel, B., Szaszi, B., & Holcombe, A.  O. (2021). A Billion-Dollar Donation: Estimating the Cost of Researchers’ Time Spent on Peer Review. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6(1), 1–8. Addison, F. (2019). Lithium–Ion Battery Book Written by Machine Learning Algorithm. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/lithium-ion-batterybook-written-by-machinelearning-algorithm/3010380.article.

8 KNOWLEDGE 

217

Alquati, R. (1961/2013). Organic Composition of Capital and Labor-Power at Olivetti. Viewpoint 3. Banaji, J. (2020). A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket books. Bauwens, M., & Kostakis, V. (2014). From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-Operativism. tripleC, 12(1), 356–361. Beta Writer. (2019). Lithium-Ion Batteries. A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research. Dordrecht: Springer. Beverungen, A., Murtola, A.  M., & Schwartz, G. (2013). The Communism of Capital? ephemera, 13(3), 483. Brembs, B., Huneman, P., Schönbrodt, F., Nilsonne, G., Susi, T., Siems, R., … Rodriguez-Cuadrado, S. (2021). Replacing Academic Journals. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo,5793611. Butler, L. A., Matthias, L., Simard, M. A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2022). The Oligopoly’s Shift to Open Access. How For-Profit Publishers Benefit from Article Processing Charges. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7057143 Chen, G., & Chan, L. (2021). University Rankings and Governance by Metrics and Algorithms. In E. Hazelkorn & G. Mihut (Eds.), Research Handbook on University Rankings (pp. 425–443). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Corsani, A. (2012, June). “Wage/Labor Relations” in Neoliberal Cognitive Capitalism. In Economic Culture of Modern Capitalism. Conference Proceedings. ID number: halshs-00684845, version 1. Csomós, G., & Farkas, J. Z. (2023). Understanding the Increasing Market Share of the Academic Publisher “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute” in the Publication Output of Central and Eastern European Countries: A Case Study of Hungary. Scientometrics, 128(1), 803–824. Dyer-Whitford, N., Kjøsen, A.  M., & Steinhoff, J. (2019). Inhuman Power. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital Labour and Karl Marx. London: Routledge. Fumagalli, A., & Lucarelli, S. (2007). A Model of Cognitive Capitalism: A Preliminary Analysis. European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, 20(1), 117–133. Golumbia, D. (2016). Marxism and Open Access in the Humanities: Turning Academic Labor Against Itself. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 28, 74–114. Haigh, S. (2016, February 3). Falling Canadian Dollar Raises the Longstanding Issue of Journal Costs. Canadian Association of Research Libraries. [@:] https:// www.carl-­abrc.ca/news/journal-­costs/ Hall, R., & Winn, J. (Eds.). (2017). Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

218 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Jacob, M.  C. (2014). The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knoche, M. (2020). Science Communication and Open Access: The Critique of the Political Economy of Capitalist Academic Publishers as Ideology Critique. tripleC, 8(2), 508–534. Komljenovic, J. (2022). The Future of Value in Digitalised Higher Education: Why Data Privacy Should Not Be Our Biggest Concern. Higher Education, 83(1), 119–135. Krzeski, J. (2021). How to Imagine a Non-Capitalist Measure? Going Beyond the Value Production with Spinoza’s Concept of Expression. Critique, 49(3–4), 325–342. Krzeski, J. (2022). Power and Agency Within the Evaluative State: A Strategic– Relational Approach to Quantification of Higher Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022. 2162388. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502. Lebowitz, M. A. (2009). Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis. Leiden: Brill. Lombardo, T. et al. (2022). Artificial Intelligence Applied to Battery Research: Hype or Reality? Chemical Reviews, 122(12), 10899–10969, https://doi. org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00108. Lund, A., & Zukerfeld, M. (2020). Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness: Profit for Free? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Marazzi, C. (2008). Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marginson, S. (2013). The Impossibility of Capitalist Markets in Higher Education. Journal of Education Policy, 28(3), 353–370. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1998). Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 37: Marx: Capital III. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mazzucato, M. (2013). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths. London: Public Affairs. Monnier, J.  M., & Vercellone, C. (2010). Labour and Welfare State in the Transition to Cognitive Capitalism. In V.  Cvijanović, A.  Fumagalli, & C. Vercellone (Eds.), Cognitive Capitalism and Its Reflections in South-Eastern Europe. Berlin: Peter Lang. Moore, S.  A. (2017). A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations Between Openness and Access to Research. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication, 11, 1–15. Moulier-Boutang, Y. (2011). Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

8 KNOWLEDGE 

219

Oviedo-García, M. Á. (2021). Journal Citation Reports and the Definition of a Predatory Journal: The Case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI). Research Evaluation, 30(3), 405–419. Pasquinelli, M. (2015). Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3), 49–68. Pasquinelli, M., & Joler, V. (2021). The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism. AI & SOCIETY, 36, 1263–1280. Peekhaus, W. (2012). The Enclosure and Alienation of Academic Publishing: Lessons for the Professoriate. tripleC, 10(2), 577–599. Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance Publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1), 39–49. Posada, A., & Chen, G. (2018, June). Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers. Journal d’Interaction Personne-Système, 1, 1–21. Preston, J. (2022). Artificial Intelligence in the Capitalist University: Academic Labour, Commodification, and Value. London: Routledge. Puehringer, S., Rath, J., & Griesebner, T. (2021). The Political Economy of Academic Publishing: On the Commodification of a Public Good. PLoS One, 16(6), e0253226. Rekret, P., & Szadkowski, K. (2021). Intellectual Property. In B. Skeggs, S. R. Farris, A.  Toscano, & S.  Bromberg (Eds.), Sage Handbook of Marxism (Vol. III, pp. 1556–1573). London: SAGE. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Smits, R. J., & Pells, R. (2022). Plan S for Shock: Science. Shock. Solution. Speed. London: Ubiquity Press. Springer Nature. (2019). Springer Nature Publishes Its First Machine-Generated Book. [@:] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-­springer/media/press-­ releases/corporate/springer-­nature-­machine-­generated-­book/16590126 Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Szadkowski, K. (2019). An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-Productive Academic Labour. tripleC, 17(1), 111–131. Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism, 15(1), 13–36. Virno, P. (2003). A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles: Semiotext (e). Welsh, J. (2020). Dispossessing Academics: The Shift to ‘Appropriation’ in the Governing of Academic Life. European Journal of Social Theory, 23(3), 350–369. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Ingram Publisher.

CHAPTER 9

Productive and Unproductive Academic Labour

9.1   Introduction We have already come a long way. Starting from the recognition that capital is active in higher education and science, we have devoted considerable space to looking at the ways in which it instrumentalises sector-specific elements (prestige, measure or openness) to achieve its own goals. In Chap. 5, we focused on ways of conceptualising the relationship between capital and labour, distinguishing four notions of subsumption. I pointed out that, in contrast to the conditions of ideal subsumption of academic labour in the public sector, which increasingly resemble a purely capitalist relationship, we also have other forms of subsumption. Once we leave the framework of analysing academic labour only in its institutional setting— the individual university—we begin to see more clearly how capital, and the relations that it establishes with academic labour, operate more systematically. Similarly, as in the context of analysing capitalist open access,

Material contained in this chapter draws in part from a published article. Acknowledgement: The article was first published in the journal tripleC: Krystian Szadkowski. 2019. An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-productive Academic Labour. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique 17 (1): 111–131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v17i1.1076. Republished with kind permission by tripleC (http://www.triple-­c.at) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_9

221

222 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the ultimate stake of these considerations is not only to demonstrate the relationship established by capital with labour, but also to conceptualise its nature. The spread of capitalist open access and changes in property relations of academic labour products challenged Marxist analyses based on the concept of dispossession, as we have observed in the previous chapter. Although capitalist open access simultaneously deprives both capital and academic labour of exclusive rights to the product of intellectual labour, in the situation at hand, capital has an enormous advantage, which it enjoys without restraint. In addition, when conceptualising the connection between labour and capital in the context of dispossession, attention is directed towards the one-time and temporary action of depriving rights to the result. However, in the production process, what truly matters is the cyclical and continuously renewable nature of the transfer of the fruits of labour to capital. While it would certainly be easier to speak of this relationship in terms of exploitation, without recognising academic labour as productive labour for capital, this cannot be the case. For a number of reasons, it escapes classical Marxist understandings of productive labour. I assume, however, that the problem boils down not so much to the essence of academic labour, but to specific ways of understanding the Marxian distinction between productive and unproductive labour. The task of this chapter is to propose a conception of this opposition that would allow academic labour to be framed in terms of exploitation. In doing so, we will conclude the project of the critique of the political economy of higher education, giving space for its further study. Before we proceed with this task let me make one more philosophical excursus, for it is necessary to explicate the ontological assumption underlying my understanding of labour and capital. Tracing the Marxist roots of autonomous Italian Marxism tendency, Antonio Negri discussed the issue of labour and its understanding within this stream: Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of the human being, inasmuch as the human being is productive activity. But capital is real—while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour that approximates to the concreteness of capital is the refusal of work—or rather the kind of productivity that for capital, is purely negative—because, while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital nonetheless tends to reduce it, and precisely insofar as it is an essence of human nature, to eliminate it from production. (Negri, 2022, p. 36)

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

223

This core philosophical argument by Negri uses the ontological understanding and expression of labour to posit it in relation to the fundamental question of being productive for capital. What does it mean to be productive? In particular, what does it mean to be productive for capital? Is there any productivity of being beyond the rule of capital? Negri traces the contours of labour vis-à-vis capital, uncovering conditions for its autonomy. There are a few structural features of labour that need some attention. First, labour is the essence of capital—it is what valorises it. Capital’s movement is mediated through the “living fire” of labour. Without this, it is just dead past labour, immovable, rickety and stuck. That is its ultimate contradiction, given that its essence is to expand in limitless movement of seemingly self-valorisation. Therefore, to produce surplus, it always needs to enter the abode of production, which is the place where the labour transforms nature (or second nature) and produces wealth. When Negri emphasises the dream-like nature of human essence as labour, he means the transposited entity that manifests or shines through the subsumption. Labour contained within capital is a phantom that haunts capital. It is a spectre that capital needs to exorcise. And it does so. Negri highlights the tendency of capital to get rid of the rebellious, superfluous labour— through mechanisation, through automatisation, through algorithmic control. Capital’s paradise is a world without labour—without the human essence that makes the whole process so contradictory. This contradiction is real because capital cannot escape labour, and labour cannot gain the real concretes through any means other than simply to stand up against capital and to refuse its rule over itself. This is how Italian Autonomist Marxism understood the internal ontological antagonism inscribed within every capital-driven and labour-mediated production. Labour assumes a structurally positive position and is understood as something that goes beyond the control and that overflows the capitalist command. This separateness of labour—understood as antagonism—it is separateness of labour as non-capital. This is something that labour always was, but it became lost in a dream dreamed for it by capital. Its refusal opens the door to freedom and to the production of wealth not mediated by the capital’s value-form. This is a true productive character of labour, and it is what is at stake in any project of emancipation of labour from the capitalist subsumption. Chapter 8 closed with a diagnosis of the inadequacy of the dispossession theory for the analysis of the relationship between capital involved in academic publishing and academic labour. It assumed that it is necessary

224 

K. SZADKOWSKI

to develop a Marxian theory of productive and unproductive labour within the field of higher education. For this purpose, an Autonomist Marxist perspective on productive labour is proposed here, to facilitate analysis of the contemporary subsumption of academic labour under capital, and to organise resistance against it. The essence of this approach is rooted in an exposition of the two-sided perspective on Marxist categories—the essence of the political reading of Marx, discussed earlier in Chap. 2. It is used here to approximate the concept of directly productive academic labour and to indicate its apparent limitations. The next step is to present a view on the systemic productivity of academic labour. This is the only way to address the issue of truly productive academic labour in the Marxian sense, and to counter the obstacles standing in the way of its full realisation, of which the most important is the smooth functioning of capitalist measurement exercised within the field of science and higher education.

9.2   Marxist Debate on Productive and Unproductive Labour The ability to differentiate between productive and unproductive labour lies at the foundation of a well-functioning capitalist economy. Karl Marx knew this perfectly well and addressed the issue several times, initially in his economic manuscripts (Marx, 1973, 1994, 2000), which were supposed to form the basis of Das Kapital. The discussion on the essence of the distinction has lasted for years (Rubin, 1990; Gough, 1972; Meiksins, 1981), and it has not lost its importance (Duménil & Lévy, 2011; Negri, 2014; Roberts, 2014; Pitts, 2015; Ratajczak, 2015; Moraitis & Copley, 2017). It is as if a statement on the functionality or obsolescence of this pair was a fundamental task for every person who sought to extend Marx’s oeuvre and who wanted to say something about labour and production under capitalism. In this discussion, the tone adopted is that of strategic economic interpretations conducted from the perspective of capital (Cleaver, 2000, pp. 29–31). Such analyses, above all, follow categories and divisions in reference to the functioning of the capitalist economy; ultimately, their aim is to present a picture of the productive/unproductive labour that would save Marx’s theory of value from crushing criticism (Savran & Tonak, 1999, p. 133; p.  147, or especially the three-dimensional topological approach presented in Roberts, 2014, p. 339). However, some scholars assume that all

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

225

workers employed by capital generate surplus value (Houston, 1997; Laibman, 1999). Thus, the pair itself brings nothing analytically relevant to the table. However, it also finds fierce defenders (Mohun, 1996, 2002). Mohun (1996) reasonably states that when it is devoid of this distinction, Marx’s conceptual apparatus loses its analytical utility altogether. Hence the task facing every Marxist political economist is a systematic rejection of allegations that the distinction is supported on a metaphysical basis. Still, some rightly point out that Marx’s concepts are not burdened metaphysically, but that capital as the source of all transcendence within the field of production is not able to ground the productivity of labour other than by determining metaphysically what is productive and unproductive (Ratajczak, 2015, p. 97). The second significant stream in this ongoing discussion is political interpretation, the foundations of which were discussed in Chap. 2. The authors following this current take as their aim the development of such a formulation of the productive/unproductive labour dichotomy that would allow for the expansion of the class struggle. If productive workers play an essential role in effective resistance to capitalism, then proving that all labour has or can have a productive character for capital allows the struggle against it to be opened up to the broadest possible group (Lebowitz, 2003; Harvie, 2005, 2006; Negri, 2014). An example of such an extension of the category of productive labour is David Harvie’s (2006) inclusion of teachers (including academic teachers) employed in the public sector. Harvie claims that his intention is not to be in logical compliance with Marx’s writings. This seems to be impossible. He instead believes that his perspective is much more useful in understanding the processes in which teachers produce and reproduce capitalist social relations, and that it points to the potential of teachers to break this (re)production. According to Harvie (2006), teachers are productive labourers, as long as they are subjected to alienation and exposed to the capitalist measuring of their labour. Another approach has been developed by Michael A. Lebowitz, who argues that economic discussions devoted to the conceptual pair point to the far-reaching one-sidedness of these Marxist readings (2003, pp.  133–136). The fetish of the objectivist capturing of capitalist processes obscures the political dimension of Marxian categories, as if Marx were developing the political economy of capitalism, not its critique. Labour can also be productive and unproductive for workers’ needs—opening perspectives for their development. Thus, these

226 

K. SZADKOWSKI

approaches indicate the two-sidedness and political nature of the productive/unproductive labour categories. This means that they might be addressed from both perspectives: that of capital, and that of labour. As Negri’s passage quoted in the introduction suggests, what contributes to the expansion of workers’ capabilities for satisfaction of needs can be considered productive labour, even if it is an organised refusal of labour for capital. Each Marxian category can be examined from this two-sided perspective (see Cleaver, 2000). Marxists of an Autonomist orientation are most often located in the political current. With their approach questioning the majority of fundamental Marxian distinctions and concepts, they ignite widespread doubts and controversies. The most-criticised author of this stream is Antonio Negri (Caffentzis, 2005; De Angelis, 2005; Kicillof & Starosta, 2007), who in the 1970s rejected this distinction as being obsolete and only used by those who want to spice up Marx with old nineteenth-century materialism (Negri, 2014). However, contrary to the impression given by the scathing criticism of their opponents, some Autonomist intuitions seem to offer a useful description of the way the relationships between labour and capital are shaped, and what difficulties capital encounters (and how it overcomes them) in trying to impose labour productivity on some sectors of the economy. I believe that following the two paths determined by the intuitions of the Autonomist Marxists, that is, following their insights into the transformation of production (Pasquinelli, 2009, 2015), as well as being faithful to their political stance (Negri, 2014), makes more sense for capturing today’s changes in the higher education sector. I will develop both of these threads in subsequent sections of this chapter.

9.3   Marx on Productive and Unproductive Labour Marx approached productive/unproductive labour in Volume One of Theories of Surplus Value, where, referring to the findings of the classics of political economy (mainly Adam Smith), he identified the three basic definitions of productive labour within capitalism. Therefore, according to Marx, productive labour is that which: a) is exchanged for capital (2000, p. 144); b) is realised in the commodity form (2000, p. 149); and c) creates surplus value (2000, p. 144; p. 323). The terms a) and b) were taken (with modifications) from Smith. Moreover, the former makes the productivity dependent only on the relationship of labour with capital (regardless of its material form), while the second emphasises the importance of

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

227

the commodity form of labour outputs. The third term had a special meaning for Marx because it places productive labour at the centre of his theory of value, and thus also at the base of his political project. According to Marx, each productive worker is a wage labourer, but not every wage labourer is productive. The author of Das Kapital points out that a considerable number of activities and functions that until that time had been considered ends in themselves were transformed due to the development of capitalist production, becoming turned into wage labour regime-related activities. Their value began to be estimated and measured according to the principles of wage labour valuation. However, the mere commodification of a given activity is not a sufficient condition for it be treated as productive. This is why the two modes of labour are often confused with each other—in order for labour to be productive, it is necessary for a given activity to be included in the process of producing surplus value. As a factor of production of surplus value, labour becomes socialised. As Marx wrote in Das Kapital, “The concept of a productive worker therefore implies not merely a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect, between the worker and the product of his work, but also a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital’s direct means of valorization” (Marx, 1982, p. 644). Therefore, the productive worker for capital is primarily a means of creating surplus value, which is the essence of capital—its beginning, its constant desire and the object of its infinite lust. The social relation between labour and capital is the relation of productivity. The case is different with unproductive labour. Marx’s indications may seem somewhat arbitrary, as he lists three types of labour as unproductive, beginning with labour that results in the mere reproduction of the labour force (2000, p. 144). Without this arbitrary exclusion, not only would the analytical framework allowing for the capture of the production of surplus value collapse, but above all the basis of the capitalist economy would be shaken up. The second type of unproductive labour is supervision over the labour of others (e.g. controlling employees who work independently) (2000, p. 1140), distinguished by Marx from labour related to the organisation of labour of others—i.e. providing cooperation schemes (1981, p.  383). The third type of unproductive activities are those involved in circulation (Marx, 1973, p.  120). Here, too, Marx makes an arbitrary exclusion: transport and everything related to it is considered a productive activity.

228 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Unproductive labour is, therefore, an activity that, despite being conducted in the form of wage labour, is exchanged for income or revenue (2000, p. 147), i.e. one that does not contribute to the direct production of value. In the case of unproductive labour, a kind of law of value operates. The value of services is determined by socially necessary labour time, as well as being dependent on the cost of its reproduction. Unproductive labourers may also perform surplus labour. Finally, the matter gets even more complex when we add to the above picture the problem of the gradual expansion of the concept and phenomenon of the productivity of labour, which accompanies increasingly complicated capitalist production. In both Grundrisse and Das Kapital, Marx highlights the insufficiency of the direct understanding of productive labour. He connects the expanding scale of cooperation in capitalism with the modification of the productive nature of labour, asserting that, “With the progressive accentuation of the cooperative character of the labour process, there necessarily occurs a progressive extension of the concept of productive labour”. The condition to be productive becomes “to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions” (Marx, 2000, pp.  643–644). Capitalist productivity, with an appropriate degree of social development of production, spills over the entire factory (and, as Italian Autonomist Marxists of the operaismo stream showed in the 1960s, onto the whole social fabric). Marx’s division into productive and unproductive labour is therefore formal and dynamic. It depends on the network of social relations in which the activity is involved. As Isaac Rubin points out, Marx, while relying on his method consistently, “throws out as useless the question of what kind of labour is productive in general, in all historical epochs, independently of the given social relation” (1990, p. 260). His intuitions, which were so clearly laid out at the beginning of the chapter on the labour process and the process of the valorisation of capital in Volume One of Das Kapital (Marx, 1981), were well interpreted by Bruno Gulli (2005), who claimed that the category of labour developed by the political economy of the capitalist mode of production does not correspond to what labour is as a concept. Labour is productive or unproductive, but—as he points out—for capital, and only when it operates within its framework. Gulli introduces the notion of neither-productive-nor-unproductive labour—or neither/ nor labour—in its neutrality, to reflect what, for Marx, exists on the ontological level. The determination of a given activity within this opposition always takes place in specific historical conditions of production.

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

229

From the assumption of the initial neutral status of labour, we can draw a necessary consequence. As Marx put it in Theories of Surplus Value, “The same kind of labour may be productive or unproductive” (2000, p. 326). It is a concrete relationship in which the given labour is performed for capital that determines its status: “What forms its specific use value for capital is […] its character as the element which creates exchange-value, abstract labour” (2000, p. 326). Looking at this problem from the perspective outlined above, we can see Marx’s intentions, as he meant that “this distinction expresses precisely the specific form of the labour on which the whole capitalist mode of production and capital itself is based” (2000, p. 323); more specifically, the totality of social relations in which a given activity and its subject is located—which generates surplus value for capital. When the hegemonic form of extracting surplus value from labour gets transformed (e.g. as a result of “becoming rent of profit”, Vercellone, 2007), and the relationship between labour and capital changes accordingly, the form of imposition of productivity on labour also gets transformed. It is in this Marxian approach to productive/unproductive labour, which on the one hand assumes that this conceptual pair is crucial to understanding the actually functioning capitalist mode of production and, on the other hand, that the range of its functioning is determined continuously by relations between classes, that I would like to embed further considerations that form the core of this chapter.

9.4  Two-Sided Perspective on Productive/ Unproductive Labour More than one hundred years ago, Rosa Luxemburg (2013) identified a fundamental duality inherent in political economy. From the very beginning, the divergence between bourgeois and proletarian knowledge was apparent, as they approached the basic problem of political economy differently. The former used its categories to mask the anarchy of capitalist production, while the latter used them to reveal it and eventually establish a system that enables the satisfaction of the expanding needs of the working class, striving beyond the limits of capitalist production. Although both perspectives overlap in the analysis of capitalist relations, they are ultimately disproportionate and even antagonistic.

230 

K. SZADKOWSKI

This inherent duality translates into the reading of basic categories of political economy, including the conceptual pair of productive/unproductive labour that interests us here. As Marx wrote: It is only bourgeois obtuseness that encourages the view that capitalist production is production in its absolute form, the unique form of production as prescribed by nature. Moreover, only the bourgeoisie can confuse the questions: what is productive labour? and what is a productive worker from the standpoint of capitalism? with the question: what is productive labour as such? (1981, p. 1040)

The naturalisation of capitalist reality, which goes hand in hand with the absolutisation of the categories used to describe it, is not only something ruthlessly attacked by Marx (1973, pp.  81–115), but also something always deliberately addressed when it comes to transplanting these categories to his discourse. Therefore, several times he points to this fission, as in the Theories of Surplus Value, where he claims that the actual productivity of labour involves the necessity of abolishing the foundations of producing surplus value and transferring the created surplus to the workers. As Marx wrote: “Assuming, however, that no capital exists, but that the worker appropriates his surplus-labour himself—the excess of values that he has created over the values that he consumes. Then one could say only of this labour that it is truly productive, that is, that it creates new values” (2000, p. 145). Thus, the quoted fragments show not only the ontological neutrality of labour (“labour in general”) but also the possibility of having at least two opposing modes of productivity: productivity for capital and productivity for the worker. The abovementioned duality is a starting point for formulating contemporary perspectives on productive/unproductive labour. A good example is David Harvie (2005), according to whom this distinction must be treated as a category of struggle, not as a category of the movement of capital. Capital continually strives to make every activity productive labour. Conversely, the working class should strive (and is striving) to make as many activities as possible unproductive labour (that is, unproductive for capital). According to Harvie, the struggle against manifestations of the functioning of the law of value, against the imposition of a social measure on the new areas of human (and non-human) activities, is the essence of the struggle against productive labour (2005, p. 30). The processes of the self-valorisation of the working class, that is, the positive and autonomous

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

231

formation of the means of subsistence and expansion of living labour, are unproductive from the perspective of capital, yet they are the axis of building communism. This vision is further developed by Michael Lebowitz (2003) and Negri (2014). Lebowitz made a valid attempt at the philological development of the concept of two-sided Marxism, indicating at the same time that the Smithian concept of productive labour developed by Marx is just one-­ sided—coined from the perspective of capital. Supporting one-sided Marxism not only exposes the proponent to easy criticism, but also poses no challenge for capital. Productive labour for a worker is labour that produces useful values for workers, the labour involved in reproduction, and activities that are conducive to the development of human and non-human beings in general. Productive labour in this sense is, therefore, only that which rebels against exploitation in the movement of self-valorisation of workers’ social labour—the collective force that produces the common. As I have already stated, Marx emphasised the inadequacy of the concept of direct labour for defining productivity at a particular stage of the development of capitalist production and cooperation developed on a social scale. It is a starting point for Negri’s interpretation of the concept of truly productive labour as a constituent power. Although the Italian Marxist states that it is in Das Kapital where “the concept of direct productive labour is ultimately inscribed in the concept of social productive labour” (Negri, 2014, p. 205), his main point of reference is the vision sketched by Marx in the so-called Fragment on Machines (1973), where the conflict between the time spent on production and the disposable time for workers’ own development was inscribed into the general dynamics of technological development in capitalism and attached to the importance of scientific production. The axis on which this conflict is taking place is the gradually decreasing share of direct labour needed in the production of value as opposed to the growing importance of the productivity of social relations in their totality. The tendency to increase our collective forces and the resources that allow us to enjoy their effects in the conditions of social harmony is in a way embedded in the dynamics of capitalist development. The mere breakdown of the basis of measure (direct labour measured by time) does not automatically constitute an open gate for the new balance of power in the capitalist economy—it does not entail its automatic crash. Unlike Negri, I believe that capital is very efficient at finding new ways of measuring social labour. We have seen it in Chap. 6. However, with the development of the

232 

K. SZADKOWSKI

process observed by Marx, the socially-perceived scale of the irrationality of applying these measures to the social reality of production is growing. This does not change the fact that Negri accurately described the nature of productive labour under the new conditions: “as a whole, the exploited social labour opposes (and is objectively antagonistic) […] various forms in which capitalism maintains its rule. Then, unlike capitalist power, it is possible to classify productive labour as such collective power that produces the common” (2014, p.  223). In this context, exploitation is becoming more and more often “a form of expropriation of social cooperation, corruption of the common” (2014, p. 223). I assume that the categories of productive/unproductive labour within capitalist production are characterised by an antagonistic tension. It must be stated not only that the pre-existing productivity of a given activity for the group that performs it is the starting point for the efficient productivity of labour for capital, but also that the material movement underlying capitalist expansion creates conditions for the development of social production on an unprecedented scale. Such pre-existing structure of productivity undermines capital’s imposition of mechanisms of measurement, which does not correspond to labour’s heterogeneity and the form of wealth it creates; in other words, the common. Unlike Negri or Harvie, however, I see the importance of understanding contemporary mechanisms on the basis of which capital tends to impose productivity on living labour. I have already exposed some of these mechanisms in Chaps. 6, 7 and 8. If capital continually strives to transform and subordinate all kinds of activities and to make them productive, we must be aware of the logic of this movement and take it into account when formulating our resistance strategies. Therefore, the two-sided perspective on productive/ unproductive labour—being consistent with the essence of the proletarian science of the critique of political economy—should be able to grasp capital in its limits, as well as indicate the conditions for the existence of an autonomous community of producers. In the remaining sections of this chapter, I will look at the productivity of academic labour from this two-­ sided perspective.

9.5  Directly Productive Academic Labour There is no single approach to the productive aspect of academic labour. David Harvie (2005) believes that the existing balance of class power determines the distinction between productive and unproductive labour

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

233

in a capitalist society. Every activity has the potential to become both productive and unproductive for capital. At present, however, according to Harvie, we are dealing with the subsumption of the (higher) education sector under capital, and therefore the labour conducted within its frame is primarily productive (Harvie, 2005). This subsumption assumes various types of measures and indicators that operate by reflecting the logic of the law of values within this sector (De Angelis & David, 2009; Szadkowski, 2016a; Woodcock, 2018). Simon Marginson (1998) revealed similar tensions in Marx’s application of the concept of productive labour, indicating that capital achieves the productivity of the educational services sector, expanding the privatisation and capitalisation of the public institutions of higher education. Similarly, Bruno Gulli (2009), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (1998) consider the university sector as the last stronghold defending itself (though less and less) from the progress of real subsumption, through which academic labour is transformed into productive labour for capital. All these positions combine the conviction that capital has a somewhat universalising power and can extend its relations to new areas, regardless of their original specificity. Even if the practice of labour subsumption under capital is accompanied by fierce resistance, the original specificity of the subordinated sector is not assumed to affect how capital functions within it. This situation tends to distinguish the areas of immaterial production, in particular within science and higher education. The conditions that Marx writes about—for example, the inclusion of academic labour in private and profit-oriented enterprise (1982/1867, p. 1044), or employing academic staff on a wage basis, or offering goods in the form of commodities that realise the surplus value through the market exchange—cannot occur within the public sector. And the core of higher education and science systems are public, state-subsidised or private formally non-profit institutions. If we focus our attention only to spaces that meet Marx’s criteria of directly productive labour, then, as Marginson (2016), whose proposals I discussed in Chap. 3, rightly pointed out, the factions of academic labour we could analyse would be limited to for-profit institutions, especially in the Global South. While in the centre (North) of the global higher education system, such conditions are rarely met and formally for-profit organisations in the sphere of higher education play rather limited role, the situation is different in the Global South, where systems are restructured

234 

K. SZADKOWSKI

along the lines of World Bank and International Monetary Fund recommendations (Accioly, 2023). Even if, in countries like Brazil, a massive part of the student population is enrolled in the declaratively for-profit sector (Salto, 2018), it does not change the fact that in parallel there is a substantial public sector with the academic labour it employs, and a conception of directly productive labour would not allow it to be taken into account. Secondly, there is little capacity for capital to produce breakthrough knowledge on its own, regardless of the field (Mazzucato, 2013). Despite the temptation to identify a new area for the resurgence of Bell Labs, with their proven capacity for progress in basic and applied research (success built on a solid foundation of public funding), the prospect of conducting advanced basic research in capitalist laboratories remains elusive. While capitalist companies invest in their own R&D, their focus is primarily on capturing innovations at the end of the production cycle, and the idea of conducting successful advanced basic research in a capitalist setting looks like an unrealisable goal. In order to escape the limitations of addressing the productivity of academic labour only in the direct terms, it would be necessary, following in the footsteps of Marx and Negri (2014), to enter the reality of the socially-­ understood productivity of academic labour. An essential step in this direction has been taken by Thomas Allmer (2018, 2019), who, following a similar recognition of the political importance (2018, p. 54) of emphasising the indirect contribution of academic labour to the creation of surplus value (2019, p.  6), developed an elaborate framework for understanding the social embeddedness of academics in the broader relations of production. While Allmer provides a comprehensive and precise picture of what I called in the Chap. 5 the ideal subsumption of academic labour under capital within the public university, my intention here is modest. In the final part of this chapter, I want to focus on just one dimension of the labour/capital relationship in higher education: the publication of research results that capital in the academic publishing sector dominates through the establishment of a complex system of measuring academic labour outputs. In previous chapters, I have demonstrated the centrality of this aspect of the relationship between academic labour and capital in the functioning and reproduction of capital in the higher education sector. It allows a deepening of the capitalist subsumption and an acceleration of competition among institutions and individual academics. As discussed in the section on the capitalist architecture of measurement

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

235

in higher education, the published outputs lay at the centre of a multi-­ layered system of rankings, comparisons and commensuration of academic labour and institutions; therefore, they provide a means for determining the position and value of different aspects of the sector. This allows for the development of purely capitalist strategies, such as the creation of fee-­ paying degree programs for international students, as well as the identification of important knowledge hubs by capital. However, as highlighted in Chap. 8, this relationship is also important in itself because it allows us to show the development of strategies by capitalist publishers and to track the processes of the opening up of access to the knowledge created by academic labour, which makes it a readily available resource for capital operating within the sphere of knowledge production.

9.6  Social Productivity of Academic Labour If Marxist analysis is to establish a proposal for a precise recognition of the dual productivity of academic labour, then the task before it is to indicate how the logic of praxis of a given (academic) field is first instrumentalised (hybrid subsumption), absorbed (formal subsumption), and then processed (real subsumption) by capital (Szadkowski, 2016b). The key to this undertaking is to examine the tension between the individualising and the abstracting measure developed and imposed by capital and the social basis of academic production (and the measure itself). I have referred to the measure several times in this book, but it is appropriate to explain its significance for the phenomenon that interests us here. Value is socially necessary labour time (Harvey, 2010), which is a measure, fixed in capitalist production, under which all work processes are subsumed. The ‘measure’ and tendency to abstract are inherent in capitalist reality, and the global system of higher education has become an area in which capital places and strengthens its processes of the valorisation and expansion of the creation of surplus value. To permanently establish the domination of measurement processes over a specific area and to identify the activities in it as production, capital must install measurement processes that will drive its movement within a given sector. The capitalist measure in higher education, as we know from Chap. 6, is a process of mapping of social relations established by academic labour. It is a process, as Negri sees it, of “expropriating social cooperation” (2014, p. 223). De Angelis and Harvie, in their work on the British higher education system, pointed out the systemic way of functioning and the vital issue of

236 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the measure in the relations between academic labour and capital. In higher education, the imposition of the procedures of measurement works through two parallel processes (De Angelis & David, 2009, p. 26). On the one hand, there is a diachronic movement, which is a pressure to reduce socially necessary labour time for the ‘production’ of ideas and affects as part of both research and teaching. The context for this movement is a policy of making continuous cuts and shrinking public budgets for science and higher education. In this diachronic process, one can squeeze more out of academic labour—more texts, more hours spent with students, more patents (Hall, 2018). On the other hand, at the national and global level, there is a synchronous movement, which is a movement of constant comparison of academic labour, in the context of which heterogeneous activities are subsumed under the form of abstract labour. In the case of research, the measure by which achievements in science are pulled under the common denominator is a bibliometric indicator like the JIF or CiteScore (which we discussed in Chap. 6), often translated into the value of individual researchers’ achievements within the evaluation processes. In this way, a basis for the functioning of mechanisms that estimate the socially necessary labour time in the sector is created. These processes mutually reinforce each other. The constant struggle of capital to impose the law of value is a simultaneous struggle to impose a measure constituting an underlying mechanism that gives roots to the productivity of labour. In their discussion on the procedures of evaluation of academic labour in a mostly public British system, De Angelis and Harvie are unable to show a direct connection between the practice of measurement and the functioning of capital within this field. Exposure of the measurement procedure alone is enough for them to state that we are dealing with the imposition of the law of value, and thus with the productive labour for capital. The latter, however, remains elusive in this analysis. Carlo Vercellone (2007) rightly points to the constant striving of capital to avoid coagulation in the production process. At each stage of its development, capital must decide on the degree of involvement in the production area. At this point, it must always freeze for a certain period, which is something contrary to its essence. The involvement in the organisation and control of the scientific enterprise is additionally burdened with a significant risk of failure to obtain a quick or even long-term profit (Mazzucato, 2013); therefore, it is difficult to imagine the existence of the mass-scale private research institutes that Marx wrote about—especially in the area of basic

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

237

research. However, capital harnesses various types of mechanisms to enable its valorisation processes. The basic observation from which one should discuss the social productivity of academic labour is Gigi Roggero’s claim that in contemporary capitalism “capital is less and less capable of organising ‘the top-down’ cycle of cooperation” (2011, p. 71). Because it is no longer able to carry out this task, it ceases to be interested in taking control of the direct production process. If we look at the landscape of global higher education, we see that from the perspective of capital, what matters is what appears through the established framework of measurement. All the remaining processes can be freely supported and powered by the state. In the realities of higher education, capital carries out self-valorisation processes, not so much through domination over a single institution, but rather through the determination of the conditions for the functioning of the global system with its more significant centres (in terms of productivity) and less critical (but essential when it comes to consumption) peripheral systems. As Roggero writes, “the act of accumulation, the interception of value produced in common by living labour/knowledge, is increasingly taking place at the end of the cycle” (2011, p. 71). The same happens in the relationship between the production cycle of publicly funded research and the publishing effect captured by merchant capital involved in academic publishing. As we have seen in the previous chapters of this book, capital gradually absorbs, processes and presents as its own movement the successive elements of articulation of production in the subordinated sector of science and higher education. It mediates within itself all the communicative and calculative activities of estimating the value of academic labour, and finally expresses them in an empty, abstract and homogeneous measure that allows for the efficient display of what appears as value from the point of view of capital. Only by shifting to a social and systemic understanding of relations in higher education will we be able to see the increasingly complex relations by which capital entwines academic labour. These processes occur irrespective of the sector, irrespective of the form of ownership of the products of academic work, and irrespective of whether the activities in question are directed towards the realisation of the “public good” or the accumulation of prestige. Capital in higher education is the force that mediates all existing sector-specific practices, and its continued accumulation begins to appear as its truth and ultimate goal.

238 

K. SZADKOWSKI

9.7  Academic Production of the Common The starting point of this chapter was the inadequacy of the theory of dispossession to explain the relations between academic labour and the oligopoly of academic publishers that were discussed in Chap. 8. The theoretical stake of these considerations was not only to understand the relations of exploitation and subsumption of the academic labour sector, but also the conditions of the possibility of renouncing them. These relations were exposed through the prism of the Marxian concept of productive and unproductive labour, grasping not only how capital imposes labour productivity but also how labour creates and expands the conditions of its autonomy in the productive self-valorisation movement. The limitations of the direct recognition of the productivity of academic labour have been indicated: such labour, mainly performed at public institutions, rarely fulfils the conditions of directly productive labour as defined by Marx. Finally, the crucial role of measurement processes of academic labour on a systemic social scale has been shown: these not only allow for the channelling of academic efforts on a global scale in specific publishing venues controlled by oligopolistic publishers, making them productive for capital, but they also show and accelerate the multiplication of communication links between academic workers. Voluntary submission to the permanent expropriation of the effects of academic labour, which happens through the realm of academic publishing, is characterised by a permanent relationship that capital establishes through the mediation of a system of measurement. In this sense, one can recognise that a system resulting from a complex set of activities of national governments, bibliometric data providers, commercial and academic publishers and, finally, the creators of global university rankings, form the mechanism of real subsumption of academic labour under capital. Such transformation of internal modes of organisation of an academic field not only allows for mapping the relations of productivity within the global system, but also helps to extract the productive energy of academic living labour on a constant basis by capital located in oligopoly of academic publishers. In other words, the mechanism of measuring and comparing the academic labour described on the pages of this book enables a permanent enforcement of the channelling of publication efforts into the journals that belong to oligopoly of academic capitalist publishers (Larivière et al., 2015). At the same time, the measure applied within this relation exposes a specific common space between the broader working class and academic labour scattered all over the world.

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

239

Moreover, not only does this system allow for accelerated communication between researchers, but it also becomes the foundation of feedback mechanisms on the significance of published results in times of scientific hyper-production. All of this, however, is based on the existing communication practices of the scientific community focused on the production of knowledge as the common. We have seen that not only do everyday practices of academic labour (citation of sources, reviewing articles) form the basis of all capital ventures in the academic field, but also that capital valorises the network of relationships created by academic labour through mapping and further interception of the value formed. Therefore, the whole process of scientific communication could potentially take place entirely outside its relationship with capital, in the immanent space of creation of the common; however, apart from the existing material practices that support this parasitic accumulation, there is not much to suggest this possibility currently. Academics do not cease to question this state of affairs collectively. Many scientists and scientific organisations around the world have vehemently opposed the use of indicators like the JIF for individual evaluation, as well as the pressure to continually increase productivity and publish in journals owned by capitalist publishing giants. They have also called for the development of alternative assessment methods, yet these cumulative efforts have not yet had a significant and lasting impact. Furthermore, university authorities and legislators have not fully abandoned the use of capitalist measures, despite the widespread support for change. Truly productive Marxian academic labour, that is, the creation of wealth without the mediation of capital (e.g., production of knowledge that would contribute to the spread and growth of the common) seems to require the final abandonment of the capitalist measure (Krzeski, 2021), as well as the individualising system of prestige distribution on which it is based. Achieving these solutions may prove impossible within higher education dominated by capital. To truly succeed, we must look beyond its constraints and move towards a system based on the common.

References Accioly, I. (2023). Critique of the Political Economy of Education: Methodological Notes for the Analysis of Global Educational Reforms. In R. Hall, I. Accioly, & K.  Szadkowski (Eds.), Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Basingstoke.

240 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Allmer, T. (2018). Theorising and Analysing Academic Labour. tripleC, 16(1), 49–77. Allmer, T. (2019). Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism. Critical Sociology, 45(4–5), 599–615. Caffentzis, G. (2005). Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx’s Legacy. The Commoner, 10, 87–114. Cleaver, H. (2000). Reading ‘Capital’ Politically. AK Press. De Angelis, M. (2005). Value(s), Measure(s) and Disciplinary Markets. The Commoner, 10, 66–86. De Angelis, M., & David, H. (2009). ‘Cognitive Capitalism’ and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities. Historical Materialism, 17(3), 3–30. Duménil, G., & Lévy, D. (2011). Unproductive Labor as Profit-Rate-Maximizing Labor. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 23(2), 216–225. Gough, I. (1972). Marx’s Theory of Productive and Unproductive Labour. New Left Review, 76, 47–72. Gulli, B. (2005). Labor of Fire. The Ontology of Labor Between Economy and Culture. Temple University Press. Gulli, B. (2009). Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic Labor. Workplace, 16, 1–30. Hall, R. (2018). The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University. Palgrave Macmillan. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (1998). Doing Academic Work. In R.  Martin (Ed.), Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University (pp.  154–180). Duke University Press. Harvey, D. (2010). A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso. Harvie, D. (2005). All Labour Produces Value for Capital and We All Struggle Against Value. The Commoner, 10, 132–171. Harvie, D. (2006). Value Production and Struggle in the Classroom: Teachers Within, Against and Beyond Capital. Capital & Class, 30(1), 1–32. Houston, D. (1997). Productive-Unproductive Labor: Rest in Peace. Review of Radical Political Economics, 29(1), 131–147. Kicillof, A., & Starosta, G. (2007). Value Form and Class Struggle: A Critique of the Autonomist Theory of Value. Capital & Class, 31(2), 13–40. Krzeski, J. (2021). How to Imagine a Non-Capitalist Measure? Going Beyond the Value Production with Spinoza’s Concept of Expression. Critique, 49(3–4), 325–342. Laibman, D. (1999). Productive and Unproductive Labor: A Comment. Review of Radical Political Economics, 31(2), 61–73. Larivière, V., Haustein, S., & Mongeon, P. (2015). The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS One, 10(6), e0127502.

9  PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE ACADEMIC LABOUR 

241

Lebowitz, M. A. (2003). Beyond Capital. Political Economy of the Working Class. Palgrave Macmillan. Luxemburg, R. (2013). Introduction to Political Economy. In The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1: Economic Writings 1 (pp. 89–300). London: Verso. Marginson, S. (1998). Value Creation in the Production of Services. A Note on Marx. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 22, 573–585. Marginson, S. (2016). Higher Education and the Common Good. MUP Academic. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. Random House. Marx, K. (1981). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume Three. Penguin. Marx, K. (1982). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One. Penguin. Marx, K. (1994). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (MECW Vol. 34). Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. (2000). Theories of Surplus Value: Books I, II and III. Prometheus Books. Mazzucato, M. (2013). Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Books. Meiksins, P. (1981). Productive and Unproductive Labor and Marx’s Theory of Class. Review of Radical Political Economics, 13, 32–42. Mohun, S. (1996). Productive and Unproductive Labor in the Labor Theory of Value. Review of Radical Political Economics, 24(4), 30–54. Mohun, S. (2002). Productive and Unproductive Labor: A Reply to Houston and Laibman. Review of Radical Political Economics, 34, 203–220. Moraitis, A. B., & Copley, J. (2017). Productive and Unproductive Labour and Social Form: Putting Class Struggle in Its Place. Capital & Class, 41(1), 91–114. Negri, A. (2014). Praca Produkcyjna i Nieprodukcyjna. In L. U. M. Marks (Ed.), Nowe Perspektywy (pp. 147–159). Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN. Negri, A. (2022). Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context. Polity Press. Pasquinelli, M. (2009). Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect. In K. Becker & F. Stalder (Eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google (pp.  152–162). Transaction Publishers. Pasquinelli, M. (2015). Italian Operaismo and the Information Machine. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(3), 49–68. Pitts, F.  H. (2015). Creative Industries, Value Theory, and Michael Heinrich’s New Reading of Marx. tripleC, 13(1), 192–222. Ratajczak, M. (2015). Divine Management of Worldly Matters: Agamben’s Theological Genealogy of Economy as a Political Philosophy of Praxis. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 3(17), 75–105. Roberts, B. (2014). Productive/Unproductive: Conceptual Topology. Rethinking Marxism, 26(3), 336–359. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge. Temple University Press. Rubin, I. (1990). Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Black Rose Books.

242 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Salto, D.  J. (2018). To Profit or Not to Profit: The Private Higher Education Sector in Brazil. Higher Education, 75(5), 809–825. Savran, S., & Tonak, A.  E. (1999). Productive and Unproductive Labour: An Attempt at Clarification and Classification. Capital & Class, 23(2), 113–152. Szadkowski, K. (2016a). Socially Necessary Impact/Time: Notes on the Acceleration of Academic Labor, Metrics and the Transnational Association of Capitals. Teorie Ve ď y/Theory of Science, 38(1), 53–85. Szadkowski, K. (2016b). Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour under Capital. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 28, 9–29. Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism. Historical Materialism, 15, 13–36. Woodcock, J. (2018). Digital Labour in the University: Understanding the Transformations of Academic Work in the UK. tripleC, 16(1), 129–142.

CHAPTER 10

Beyond Capital

10.1   Introduction Throughout the book, our focus has been on capital, its movement, and its relentless drive to subsume academic labour. Nonetheless, my aim was not an anatomical study of capital, no matter how intriguing this task may seem. Capital has always interested me only insofar as seeing its weaknesses and identifying the cracks in the monolith of its rule (Holloway, 2010) will allow us to break free from its power. Nonetheless, as Mario Tronti (2019) suggests, capital’s power can be broken not where it is weakest, but where working class (here, academic labour) is strongest. I am under no illusion that, like Marx’s project of critique, the critique of the political economy of higher education must also assume a positive ontological component that would allow for conceptualising and expressing the living energy capable of breaking free from the chains put on it by capital. As I mentioned in Chap. 2, Marx sought to ground his critique on an ontological, transhistorical notion of wealth, which contemporary analysts read as the common (Holloway, 2015; Hardt & Negri, 2017; Dardot & Laval, 2019; Negri, 2022). Likewise, in the pages of this book, the critique of capital and its actions, or the critique of the communism of capital in science that is introduced with the capitalist form of open access, has been accompanied by strong indications of the element in the sphere of production in higher education that enables liberation from the power of capital. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7_10

243

244 

K. SZADKOWSKI

common, the element on which I would like to focus readers’ attention at the end of this book, is an expression of alternative social relations, as well as the basis for all productive activity, the effects of which capital seeks to capture (Roggero, 2010). I have devoted much space to describing how capital subsumes this living energy, and how it flexibly adapts its patterns of action to the new reality. However, the critique always moves through the three moments: in, against and beyond (Szadkowski & Krzeski, 2019). Therefore, now I would like to devote some space to the two remaining moments: “against” and “beyond” capital in higher education. I will present lines of reflection on the common in higher education, as well as pointing to existing practices that use this logic to expand their activities and go beyond the capitalist status quo in the sector. For in order to go beyond capital, all that is needed (as if it were easy!) is to liberate the potential of the common and create firm conditions for its expansion and stable reproduction. However, it will not be possible to provide all possible answers to the problem. The common is not only a vast subject for consideration, but also one that requires a thorough reflection. On the few closing pages of this book, however, I would like to point out directions for this reflection, for future research, but also for a future political practice that, by extending the common, will allow the university and its future to be reclaimed. It is only on the road to reclaiming autonomy of the common that I see the possibility of resolving the various crises that have been generated by the presence of capital and that continue to plague contemporary higher education. Before discussing specific practices, it is worth looking at some basic conceptual distinctions.

10.2  The Common or the Commons? Let’s begin with some conceptual clarifications. Readers may have already noticed that there is a seeming interchangeability between the concepts used to describe what I term as the order of the common. On the one side, there are reference to the common, and on the other side to the commons. While the latter are more popular in the literature on higher education (Szadkowski, 2019), as well as in the Marxist scholarship in general, the former is of crucial importance for understanding the perspective developed here. The common is a concept from the ontological order, encapsulating being in its openness and transformability. On the ground of Marxist ontological reflection, of which Lukács and Negri were the guides in this

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

245

book, ontological order means historically variable ways of expressing independent structures of being—Lukács’ “complexes”. The common is one name for these transhistorical structures. The common always precedes the community, it forms the ontological ground on which the latter can expand and prosper. The common is the name of a fundamental ontological aspect of reality, that of “relationness” of the reality itself; it is a fundamental connection between all that exist, as all that exist exists in common. In this book, the common has been equated with “wealth” in the Marxian sense expressed in Grundrisse, as something positive and of a fundamental nature for the expansion of any historical system of production. Its crucial role is dependent on its dual status (Roggero, 2010). On the one hand, it is a fundamental resource that makes any social formation productive, while at the same time, it is what makes it possible to transcend any limited social formation. The common offers the key to understanding any system—in our case, the system of capital-dominated production in higher education—as finite and dependent. It offers a perspective that goes beyond capital with its imposed limitations on social production. Moreover, the common is often considered as an actual subject of emancipatory change—no matter whether it is addressed more as a political principle (Dardot & Laval, 2019), or as productive positivity of the living (Hardt & Negri, 2017). In this context, the commons move away from this abstractness and ground it in concrete operations of communities. The commons are both historical and contemporary, preceding capitalism, living on its margins, sometimes operating in the centre of its interest, and sometimes transcending its rule. In the most general terms, “the commons imply a plurality of people (a community) sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re)production processes through horizontal doing in common” (De Angelis, 2017, p. 10). With such a general definition, one could expect to find commons, as practice and as a theory, in different areas of social life. Therefore, we can identify at least three streams of interpretative traditions of the commons (Broumas, 2017). First, liberal theories of the commons, where they are approached as a way of governing resources that is functional for both the state and the market and can compensate for their failures. Second, the social democratic theories that use them for proposing a more humane vision of a state-led reformed capitalism, where the commons can offer a paradigm for inclusion of social autonomy. Finally, the revolutionary and Marxist theories, to

246 

K. SZADKOWSKI

which I refer in this chapter, that see in the commons a potential that may allow us to put an end to the rule of capital. Finally, a concept that needs to be clarified is “commoning”, which is a social practice and processual aspect of the common that makes the whole system expand and reproduce. As defined by Massimo de Angelis commoning is: the form of social doing (social labour) occurring within the domain of the commons, and thus is characterised by modes of production, distribution and governance of the commons that are participatory and non-hierarchical, motivated by the values of the commons (re)production, of the (re)production of commoners’ commonwealth and of the affective, material, immaterial and cultural (re)production of the commoners and their relations. (2017, p. 121)

The concepts of the common, the commons, and commoning provide us with vocabularies that enable us to conceptualize the dynamic and independent production of academic labour in a manner that makes it possible to imagine and accomplish the transcendence of capitalist constraints.

10.3  The Future Is Now Our future beyond capital begins now. We need to be aware that the common is not just an element of the distant past, still less is it some romantic image or vague utopia. The common is something fundamental that glues together all autonomous forms of social reproduction. Where communities come together to create, develop and reproduce the basis of their activities, there we find the common. The common forms, as Caffentzis and Federici (2014, p. 195) would put it, “the seeds, the embryonic form of an alternative mode of production in the make”. It is present in our here and now and offers a horizon of a future liberated from the dominion of capital. As Massimo De Angelis rightly points out, the foundations of an alternative order are not “implemented, their dominance emerges; and their emergence occurs through the related processes of social revolution and political revolutions, with the former creating the source from which the latter get their power to perturb capital while at the same time developing their autonomy.” (2017, p. 269). The practice of social emancipation, that is, transcending the constraints of the capitalist mode of production, about

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

247

which I have written in this book in relation to higher education, is not and will not be possible without a positive reference. It is not the destruction of capital and its system of oppression of living labour, or, still less, its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, but above all it is the free proliferation and domination of the common over the landscape of social production that constitutes the starting point for emancipation. The alternative to capitalism in science and higher education will only be as coherent and sustainable as the constituting foundations and models of production based on the common that they will develop. If there were no commons, capital, especially in an area such as science and higher education, would have to invent, sustain and reinforce them. Capital has a certain level of acceptance of the commons; as long as it can draw on their resources free of charge, it accepts their existence and can even foster their development. As I wrote in Chap. 8 on knowledge and open access, commons that are understood primarily as resources do not pose a particular threat to capitalist development in science. Open knowledge infrastructures, as well as the whole public system of higher education, may offer “the possibility of evolving into an alternative mode of development founded on the logic of the common” (Vercellone, 2015, p. 3), but capital is too easily able to integrate them into its own development and to instrumentalise them for its own ends. Therefore, I believe that viable alternatives in higher education must be openly and actively anti-capitalist (Kamola & Meyerhoff, 2009; Neary & Winn, 2012, 2017; Szadkowski, 2017). They should cut across the false contradictions generated in the course of capitalist development. Two divergent tendencies are inscribed in it. On the one hand, capital seeks to develop through constant privatisation, enclosing the commons and depriving producers of the basis for autonomous social reproduction. On the other hand, its contemporary development depends on strengthening the social powers of productivity and autonomy (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Vercellone, 2015; Vercellone & Giuliani, 2019). These tendencies are unsustainable and, in the long run, undercut the conditions of accumulation. It is exactly this contradiction that was pointed out by Marx in his Fragment on machines, where he argued that the only solution to the social irrationality generated by this tension is the struggle of an organised class of producers for emancipation from the yoke of capital. The commons form the indelible basis of the alternative to capitalism. Therefore, in these conclusions, I will shed light on the alternatives to capitalist-organised higher education that exist and develop on the logic of

248 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the common. I will therefore look at what I mean by the commons-based university and its emanations. These are not utopias but realistically existing alternatives developed in, against and beyond higher education subsumed under capital.

10.4  The Common In, Against and Beyond the Capitalist University The commons surround us, especially in higher education, where they permeate almost every aspect of its daily functioning. Without them, neither learning nor research would be possible, nor would many other elements of the daily functioning of faculties and institutes, whole institutions or systems. One important task facing critical reflection on higher education is to learn how to recognise them, support them, and help them prosper. Usually, however, we notice commons when it is too late, such as when they are threatened by enclosures and destruction (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2017). This is no different in the context of the university, where collective forms of governance began to be appreciated when no trace of them was left. Notwithstanding, the commons offer a progressive agenda, and alternatives based on the commons are developing in different parts of the world, where they are transforming spaces of universities, as well as functioning outside of them. We should look at the commons in higher education from at least two complementary perspectives. Firstly, we should consider the commons from a diachronic perspective, which means looking at their development over time, including their disappearance and re-emergence in various areas of higher education. Secondly, we can benefit from exploring the commons from a synchronic perspective, which entails looking at the dynamics of the conflicts that are ongoing around higher education and their results in the form of educational organisation and knowledge production based on the common. 10.4.1   Diachronic Perspective The diachronic perspective allows us to bring to light the historical foundations of the commons, as well as to uncover how, in the course of successive recent struggles against the commodification of public universities (occurring concurrently with their subsumption under capital), further

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

249

elements of the commons were installed within them. The organisational form taken by academic institutions in Europe from their early beginnings resembled that of the commons (Gieysztor, 1992). Even today, when we share knowledge, when we gather for self-education in student grass-root organisations, or when we organise a conference together on a topic that is important to us, we are reproducing practices that are pervaded by the logic of the common. By coming together in communities in universities, we contribute to the creation of the commons of knowledge and practices of sharing and learning through them. 10.4.2   Common Ontology of Higher Education The commons are the starting point of existing practices performed by both students and academics. They constitute the everyday functioning of institutions at all their levels—their operational everydayness (Marginson, 2004; Roxå & Mårtensson, 2014)—in the same sense in which Cook (2013, p. 59) wrote about already existing UK higher education institutions sharing many of their “preferences, assumptions and behaviours” with co-operatives. In this context, it is not even necessary to refer to Marxist diagnoses. The somehow spontaneous form that the sharing of knowledge or education takes is the common. When we come together in a seminar, create and recreate and constantly expand a certain resource, or when we come together to organise activities or spaces in universities, we act in accordance with the logic of the common. That is, for the reproduction or development of a particular resource, we interact within communities that themselves regulate the rules of conduct, as well as ways of accessing those resources. David Harvie (2004) rightly pointed out that research, open access learning materials, and even entire institutions can be treated as vast sets of the commons. It is this dimension that we most often forget and notice only once capital has already transformed practices in this area to conform with its own image and purposes of self-valorisation. 10.4.3   The Common As a Legacy of Past Struggles However, the everydayness of operating in relations resembling the commons in our university spaces did not come out of nowhere. Commons do not fall from the sky. They are a historical legacy of academic practices that have been shaped over centuries. We owe this legacy both to very ancient

250 

K. SZADKOWSKI

practices and to completely fresh struggles being waged in higher education all around the world (Katsiaficas, 2018). One thing, then, is the form of student associations which, in the UK, Belgium or Poland, are responsible for organising social spaces at universities, running canteens or shops on campuses or running dormitories. Another is the formula, dating back to the Enlightenment, of scientific societies that animate research and scientific communication and publish journals or series. Likewise, university libraries and presses create knowledge commons (often with a global reach). Finally, there are the elements of participatory governance in the public higher education sector, where in many countries (such as Denmark or Sweden, Poland or the UK) the inclusion of student representatives emerged as a result of specific student struggles for representation in these structures. Although all these forms are permeated by the logic of the common, they have been realized at different moments in the development of specific higher education systems, sometimes in situations of open confrontation, but sometimes through a less conflictual evolution. Not coincidentally, they all find themselves in actual, more or less open conflict with capital recently advancing its domination over the sector. Student cooperatives are being pushed out of European campus spaces by private companies, open access projects run by libraries are under constant threat from shrinking public budgets, journals run by scientific societies are being continuously bought up by large oligopoly, and in successive reforms of public higher education sectors in Europe, managerial centralism is gradually displacing more participatory forms of governance. Having no illusions about the fact that often all these forms of academic activity are objects of co-optation by capital or university managers (Kamola & Meyerhoff, 2009), we should learn to see in them the potential of the common, which is being purged right before our eyes. Finally, a constant element of the commons in which we live is knowledge in its epistemic dimension. The specific theories or lines of research that address the issues emerging from emancipatory protest movements make up the global common, created and reproduced by researchers around the world. We already mentioned these processes at the beginning of this book, pointing out that while social movements, from feminist, Black, LGBTQ+ and anti-colonial movements to autonomist Marxists, feed research agendas and lead to the establishment of entire fields of study in universities around the world, capital has mastered to perfection the tools of cognitive pacification of these demands and ways of knowing. The “methodological university” of which Hall (2021) writes, effectively

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

251

grinds these currents in its mills of abstraction. Nonetheless, the impulses and radical perspectives from which the knowledge that makes up Black studies or LGBTQ+ studies, Marxist studies or postcolonial critique, represent the potential for the common handed down to us by generations of radical scholars. We can use it in further struggles to liberate practices of knowledge production. A diachoronic perspective on the common in higher education subsumed under capital thus allows us to see it in the reality around us, as well as to understand its conflicting origins and to see the threats coming from the state and capital. The commons are neither given (they are won over) nor permanent (they are constantly threatened by enclosures). The second perspective that I would like to mention highlights precisely this conflictual dynamic. 10.4.4   Synchronic Perspective A synchronic perspective allows us to grasp the commons in their parallel functioning in, against and beyond the university subsumed under capital. It is not only fragments of our academic reality that are structured according to the logic of the common. Sometimes entire academic institutions adopt this logic and organise their activities according to it. A special case of the institutions of the common are co-operative universities, the most famous case of which is the Basque university run by the Mondragon co-­ operative (Wright et al., 2011; Winn, 2015). Primarily oriented towards vocational training, Mondragon not only integrates its employees into the university’s ownership relationship by requiring a financial contribution upon employment, it also pays a dividend based on the employee’s share of ownership, thus guaranteeing participation in a certain proportion of the institution’s annual revenue. This institution allows students to work in a network of co-operative enterprises, but it is also part of a broader movement to change economic relations in the region. Although the institution itself has been subjected to multifaceted criticism over the years, this does not change the fact that it is one of the few long-established co-­ operatives in the sphere of higher education (Winn, 2015). 10.4.5   Common Institutional Form Discussing cooperative universities as “institutions in potentia”, Joss Winn (2015) distinguished three pathways leading to the possible constitution

252 

K. SZADKOWSKI

of such institutions: conversion, dissolution, and creation. While conversion implies the transformation of entire institutions (e.g. public) into full-­ scale co-operatives and is a relatively rare phenomenon, dissolution involves the gradual decomposition of public institutions strengthening the constituent individual institutes or departments with a co-operative form of governance. Finally, the third path involves the creation of cooperative institutions from scratch and outside the existing system. Few projects follow the third path. Nonetheless, the commons perspective is not so focused on the institutional form of the university itself, allowing us to capture the more diverse forms in which autonomously governing communities create and reproduce the knowledge and learning resources that are crucial to their functioning. Moreover, this perspective assumes that the commons already surround us, providing models for effective action, and part of our efforts should focus not so much on constituting them as on helping them to expand and prosper. Additionally, while all co-­operatives (including cooperative universities) are based on the logic of the common, not all commons in higher education resemble co-operatives in their shape. The difference between co-operative universities and common-pool resource-based institutions can be seen in the case of the Ecuadorian Polytechnic run by the Salesians in the capital, Quito (Carrera & Solorzano, 2019). The transformation of the polytechnic into a common-pool resource institution—created and reproduced by staff and students through a shared horizontal process—was a conscious decision and direction set by the university’s leadership. The important point, however, is that in no way can this kind of initiative be said to be anti-capitalist. Although distanced from the pathologies of competition and the market, as well as being outside the direct influence of state authorities, the university does not take an antagonistic stance towards them. 10.4.6   Multitude of Common Struggles The commons also develop in a more antagonistic dimension—against the capitalist university. They arise in a movement of protest against the restrictions imposed by capital and the state on the development of living knowledge (Edu-factory Collective, 2009; Roggero, 2011; Dokuzović, 2016). For example, the communities of protest themselves are making use of a form of the common to sustain the momentum of their actions. The last two decades in global higher education have been marked by a series of protests against the capitalist transformations of higher education sector:

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

253

the introduction or increase of tuition fees, the neoliberal restructuring of public universities, the spread of metrics or competitive logics within the system, as well as issues of racial injustice or colonial legacies. In the course of these protests, the question of the reproduction of the movement itself—the need to create institutions to sustain its persistence and development over time—becomes crucial. In many cases, spontaneously created and established commons proved to be helpful, such as in the cases of the Croatian protest movement using the form of a democratic plenum to manage the protest (Occupation Cookbook, 2009), the Austrian occupations at the Fine Arts Academy (Dokuzović, 2016), the British series of university occupations during the tuition fee increase protests, the Californian wave of occupations, the South African #FeesMustFall protests (Cini, 2019), the long series of Chilean protests against public sector tuition fees (Fleet & Guzmán-Concha, 2017) or the Italian Onda anamola (Cini, 2016). The student and academic workers movements prioritized the preservation of the commons-based practices that arose amidst the protests. The knowledge produced during the academic struggles— including the protestors’ principles, the causes, effects, and tactical reflections on the protest forms—comprises a global anti-capitalist common that benefits those advocating for higher education beyond accumulation imperatives (Occupation Cookbook, 2009). On the other hand, as I mentioned above, ongoing protests have a feedback effect on the system, as in the case of the recent events in Chile, that led the transformations of the system in which tuition fees were abandoned (Fleet & Guzmán-Concha, 2017). All these actions make the public sector more common-based (Vercellone, 2015). 10.4.7   Higher Education Commons Beyond the University Walls Another aspect of the protest commons is the way in which protesting communities shift into institutions that function outside the official system. Examples vary in this area. On the one hand, in Western countries, this includes autonomous learning institutions that develop as a result of the experience of protests against tuition fees, such as the Lincoln Social Science Centre (Neary & Winn, 2012) or the Really Open University (Pusey, 2017). Both institutions focused the energies of specific protesting communities and transformed them into a longer-standing process of self-education.

254 

K. SZADKOWSKI

On the other hand, we can find transnational hubs dedicated to amplifying and multiplying the struggles in the university sector. An example of the institution of the common born out of protest was the transnational group Edu-factory, which, as Lina Dokuzović writes, “began in 2006 as a transnational mailing list, discussion platform, and online archive, and was centred around university transformations, knowledge production, and the publication analysis and statements of protests, conflicts, and actions in institutions of knowledge production.” (2016, p.  52). The Edu-factory and the militants and researchers gathered around it assisted in mobilising and organising synergies between national protesters seeking to make struggles common, not only in Europe during the Occupy or Indignados periods, but also beyond—most notably on both sides of the Mediterranean—linking grassroots student organisations opposing the imposition of precarity during the Arab Spring. Born out of this activity, Knowledge Liberation Front, an ephemeral organisation dating back to a transnational meeting of student movements in Paris in February 2011, continued this activity by organising further meetings where militants from all over the world could pool their knowledge and experience, as well as plan joint actions. Both Edu-factory and Knowledge Liberation Front acted as institutions of the common responsible for extending and communicating the struggles carried out in the global space of the capitalist university. In countries with a tradition of strong authoritarian rule (Dönmez & Duman, 2021), autonomous learning organisations represent an opportunity for a withdrawal from violent relations imposed by the state. An important case was the creation of the Solidarity Academy network in Turkey (Erdem & Akın, 2019; Erdem, 2020), which was established in response to the mass dismissal (more than 5000 by 2017) of academics from higher education institutions as a result of the purges carried out after the failed coup of July 2016 and the state of emergency declared in its aftermath. The dismissed academics began to organise independent, grassroots and non-hierarchical forms of self-governance with their academic activities (both education and knowledge creation) outside the system. Erdem and Akın (2019) call these “communities of commoning”, autonomous institutions based on values of resistance, solidarity, critical inquiry, democracy and social inclusion. In the course of their activities, the Academies of Solidarity, established in Koceli, Ankara and Istanbul but also in other smaller cities, were primarily concerned with organising academic life, enabling students to interact with dismissed academics in

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

255

participatory learning, giving affective support to dismissed academics, and working together to further political militancy. When I attended a conference organised in Koceli in 2018, in which academics wanted to explore the historical tradition of autonomous education in Turkey, closely linked to the labour movement and its institutions, but also to learn from examples of transnational struggles (such as the Knowledge Liberation Front and Edu-factory, in which I was also active in the past), the network was already on the downward trend of its militancy. The commons organised against both capital and the state with its public university are fragile and very unsustainable. The representatives of the collective stressed that, although in their first year of activity they had managed to support the dismissed academics with funds collected from those who remained in the system, the following years of activity were marked by a struggle for existence and survival. In addition, the easily recognisable “secret agents” appearing at the sessions made it clear how difficult and dangerous the struggle of the commons against the authoritarian state was. I have already mentioned co-operatives, as well as the institutions of the common growing out of protests and taking root in institutional forms. However, there are also projects that do not fit into this framework. Autonomous knowledge creation projects that often have no ambition to submit to the regime of university certification and validation—transcending rigid disciplinary boundaries and responding to the needs of social actors. We can point to SHURE University in Japan, an institution where students shape their own educational programme (Li, 2017). In a system that is at the same time extremely competitive, characterised by high tuition fees and a general aversion to the humanities and social sciences, SHURE gives students a free space in which they are able to develop their passions and manage the design of their study programmes themselves. Finally, it is worth mentioning the Indian Lokavidya movement, the folk knowledge movement, a movement for the radical integration of everyday knowledge into the structures of emancipatory scholarship (Dokuzović, 2016).

10.5  The Common and Its Limitations While it is difficult to argue with conviction that the common currently has the potential to definitively resolve the reign of capital in higher education, it seems all the more our task to abandon our blindness to their existence in the surrounding reality. To better develop projects based on

256 

K. SZADKOWSKI

the commons, we must first learn to understand and recognise them in order for the common function in, against and beyond the capitalist university. No matter how beneficial solutions based on the logic of the common may seem, one must be aware of their many limitations. Firstly, the commons are fragile and exposed to numerous threats (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014). Whether in the form of historical remnants or newly achieved practices, their stabilisation requires efforts that often crash against fundamental constraints such as the energy and time-consuming nature of creating and recreating the institutions of the common or exposure to evaluation or criticism from institutions based on other (capitalist) principles. From the point of view of capitalist management, focused on efficiency and surplus extraction, practices based on the common may seem too slow or inefficient. However, we must not succumb to these pressures, otherwise we will miss the opportunity to build our future beyond capital. Secondly, the common and the commons are developed in narrow areas of the university, often with disciplinary links to the humanities and social sciences. It is true, as Andrzej W.  Nowak (2013) indicated, that democratising a large technological research infrastructure seems from today’s perspective like a dream. We are a long way from observing the emergence of the collectively managed and common-oriented laboratories or large-scale research projects. At the same time, the difficulty of commoning of these spaces, and their close interconnectedness and dependence on the support from the state, military industry, and capital, offers an easy temptation to abandon them when thinking about building a non-­ capitalist future. Like Aaron Bastani (2019) I believe that antagonism extends to all areas of human practice and the high-tech sphere cannot be left at the sole disposal of capital. Just as we should resist Luddite impulses that see the commons as a-technological autarky, so too should we stand in a position that rejects an overconfidence in technologically-driven salvation. Commoning is first and foremost hard work, struggle and coordination of social energy. There is no way it can happen automatically and effortlessly. No matter how hard it is to imagine, a future beyond capital will require the commoning of big science, technology and their infrastructure. Thirdly, existing alternatives, especially those that go beyond the capitalist university and provide a counterbalance to it based, for example, on cooperative principles, are limited by their functioning in the everyday capitalist reality with its principles of competition and subordination to

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

257

profit generation. Only in broad coalitions for the abolition of capitalism will their development and successful functioning be possible at all (De Angelis, 2017). There is no doubt about this.

10.6  Conclusion The capital in higher education is a social relation striving towards totality. Step by step, penetrating a new area of social activity, capital develops to the point of presenting the whole social energy, the social totality, as its activity—its own movement. In this book, I have outlined the process of this movement as seen from the standpoint of capital seeking to embrace a new area: higher education and science. Along the way, I have pointed out the necessary elements of this process, as well as the resistance and friction faced by this movement. I called it, following Marx, the subsumption of labour under capital. It is within this process—through formal, real, hybrid or ideal subsumption—that the encounter between capital and labour takes place. The outcome of this encounter is not predetermined. Capital does not reach a state of smooth functioning in a given area by force of necessity. It uses all the means at its disposal to do so (including violence and state pressure), as well as its flexibility and adaptability to the patterns of labour activity found in the new space. It is by following this encounter, as well as the general movement of capital in the higher education sector, rather than by emphasising the mechanisms of market regulation that predate it, that we are better able to understand the dynamics of the transformation. In the ensuing chapters, we considered how capital develops and masters the processes of measuring academic labour that it needs for its efficient operation and control of the field, how it instrumentalises the inherent mechanisms of prestige distribution, and finally, how it is able to compromise and even partially abandon the private form of ownership of knowledge in order to maintain the control that it exerts over higher education. These chapters laid the necessary foundation that allows us to understand that capital and the exploitation of academic labour can operate in subtle or non-obvious ways. This understanding has been made possible by incorporating insights on the specificity of this sector into Marxist analyses. Indeed, the analyses collected in this book go beyond both the simple economic reductionism of Marxist analyses (while maintaining the potential of indicating the spread of the value-form in a new area). They also go beyond the limitations of an exceptionalism that postulates the resistance of higher education to fully capitalist transformation

258 

K. SZADKOWSKI

precisely because of its intrinsic specificity (while maintaining the potential to understand how this specificity plays an important role within capitalist subsumption). Indeed, the task of Capital in Higher Education has been to provide a method of analysis in higher education research that is not bound by these limitations as they have been expressed here. However, capital is not merely a value in motion. It is a process of corrupting, erasing and forgetting of the common. In other words, it is an erasure and deactivation of social power and a repeated attack on our ability to govern our world by ourselves. In going through the subsequent threads of analysis, I have tried to highlight moments in which the potential of the common was deactivated, obliterated or corrupted. Capital is not a force that can ensure the emancipation of the common. At worst, it violently destroys it. At best, it leads to the establishment of a communism of capital that is functional for its own development. In analysing subsequent problems, however, I have tried to emphasise this always-already antagonistic dimension of the relationship between the common (academic labour and its products) and capital. For it is only by being aware of the presence of the common in and around us, in our productive relations with the world and with others, that we can develop a political reading of capital. That is, one that aims to rupture its relations. As has been clear at many points in this book, the possibility of seeing the common as part of a socio-economic reality is conditioned by the political-ontological optics that my reflections owe to Marx. For political ontology is not only a tool that enables the critical denaturalisation of the ontological constructions imposed on us by capital and its proponents, but one that also allows for the antagonistic articulation of alternative forms of being. Like capital, the common is a form of social relation rather than a thing. Moreover, it is this universal social relation that emancipatory social movements, as well as labour and student movements in the field of higher education, aim to establish. However, it is not enough simply to change the form of governance of a higher education institution, such as by eliminating the managers or bureaucrats and establishing a co-operative university. Rather, the movement for a free university must universalise the common and lead to its establishment as a dominant social relation that displaces capital from all pores of life—including academic life. This, precisely, is the proper task of a critique of political economy of higher education.

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

259

References Bastani, A. (2019). Fully Automated Luxury Communism. London: Verso Books. Broumas, A. (2017). Social Democratic and Critical Theories of the Intellectual Commons: A Critical Analysis. tripleC, 15(1), 100–126. Caffentzis, G., & Federici, S. (2014). Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism. Community Development Journal, 49(1), i92–i105. Carrera, P., & Solorzano, F. (Eds.). (2019). The University As Commune: The Centrality of Community Action in the Management Model and Practices of Universities. Quito: ABYA YALA. Cini, L. (2016). Student Struggles and Power Relations in Contemporary Universities: The Cases of Italy and England. In Student Politics and Protest (pp. 49–64). London: Routledge. Cini, L. (2019). Disrupting the Neoliberal University in South Africa: The #FeesMustFall Movement in 2015. Current Sociology, 67(7), 942–959. Cook, D. (2013). Realising the Co-Operative University. A Consultancy Report for The Co-Operative College. Available at: https://bit.ly/3F0bHRW Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2019). Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. De Angelis, M. (2017). Omnia sunt communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Dokuzović, L. (2016). Struggles for Living Learning: Within Emergent Knowledge Economies and the Cognitivization of Capital and Movement. Wien: Transversal Texts. Dönmez, P. E., & Duman, A. (2021). Marketisation of Academia and Authoritarian Governments: The Cases of Hungary and Turkey in Critical Perspective. Critical Sociology, 47(7–8), 1127–1145. Edu-factory Collective. (2009). Toward a Global Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia. Erdem, E. (2020). Free Universities as Academic Commons. In The Handbook of Diverse Economies (pp. 316–322). London: Edward Elgar Publishing. Erdem, E., & Akın, K. (2019). Emergent Repertoires of Resistance and Commoning in Higher Education: The Solidarity Academies Movement in Turkey. South Atlantic Quarterly, 118(1), 145–163. Fleet, N., & Guzmán-Concha, C. (2017). Mass Higher Education and the 2011 Student Movement in Chile: Material and Ideological Implications. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 36(2), 160–176. Gieysztor, A. (1992). Management and Resources. In A History of the University in Europe (Vol. 1, pp. 108–143). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, R. (2021). The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History. London: MayFly Books. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

260 

K. SZADKOWSKI

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2017). Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvie, D. (2004). Commons and Communities in the University: Some Notes and Some Examples. The Commoner, 8, 1–10. Holloway, J. (2010). Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press. Holloway, J. (2015). Read Capital: The First Sentence: Or, Capital Starts with Wealth, Not with the Commodity. Historical Materialism, 23(3), 3–26. Kamola, I., & Meyerhoff, E. (2009). Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against Enclosure in the University. Polygraph, 21, 15–37. Katsiaficas, G. (2018). Global Imagination of 1968: Revolution and Counterrevolution. Oakland: PM Press. Li, Y. (2017). SHURE: A Democratic University in Tokyo. Alternative Education Resource Organization. [@:] http://www.educationrevolution.org/store/ shure-­a-­democratic-­university-­in-­tokyo/ Marginson, S. (2004). A Revised Marxist Political Economy of National Education Markets. Policy Futures in Education, 2(3–4), 439–453. Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2012). Open Education: Common (s), Commonism and the New Common Wealth. Ephemera, 12(4), 406–422. Neary, M., & Winn, J. (2017). Beyond Public and Private: A Framework for Co-Operative Higher Education. Open Library of Humanities, 3(2), 2. Negri, A. (2022). Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context. London: Polity Press. Nowak, A.  W. (2013). Demokratyzowanie czy neoluddyzm—reforma uniwersytetu wobec wyzwań technonauki. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 1(7), 169–193. Occupation Cookbook. (2009). The Occupation Cookbook, or the Model of the Occupation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. New York: Minor Compositions. Pusey, A. (2017). Towards a University of the Common: Reimagining the University in Order to Abolish It with the Really Open University. Open Library of Humanities, 3(1), 13–13. Roggero, G. (2010). Five Theses on the Common. Rethinking Marxism, 22(3), 357–373. Roggero, G. (2011). The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Roxå, T., & Mårtensson, K. (2014). Higher Education Commons–A Framework for Comparison of Midlevel Units in Higher Education Organizations. European Journal of Higher Education, 4(4), 303–316. Szadkowski, K. (2017). The University of the Common: Beyond the Contradictions of Higher Education Subsumed Under Capital. In The Future of University Education (pp. 39–62). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Szadkowski, K. (2019). The Common in Higher Education: A Conceptual Approach. Higher Education, 78(2), 241–255.

10  BEYOND CAPITAL 

261

Szadkowski, K., & Krzeski, J. (2019). In, Against, and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis. Social Epistemology, 33(6), 463–476. Tronti, M. (2019). Workers and Capital. Verso Books. Vercellone, C. (2015). From the Crisis to the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a New Mode of Production. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(7–8), 85–99. Vercellone, C., & Giuliani, A. (2019). Common and Commons in the Contradictory Dynamics Between Knowledge-Based Economy and Cognitive Capitalism. In C.  Capitalism (Ed.), Welfare and Labour (pp.  132–173). London: Routledge. Winn, J. (2015). The Co-Operative University: Labour, Property and Pedagogy. Power and Education, 7(1), 39–55. Wright, S., Greenwood, D., & Boden, R. (2011). Report on a Field Visit to Mondragón University: A Cooperative Experience/Experiment. Learning and Teaching, 4(3), 38–56.

Index

A Abstraction, 10, 11, 23, 24, 43, 44, 48, 49, 95, 105, 141, 144, 146, 190, 191, 251 Academic capitalism, vii, xii, 14, 39, 44, 63, 69–72, 75–77, 113 Academic labour, x–xii, xiv, 3–6, 8–18, 22, 26, 35, 38–41, 46, 50, 55, 56, 62, 69, 71, 75–77, 84, 86–88, 93, 94, 96, 101, 102, 105–107, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 127–145, 148–160, 165, 167, 169–171, 179, 181, 185, 187, 192, 196, 198–200, 203–208, 210, 211, 214–216, 221–239, 243, 246 Academic publishing oligopoly, 3, 148, 196, 201 Acceleration, 5, 10, 27, 82, 91, 140, 159, 177, 201, 234 Accumulation of capital, 212 Adorno, Theodor, 39

Affective labour, 9 AI, 102, 190, 192, 193, 197, 201–202, 208, 214 Algorithms, 147, 154, 156, 157, 192, 201, 202, 208 Alienation, ix, xiii, 192, 206, 207, 210, 216, 225 Alternative, xiii, xiv, 11, 18, 31, 35, 40, 56, 83, 94, 101, 103, 111, 112, 137, 143, 144, 159, 160, 188, 207, 210, 239, 244, 246–248, 256, 258 Altmetrics, 139, 200 Antagonism, xi, xii, xiv, 7, 34, 45, 47, 51, 223, 256 Anti-capitalist, 112, 194, 207, 247, 252, 253 Appearance, 34, 42, 91, 167 Article Processing Charge (APC), 114, 191, 194, 196–198, 212, 215 Autonomist Marxism, 7, 140–144

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. Szadkowski, Capital in Higher Education, Marxism and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38441-7

263

264 

INDEX

B Becoming rent of profit, 9, 229 Behavioural surplus, 154, 192, 193, 199 Bell Laboratories, 86 Bernal, John Desmond, 132–133, 173 Bibliometric indicator, 4, 155, 156, 236 Bibliometrics, 15, 16, 103, 127, 130–131, 134, 140, 141, 153, 156, 157, 179, 180, 238 Biopolitical labour, 210 Black studies, 28, 251 C Capitalism, vii, xiii, 2, 3, 7, 10, 31, 32, 35–40, 44, 45, 48–53, 56, 63, 65, 70, 103, 104, 111, 113, 115, 116, 118, 128, 143, 145, 154, 181, 186, 191, 192, 209, 210, 224–226, 228, 230–232, 237, 245, 247, 257 Capitalist command, 223 Capitalist development, 18, 22, 38, 47, 48, 51, 82, 111, 143, 186, 187, 231, 247 Capitalist form, 22, 27, 35, 195, 201, 207, 243 Circulation, 27, 48, 51, 85, 88–91, 95, 96, 126, 140, 186, 187, 189, 200, 227 Citation, 5, 12, 13, 16, 27, 106, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 148, 153, 154, 156, 157, 168, 172, 176, 178, 180, 193, 200, 207, 239 CiteScore, 158, 236 Clarivate Analytics, 13, 153, 156, 157 Class conflict, 45, 62, 68

struggle, xi, xii, xiv, 22, 37, 39, 45–47, 50, 52, 53, 63, 109, 112, 119, 225 Classical political economy, 61 Cleaver, Harry, 10, 47, 49, 50, 89, 224 Cognitive capitalism, 9, 16, 103, 117, 156, 185–191, 202, 209, 213 Cognitive labour, 9 Cole, Jonathan R., 171–173, 176, 177, 180 Commensuration, 10, 96, 146, 147, 235 Commercial, 72, 73, 77, 93, 95, 107, 113, 128, 129, 140, 147, 148, 156, 158, 172, 180, 196, 198, 207, 212, 238 Commodity, vii, 11, 16, 27, 31, 35, 54, 66, 75, 85, 86, 88–94, 96, 107, 110, 111, 126, 156, 185, 186, 188, 190, 193, 199, 200, 205, 206, 209–211, 215, 216, 226, 227, 233 Commodity capital, 90, 216 Commoning, xi, xiii, xiv, 160, 165, 246, 254, 256 Commons, the, xiii–xv, 7, 13, 17, 18, 30, 32, 34, 37, 54, 55, 75, 82, 136–137, 140, 143, 146, 157, 159, 160, 167, 177–178, 185, 202, 203, 206, 210, 211, 215, 231, 232, 238–239, 243–258 Communism, xv, 41, 42, 46, 103, 111, 173, 231 Communism of capital, 16, 111, 112, 185, 187, 191–193, 195, 196, 200, 213, 243, 258 Competition, ix, 5, 6, 8, 11, 64, 68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 105, 111, 117, 118, 135, 146, 147, 152, 158–160, 170, 174, 234, 252, 256

 INDEX 

Consumption, 83, 153, 186, 190, 237 Contradiction, ix, xi–xiii, 7, 10, 16, 31, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 83, 111, 112, 142, 143, 145, 185–191, 195, 196, 201, 202, 213, 214, 223, 247 Co-operative universities, 251, 252, 258 Co-research, 34, 55 Crass empiricism, 14, 22–26, 43 Crisis, 30, 33, 34, 38, 50, 52, 84, 89, 93, 129, 133, 135, 138, 140, 145, 171, 195, 197 Critique, vii, ix, xiv, 7–10, 13, 14, 17, 21–23, 29–52, 54–56, 61–63, 76, 103, 119, 140, 143, 147, 173, 175, 192, 196, 212, 214, 222, 225, 232, 243, 244, 251, 258 of political economy, 9, 10, 14, 17, 22, 32, 41–47, 49, 55, 56, 61, 140, 258 D Das Kapital (the book), 15, 21, 30, 32, 40, 45, 49, 53, 82, 84–86, 90, 91, 94–96, 104, 108, 126, 168, 191, 213, 224, 227, 228, 231 Volume One, 85, 86, 88, 104, 126, 228 Volume Three, 84, 85, 91, 95, 96, 126, 168, 191, 213 Volume Two, 84, 85, 88, 90, 95 Dealienation, 37 De Angelis, Massimo, xi, 106, 120, 143, 150–152, 157, 226, 233, 235, 236, 245, 246, 248, 257 Debt, 1, 2, 6, 88, 92, 93, 113, 178 Denaturalisation, 30, 31, 76, 258 Dialectics, 77, 116, 213

265

Dispossession, 16, 185, 204–213, 216, 222, 223, 238 Distribution, xiv, 12, 16, 70, 83, 85, 105, 106, 111, 130, 131, 133, 134, 143, 157, 160, 165, 166, 168–172, 176, 177, 179–181, 186, 207, 215, 246 Domination, 13, 24, 27, 34, 35, 40, 46, 82, 84, 105, 108–110, 114, 119, 136, 160, 181, 187, 188, 199, 207, 235, 237, 247, 250 E Economic determinism, 8, 11, 74 Economic imperialism, 65, 67 Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863 (the book), 112 Economic reductionism, 76, 77, 257 Efficiency, 2, 3, 15, 64, 86, 92, 110, 111, 127–129, 133, 139, 152, 166, 170, 199, 256 Elsevier, 3, 5, 53, 94, 114, 155, 156, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 208, 211 Engels, Friedrich, xi, xiii, xv, 14, 22, 33, 41, 42, 47, 50, 54, 126 Epistemology, 26 Evaluation, 2–5, 12, 15, 27, 107, 114, 130, 132, 138, 139, 145, 149, 153, 157, 158, 179, 203, 215, 236, 239, 256 Evaluative homogeneity, 145, 146 Evaluative state, 145–147, 149, 152 Excellence, 28, 155, 165, 176 Exceptionalism, 9, 12, 14, 15, 63, 72–75, 77, 81, 202–204, 257 Exceptionalists, 16, 73, 75, 82, 87, 94, 105, 120, 128, 144, 145, 165, 166, 185, 187, 196, 202–204

266 

INDEX

Exchange, viii, ix, 5, 14, 31, 35, 39, 48, 63, 69–71, 75, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 96, 101, 111, 148, 168, 190, 205, 209, 215, 216, 233 Exploitation, ix, 9, 11, 16, 17, 34, 41, 48, 115, 118, 140, 154, 177, 185, 204–213, 216, 222, 231, 232, 238, 257 Externalities, 66 Extraction, viii–x, xiii, 26, 97, 106, 108, 109, 111, 116, 153, 154, 156, 188, 189, 191, 201, 209, 256 F Factions of capital, 2, 15, 85, 90, 92, 95, 97 Feudalism, 44, 45, 103 Financial capital, 2, 88, 91, 92, 104, 113, 118, 119 Financialisation, ix, xi, 2, 92 Financial market, 3, 89, 103, 113 For-profit, 3, 69, 86–89, 92, 95, 107, 117, 140, 166, 170, 204, 211, 233, 234 G Garfield, Eugene, 13, 127, 131, 133–138, 154, 155, 171–173, 180 General formula of capital, 86 German Ideology (the book), xiii, 14, 33 Grant agencies, 72 Grundrisse (the book), xiii, 31–33, 36, 95, 97, 228, 245 H Hardt, Michael, 34, 41, 66, 102, 120, 140, 141, 143, 144, 150, 151, 185, 190, 191, 202, 210, 243, 245, 247

Harvey, David, 51, 63, 83, 84, 89, 92, 96, 104, 118, 235 Harvie, David, xi, 10, 106, 120, 143, 150–152, 157, 225, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 249 Hegel, G. W. F, 21 Heterogeneity, 146, 159, 232 Higher education research (HER), vii, viii, 8, 9, 14, 21–26, 28, 33, 34, 43, 44, 47, 52–54, 56, 63, 67, 69, 77, 101–103, 147, 258 Historical materialism, 36 Historical ontology, 22, 30, 32, 36, 43, 53, 54 History, vii–x, 12, 16, 36, 39, 42, 44–46, 49, 52, 54, 83, 90, 131, 132, 136, 139, 140, 143, 145, 147, 150, 168, 180, 188, 195 Holloway, John, 31, 32, 35, 243 Homogeneity, 145, 146 Homogeneous time, 126 Hybridisation of the private and the public, 117 I Immanent critique, 14, 21 Immaterial labour, 48, 120, 127, 142, 150, 151, 165 Immaterial production, 83, 106, 233 Immeasurability, 141, 142, 150 In, against, beyond, vii–xv, 14, 22, 248–255 Income, 5, 72, 196, 228 Indicators, 3–5, 11, 13, 16, 118, 127, 128, 133, 139, 147, 152, 155, 156, 158, 172, 181, 198, 233, 239 Industrial capital, xiii, 14, 85, 89–91, 95 capitalism, 7, 56, 188, 189 labour, 12

 INDEX 

Industry, 13, 16, 23, 70, 86, 96, 103, 109, 110, 113, 129, 154, 185, 186, 201, 202, 208, 211, 256 Inequalities, 16, 92, 131, 147, 166, 168, 171, 175, 177, 179, 208 Institute for Scientific Information, 13, 136 Intellectual property, 111, 134, 172, 178, 189, 204, 206–208, 212–214 J Journal, 3, 5, 12, 13, 94, 96, 106, 131, 133–136, 138, 139, 148, 152, 155, 157–159, 166, 179, 181, 194–199, 203, 206, 207, 212, 214, 238, 239, 250 Journal Impact Factor (JIF), 138–139, 155, 156, 158, 178, 180, 197, 198, 236, 239 K Knowledge/learning regime academic capitalist, 70, 72, 77, 93, 238 public good, 65, 70, 72, 145, 159 L Labourism, 35 Labour power, 13, 85, 86, 88, 104, 105, 110 Law of value, 9, 11, 15, 106, 126, 127, 140, 142, 145, 149, 151–153, 155, 228, 230, 233, 236 Lebowitz, Michael A., 47, 49, 186, 203, 225, 231 Lenin, Vladimir I., 21, 51 Liberal thought, 33

267

Living labour, 97, 104, 105, 118, 119, 156, 188, 190, 199, 231, 232, 237, 238, 247 Lukács, György, xii, 22, 27, 29, 30, 32, 96, 141–143, 244, 245 Luxemburg, Rosa, xi, 22, 47, 49, 229 M Management, 1, 12, 71, 89, 128, 129, 132, 158, 188, 256 Marginson, Simon, 12, 56, 63, 64, 66, 74–77, 147, 148, 165, 202, 233, 249 Market, vii, x, xiii, xiv, 3, 11, 13, 14, 44, 56, 61–78, 81, 85–91, 94, 97, 101, 103, 113, 117, 118, 133, 137, 146, 148, 154, 155, 166, 175, 189, 196–199, 202, 203, 206, 233, 245, 252, 257 Market failure, 65, 73 Marketisation, 14, 63–67, 73, 77 Market-like behaviours, 71 Marx, Karl, viii–xv, 6–8, 14, 15, 17, 21–24, 29–37, 40, 41, 43–54, 61, 62, 82–86, 88–91, 94–97, 101–118, 126, 142, 143, 146, 151, 168, 176, 191, 203, 204, 210–213, 224–234, 236, 238, 243, 247, 257, 258 Matthew Effect, 174, 175, 177 MDPI, see Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute Measure, x, 3, 9, 15, 16, 46, 55, 64, 106, 111, 118, 120, 125–160, 166, 171, 178, 179, 181, 191, 221, 230–233, 235–239 Measurement apparatuses, 3, 4, 15, 144–149, 158, 159, 166, 171, 203, 215 Mediation, 36, 43, 89, 92, 148, 157, 158, 171, 181, 190, 238, 239

268 

INDEX

Merchant capital, 3, 4, 10, 13, 16, 17, 92–96, 104, 113, 114, 119, 155–157, 159, 160, 168, 169, 181, 186, 209, 211, 212, 216, 237 Merton, Robert K., 16, 133, 134, 168, 170–178, 180 Metaphysics, 21, 23, 25, 43–47 Metrics, 5, 13, 27, 64, 103, 106, 130, 138, 139, 148, 158–160, 193, 203, 207, 253 Mode of production, 17, 33, 43, 45, 95, 103, 105, 107, 109, 110, 113, 115–116, 169, 187, 191, 199, 209, 211, 213, 214, 228, 229, 246 Money capital, 88, 90 Moralism, 41, 45 Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), 94, 196–199, 203 Münch, Richard, 6, 12, 74, 147, 179 N Naturalisation, 16, 31, 143, 175, 230 Negation, xi, 36, 76 Negative critique, 35–40, 52 Negri, Antonio, xi, 7, 22, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 41, 47, 54, 66, 102, 103, 107, 120, 140–144, 150, 151, 155, 185, 190, 191, 202, 210, 222–226, 231, 232, 234, 235, 243–245, 247 Neoclassical economics, 14, 61, 63, 65, 67–69, 74, 77, 81, 101, 166 Neoliberalism neoliberal doctrine, 63 neoliberal practice, 63 New Public Management, 64, 74, 116, 117, 119 New Reading of Marx (NRM), 48, 49, 52 Not-for-profit, 3, 211

O Objectivist, 51, 225 Ontology, xiv, 17, 22, 29–32, 34–41, 43, 53, 54, 62, 101, 141, 150, 170, 173, 258 Open access, 16, 111, 185, 187, 191–199, 201–213, 215, 216, 221, 222, 243, 247, 249, 250 Openness, 41, 75, 95, 189, 195–203, 208–213, 221, 244 Organic unity, 83 P Pasquinelli, Matteo, 144, 153, 155–157, 188, 201, 226 Pension funds, 3, 53 Peripheries, 4, 95, 153, 166, 208 Perspectivism, 39, 50 Philosophy, xi, 6, 133 Platform, 13, 194, 201, 208–211, 216, 254 Political economy, ix, 8–10, 12–15, 17, 22, 23, 32, 34, 35, 40–51, 53, 55, 61, 72–75, 94, 103, 133, 136, 140, 148, 214, 222, 225, 226, 228–230, 232, 243, 258 Political ontology, 9, 17, 30, 32, 54, 62, 173, 258 Political reading of Marx, 23, 47–52, 224 Postone, Moishe, 35–39 Poverty of Philosophy (the book), xiii, 22, 41, 43, 46 Praxis, 9, 22, 32, 33, 54, 55, 235 Pre-capitalist, 96, 105, 116 Precarious/precarity, 6, 86, 88, 192, 254 Prestige distribution, 12, 16, 105, 106, 111, 155, 160, 165, 166, 168–170, 172, 177, 179–181, 207, 239, 257

 INDEX 

economy, x, xi, xiv, 178–180 prestige-maximisers, 72, 165, 179 Price, Derek De Solla, 133, 134, 137, 154, 201 Private higher education, 68, 87 Private property, viii, x, 11, 107, 181, 189, 191–193, 199, 205–208 Private universities, 6, 94 Productive capital, 3, 88, 91–93, 96, 202 Productive forces, 31, 35, 44, 50, 82, 107, 112, 142, 143, 213 Productive labour, xi, 9, 17, 115, 204, 210, 222, 224–234, 236, 238 Profit, xv, 2, 3, 9, 55, 64, 69–73, 75, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116, 117, 155, 156, 172, 190, 196, 198, 209, 210, 213, 215, 229, 236, 257 Profit-maximizers, 69 Proletarianisation, 10 Proletariat, 36, 37, 40, 45, 46, 48, 50, 177 Proudhon, Joseph, 43–45 Public, ix, 4–6, 53, 64–68, 70–72, 75, 81, 89, 90, 92–95, 97, 107, 116, 117, 119, 129, 130, 138, 140, 145, 149, 151, 159, 170, 178, 187, 195, 202, 204–206, 212–215, 221, 225, 233, 234, 236, 238, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 255 Public funding, 64, 234 Public goods, 65, 70, 72, 145, 159 Public good, the, 237 Public higher education, 66, 92, 93, 97, 116, 119, 140, 250 Public universities, 71, 90, 94, 117, 138, 234, 248, 253, 255 Putting-out system, 209

269

Q Quantification, x, 5, 130–131, 178, 203, 214 R Rankings, 1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 55, 70, 87, 127, 130, 146–149, 152, 153, 155–158, 166, 171, 179–181, 199, 235, 238 Rational choice, 77 Realisation, xi, 38–40, 50, 71, 88, 92, 95, 96, 143, 237 Refusal, ix, 38, 175, 222, 223, 226 Relations of exchange, 63, 70, 75 Relations of power, 71 RELX, 5, 13, 153, 158, 180, 193, 199, 203 Rent, viii, ix, xi, xv, 9, 91, 200, 209, 210, 216, 229 Reproduction, viii, x, xii, xiii, 28, 34, 50, 52, 180, 207, 210, 227, 228, 231, 234, 244, 246, 247, 249, 253 Reputation, 3, 130, 146, 168, 174 The Results of the Direct Production Process, (the book), 82 Revolution, 39, 50, 64, 193, 246 Reward system, 171–177, 181 Roggero, Gigi, 10, 28, 34, 55, 66, 102, 103, 117, 153, 199, 200, 237, 244, 245, 252 S Scholarly communication, 5, 10, 94, 137, 148, 155, 193, 206, 207, 211, 215 Science, viii, 3, 27, 62, 82, 102, 126, 135–137, 165, 168–170, 173–175, 185, 193–195, 221, 243

270 

INDEX

Science Citation Index, 131, 135–138, 158, 171, 172, 176 Scopus, 5, 13, 94, 114, 153, 157, 158, 166, 180, 197–199, 203 Sector of production, 8, 12, 94, 103, 118, 159, 169 Self-valorisation, 30, 37, 51, 64, 101, 111, 126, 181, 187, 190, 202, 230, 231, 237, 238 Signalling system, 12, 155, 169 Smith, Adam, 23, 175, 226 Social being, 30, 40 Social critique, 35, 36, 38 Social individual, 112, 143, 159 Socially necessary labour time, 15, 106, 120, 126, 128, 144, 149, 152, 199, 205, 210, 228, 235, 236 Social relations, vii, xi, xiii, xiv, 34, 40, 43–46, 64, 82–84, 104, 113, 116, 138, 149, 153, 156, 174, 177, 180, 225, 227–229, 231, 235, 244, 257, 258 Sociology of science, 171, 172, 175, 176 Source Normalised Impact per Paper, 139 Soviet Union, 36, 132, 133, 158 Springer Nature, 3, 94, 114, 193, 196–198, 201, 203 Standardisation, 27, 126, 130, 149–152, 159, 216 State, xi, xv, 5, 15, 22, 33, 38, 64, 65, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, 86, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 115, 133, 137, 144–152, 157, 178, 188, 192, 195, 214, 215, 236, 237, 245, 251, 252, 254–257 Status, 12, 72, 74, 75, 86, 87, 105, 119, 129, 147, 148, 179, 181, 205, 229, 245

Stratification, 145, 146, 175, 176 Student loan, 1, 92, 93, 113 Student movements, 28, 254, 258 Subsumption formal, xiii, 15, 102–113, 116, 118, 119, 233, 235, 238, 257 hybrid, xiii, 15, 102, 108, 112–114, 118, 119, 159, 209, 235, 257 ideal, xiii, xiv, 15, 102, 108, 114–119, 151, 221, 234, 257 real, xiii, 15, 30, 82, 102–104, 106–113, 116, 118, 119, 257 Surplus value absolute, 86, 105, 109 relative, 86, 109, 110 Synchronisation, 126, 146, 149–152 T Taylor & Francis, 3 Taylorism, 127–129, 140, 141 Taylorist, 129, 140, 158, 170 Technology, viii, xiii, 4, 73, 82, 86, 107, 143, 189, 204, 256 Theories of Surplus Value (the book), xiii, 17, 23, 31, 83, 204, 212, 226, 229, 230 Theses on Feuerbach, 40 Totality, xii, xiv, 8, 14, 31, 64, 83–85, 91, 97, 115, 137, 173, 186, 229, 231, 257 Transformation, 8, 10–12, 14–16, 22, 26–29, 31, 34, 39, 62–65, 69, 77, 81–83, 86, 91, 94, 97, 101–103, 107, 110, 111, 116, 117, 145, 149, 156, 165, 171, 185, 188, 206, 226, 238, 252–254, 257 Transhistorical, viii, 31–36, 38–40, 53, 54, 56, 188, 243, 245

 INDEX 

271

Tronti, Mario, ix, xi, 47, 51, 52, 243 Tuition fees, 2, 53, 65, 88–90, 253, 255 Turnover-time, 155, 198, 199

Vercellone, Carlo, 95, 102, 108, 187, 190, 210, 229, 236, 247, 253 Viewpoint, 8, 14, 26, 39–42, 47, 50, 51

U Unpaid labour, 41, 111, 205 Unproductive labour, xi, 17, 115, 222, 224–232, 238

W Wage labour, 35, 104, 110, 113, 115–118, 192, 205, 227, 228 Wealth, 7, 31–33, 36, 39, 44, 54, 113, 143, 149, 153, 157, 178, 186, 223, 232, 239, 243, 245 Web of Science, 13, 94, 152, 156, 157, 166, 197, 198 Wiley, 94, 114 Workers, vii, x, xii, xiv, 13, 27, 28, 41, 42, 84, 85, 106, 107, 110, 112, 116, 119, 188, 189, 192, 200, 204–209, 225–227, 230, 231, 238, 253 Working class, 13, 35–37, 39, 49–52, 119, 214, 229, 230, 238, 243

V Valorisation, xiv, 2, 9, 16, 18, 27, 35, 38, 40, 56, 83, 85, 86, 95, 96, 105, 109, 110, 117, 118, 120, 151–159, 168, 171, 187, 189, 202, 205, 206, 212, 227, 228, 235, 237 Valuation, 9, 12, 13, 35, 66, 152–159, 227 Value, ix, 9, 22, 61, 84, 91–94, 104, 126, 167, 186, 224, 246 Value-form, xi, 11, 39, 40, 48, 115, 118, 143, 205, 206, 223, 257 Value-signalling, 137, 166, 169, 181, 197

Z Zuckerman, Harriet, 136, 171, 172, 174