capitalist accumulation and education

Ernest Mandel discusses the tension in the relationship of university education to capitalist accumulation in p260ff of Late Capitalism. Late capitalism, i.e., capitalism in which technological advancement has become the main impetus for continued accumulation, depends on the production and reproduction of intellectually skilled labor. For this purpose, universities were drafted or converted from humanist institutions into knowledge and knowledge-worker factories. By 1970 when he was writing this book, it was already clear that universities would become centers for technological innovation and hence workplaces of capitalist production. That is, humanities education, moral education, and other traditional notions of the purpose of higher education, were dissolved. Only very few intellectually skilled workers need any type of humanist or artistic education—specifically, those who will produce the ideological arts (science fiction, comic books, TV, movies).

An inevitable clash occurs when a large number of people begin to demand higher education in order to enter more lucrative fields, because this drive for upward mobility conflicts with the aims and needs of capitalists. Not many intellectually skilled workers are needed, and always a dwindling number in comparison to the quantity of constant capital (dead labor in the form of extant technology): the more technological sophistication and automation the intellectually-skilled workers produce for capitalists, the fewer intellectually-skilled workers are needed for capitalists to accumulate wealth and profit.

Thus far, the rise of political conflict related to de-funding higher education makes perfect sense. Capitalists, represented by legislators, or directly acting politically in the form of tax revolts, refuse to pay for mass scale higher education, for the simple reason that it is not in their interests. The vanishing middle class continues to expect and make rather feeble demands on the state for funding of higher education. The bargain struck between them has led to the erosion over time of tax supported higher education and the shift to debt funding.

There’s another story, less economic and more political, that I think is true and helps explain the situation. Mandel’s analysis sets higher education somewhat outside the main capitalist economy (oddly, similarly to the way economists he criticizes heartily later on set the arms economy outside the main capitalist economy). Viewed another way, what has happened is that capitalists have pressed a demand for the territory of education as a new market. In fact, capitalists have demanded not only higher education, but the entire territory of education, from pre-K on up. This makes perfect sense: enormous amounts of money are spent on education, meaning that there is a pool of potential capital circulating through these institutions. While capitalist accumulation is threatened by diminishing rate of profit in the established territories of capitalist production (Marx’ famous Departments I and II), opening a new territory, gaining access to new pots of money to convert into capital, and restructuring the entire territory on the capitalist factory model could avert further crisis, until the money runs out. (This, by the way, is very similar to theories of the permanent arms economy that Mandel agrees most with—tax funding supplies a source of previously untapped capital, and the production activity itself provides a way to valorize accumulated capital. That maintaining the arms economy as a profitable venture depends on deliberately destroying both the arms and people has an analogy in education that I will leave to the reader to contemplate for now. Enjoy.)

Education is being rapidly capitalized, through direct seizure of some schools (the so-called charter schools), but mainly through imposition of curriculum, through legislation that requires use of particular pedagogies, textbooks, standardized tests, etc. that are published by major firms. Standardizing the K-12 curriculum is precisely the replacement of variable capital (labor) with constant capital (technology), which lowers the value and cost of labor by simultaneously minimizing numbers of workers needed and allowing for a reduction of wages. The effort to extend this process into higher education is already well underway.

Then there are the labor conditions to consider. Here, higher education has been in the vanguard, because of the resistance of organized labor in the K-12 sector. Real wages, and the job protections of tenure, have been largely eliminated from higher education, as the result of a bargain not at all unlike that struck infamously between auto manufacturers and UAW leadership beginning in the 1970s or so: a smaller more permanent workforce, grandfathered in, were guaranteed continuing employment, income, and pension rights, at the expense of all future employees. The work conditions, income, and real job protections of workers in the auto industry or higher education in the 1970s look like unbelievable dreams to the workers of today—such has been the destruction of labor conditions in these industries. Labor in higher education has been entirely subjected to “free market” competition, which is to say, labor on the terms dictated by capitalists. This is why tenure has to be eliminated, after all, according to every education manager: it interferes with “flexibility” that the university needs to hire according to “market demand” (which means, in reality, the absolute authority to create and control an industrial reserve army, lower wages, and exploit workers).  

note on some lousy ways people think about Marx

One of the simple ways to dismiss Marx is to say that his communist society could never exist because human nature is greedy and competitive—or at least, that some people’s human nature is greedy and competitive. This assumes that Marx establishes the grounds of communism on a speculation about human nature being generous and cooperative. People who assume that haven’t read or haven’t understood Marx.

A secondary assumption about Marx that is used against him in ignorance is that Marx presumed that the establishment of a communist society was inevitable and the necessary outcome of history. This is also not true. What he does argue, in Capital, is that capitalism will not be able to endure its own contradictions, for instance, the contradiction that capitalist accumulation depends on the exploitation of labor as its necessarily diminishing source of wealth.

I am not sure from what writing by Marx, if any, the argument from human nature is supposed to come. I would guess the 1844 Manuscripts, and the analysis of alienated labor that refers to capitalist production alienating labor from “species-being.” I would make the point that in this early stuff, Marx has still not fully formed his own philosophical architecture, and continues to borrow from Hegel and the Young Hegelians (viz., “species-being” is from Ludwig Feuerbach). Even so, the inchoate concept of labor is the only extent to which there is something like a human nature invoked in the 1844 Manuscripts. What makes humans human is that we work, and that our work is the basis for our social world. Nothing determines that one form or another of that work is inevitable or natural. Alienation is not unnatural. The estranged form of labor is not estranged from human nature, it is estranged from the worker.

By the time he wrote Capital, Marx retained only the most basic Hegelian logic of contradiction, but in a form that’s hardly recognizable. In Capital, Marx analyzes historical documents, contemporary economic and social conditions in England, and writings by capitalist economists, to demonstrate the multiple contradictions inherent in capitalism. These are bound to fail not because of some alleged human nature but simply because they are contradictions. For instance, the familiar boom-bust cycles in capitalist economies are inevitable, because they are driven by the capitalist’s demand for accumulation of wealth, the need to generate surplus-value through unpaid labor, and the need to sell the commodities produced with that labor at their cost (including the profit created by not paying labor). When there’s a boom, production increases, leading to stockpiles of unsold commodities, which drives down prices, which drives down profit, which leads to lower employment or lower wages, which leads to decreased purchases of commodities by consumers. The boom creates the bust. The bust creates hoards of unemployed capital that needs to be spent in order to accumulate wealth, and the cycle starts again. The capitalists themselves do not need to be particularly poor examples of human beings (other than, you know, the unconscionable willingness to exploit workers) in order to be compelled to play their roles as cheap buyers of other people’s work, often with other people’s money. That’s the game, and individual capitalists are no more in control of what they do to play the game than are the workers they exploit. Marx does not need to say anything about human nature to demonstrate this. He only needs to show that the cycles have repeated in obvious sequences with the same obvious results—and that’s easy to do when the British business and bourgeois economic communities and the British Parliament keep such detailed records and testimony about economic conditions.

And not to be gloomy and doomy about it, but the catastrophic end of capitalism doesn’t necessarily lead to communism. It could just be catastrophe.

non-tenure-track faculty labor

I see two ways of interpreting the situation of non-tenure-track faculty, drawing from Marx in Capital. If we think of higher education as an industry, and a university as a capitalist enterprise on the factory model (obviously, omitting layers of exchange between the “non-profit” sector of higher ed and overall social capital and accumulation), then tenure-track faculty are regular faculty workers and non-tenure-track faculty can be understood either as cottage industry “piece work” laborers, or as an industrial reserve army. These are not mutually exclusive, I believe.

Cottage industry, as Marx used the term, refers to production taking place outside of the factory. Marx distinguished ordinary cottage industry in which the commodity products of factories are transformed into more finished commodities by individuals with specialized abilities or at the convenience of the industrial capitalist, from cottage industry taking place as after-hours piecework by ordinary wage-laborers. Either form of cottage industry applies to non-tenure-track labor.

As routine, non-tenure-track faculty are often relied upon as labor for specific functions outside normal production of the university. At Cow State Santa Claus, many work as “special consultants” on special projects, to score qualification exams of various kinds, etc. Tenure-track faculty also avail themselves of these “opportunities,” including working in summer sessions through the for-profit extended education unit. Because faculty wages are held below what affords many faculty a reasonable income for their various debts, the university creates the need for additional wages for subsistence. This is similar to mandatory overtime, or extension of work-time.

But many non-tenure-track faculty do cottage labor of a different sort, producing themselves as means of production, by preparing courses that they may or may not teach, doing research and other work without compensation or paid expenses to maintain field currency, contributing to their field’s base of knowledge, etc. Unlike tenure-track faculty who are at least nominally paid for this work, and who can typically predict what classes they need to prepare to teach and thus what areas they need to be current in, non-tenure-track faculty simply have to be ready, or else their labor will lose its saleable value. This is specialized work performed entirely outside the factory setting, and only paid on the basis of its sale as ready labor-power.

That is also the condition of the industrial reserve army. To maintain low wages, it is necessary that there always be a large stock of ready labor-power that is unemployed or underemployed. The value of labor as a commodity is lowered by this reserve stock. The costs for developing and maintaining that labor-power are unpaid, or paid via charity or social welfare systems. Capitalists call upon this reserve at the moment it is needed, and dispose of it as soon as possible. As a reserve, workers in this class are themselves immobile, but to the capitalist, transferrable and exchangeable at whatever distance and to whatever locale. The workers experience their relation to the means of production as interrupted and fleeting; for the capitalist, this labor-power is always available.

the CSU's furlough proposal

The CSU has proposed a "furlough" plan to their employee unions, as part of a program for dealing with the net half-billion dollar cut to the CSU budget for this coming academic year. The Chancellor's office plan is similar to plans proposed by other state agencies - cutting two days a month from employees' work schedules, without compensation obviously. The Chancellor's office informed the union leaders that the furlough would save about $275 million for the whole CSU. The proposal is to cut two Fridays from each month.

On its face, a furlough plan for the CSU is absurd. Anybody who knows anything about higher education knows that classes are almost always grouped by days of the week. Some classes are taught on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, some are taught on Tuesday and Thursday. On a few campuses, classes are taught only Monday-Wednesday and Tuesday-Thursday, with special all day classes, labs, or other activities scheduled on Friday. In short, cutting two Fridays a month for the academic year would make gobbledygook out of every academic calendar.

My first reaction to this, about a week ago when I first heard about it, was that this was typical of the Chancellor's office: they have no idea how higher education works, and no idea what academic calendars are, or really, what faculty labor is like. For instance, let's compare three faculty members. Faculty member A teaches four classes each day Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That faculty member would have Friday classes cut two times each month, for around 6 void Fridays a semester. Faculty member B teaches three classes on Tuesday and Thursday, and one on Wednesday night. For that faculty member, the cut to the Friday work schedule means - well, what? Faculty member C teaches only night classes, including one that meets every Friday night. The two-Fridays-a-month furlough means that that faculty members Friday class will miss six sessions over a semester. On our campus, that's nearly half the course.

But this week, I've been getting email updates about meetings between union leaders and campus presidents, and now the CSU administration's strategy for the furlough is more clear: it's a way to cut pay without calling it a pay cut.

The furlough would mean that faculty would have their pay cut relative to the amount of work they do while they are working - during the 10-month academic year. Two days a month from that 10-month year results in around 10.75% cut in salary for faculty. But there can't be any effective way to cut the actual work, and what we're hearing is that the CSU has absolutely no intention of identifying or giving account of the cuts to the faculty work.

Let me put this in context: like most faculty I know, I actually work, during the academic year, at least 6 days a week. That's because I teach Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and need to prepare to teach those classes on days when I'm not teaching them. (Contrary to what some people, notably the Chancellor of the CSU, seem to think, faculty work outside the classroom in order to be able to teach while in the classroom.) They might cut Friday classes twice each month, but there's no way they can meaningfully cut faculty workload during an academic year.

They're simply taking the opportunity of the budget catastrophe to extract more work for less pay. If I was a little more paranoid, I'd suggest that this is also helpful in attempting to undermine the power CFA generated by successfully organizing a contract fight in 2005-2006, or furthering a union-busting effort.

Oh, and what is the carrot in this proposal? The Chancellor's office threatened the employee unions that if we didn't accept furloughs, there would be mass layoffs. And if we do? No guarantee that there won't be layoffs. Meanwhile, of course, the CSU is still not subject to meaningful public scrutiny of its books.

I would have written about this earlier, but I've had this hideous chest cold all week. I haven't had real sleep in two days. But I figured, if I don't write about this, then the chest cold will have won.

life being what it is

I'm listening to a Kaki King song called "Life Being What It Is." It's really good. She's a fantastic guitar player, and I wish I could play as well as she does.

But I borrow the title for reasons having nothing to do with my appreciation for Kaki King, or the super-duper-cool percussion-n-harmonic solo on this number, which is excellent.

No, indeed. The title just speaks to the situation.

There's a guy named Keith Hoeller who teaches philosophy for a living, much like I do, up in Washington. He also spends a lot of time reading everything, apparently, published about the plight of contingent faculty in the US. For weeks, he's been sending links to the "adjunct" faculty listserv that connect to stories about universities around the country planning to cut faculty, salaries, or both, and it's just kind of overwhelming.

University of Urbana and Skidmore College were tonight's pair. Urbana is planning to ask faculty to voluntarily give back 6 percent of their salaries, and cutting non-faculty staff salaries (10 percent for salaries over $75,000). Urbana and Skidmore are both planning to cut or consider cutting temporary faculty, beginning this spring semester.

Every day, there are more reports. Part-time or full-time, non-tenurable college and university faculty everywhere in the US are losing their jobs, day by day. The press coverage of this is spotty, local, and in no way connects the various dots. Not only is there almost no concern about the impact of the layoffs on either the faculty or the students affected, there's no big picture being painted of what this means, or says, about either the economy or our public values.

It's sad to me, because I've spent my entire career as a contingent academic, and the better part of a decade as an advocate for contingent faculty. All those faculty are simply disappearing. They'll be taking unemployment, looking for other ways to make a living - and sometimes having advanced degrees is a hindrance to employment, I know from my own experience.

But above that, it's eerie. I am wondering how many of my close friends and colleagues will just be gone next year, or next month, or in two weeks when the CFA Lecturers' Council meets in Sacramento.