An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-productive Academic Labour

Abstract

This text starts 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 assumes that it is necessary 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, 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 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. 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 work in the Marxian sense, and the obstacles standing in the way to its full implementation, the key to which is the smooth functioning of capitalist measurement exercised within the field of science and higher education.

Tensiones emergentes en la coordinación sectorial y la economía política de los sistemas nacionales de educación superior en el capitalismo contemporáneo

“…Estas objetivaciones, directamente engarzadas con la Agenda de Calidad y con la búsqueda de posicionamiento mediada por los rankings nacionales e internacionales, sentarán las bases del llamado «capitalismo académico» (Slaughter y Rhoades, 2004;Sigahi y Saltorato, 2020), concepto que caracteriza el uso por parte de las instituciones del «capital humano» de sus académicos con el propósito de incrementar sus ingresos. Autores críticos caracterizan este proceso a partir de la concepción marxista del «trabajo productivo» en el capitalismo, planteando que la cuantificación de la actividad académica constituye su mecanismo esencial de incorporación al proceso de creación de valor económico (Szadkowski, 2019). La transformación subjetiva del quehacer académico es también abordada desde la «performatividad» de los dispositivos de cuantificación (Ramos, 2018), como mecanismos capaces de poner en acto una concepción de calidad del trabajo que funge como herramienta de jerarquización tanto entre docentes como entre distintas tareas, además de abstraer el quehacer académico de su contexto y presentarlo como una tarea individual (Fardella, Sisto y Jiménez, 2017).…”

Conceptualizing capitalist transformations: Marx’s relevance for higher education research

“…Why then, with such an underrepresentation of Marx's and Marxists reflection within HER, do we find its inclusion in the spectrum of theoretical tools useful, and why it may lead to the field's development? First, while HER is dominated by the naturalized opposition between the public and the private (Marginson 2016), Marx's critique proposes a political view on the ontology underlying research projects developed within HER (Marginson & Yang 2021;Szadkowski 2019b). Second, Marx's critique enables the restoration of the significance of the production sphere (instead of the emphasis on the sphere of exchange -the market), and it also reveals the opposing material interests between academic workers and capital trying to subjugate this sector as a whole.…”

“…Only in the last twenty years, we have seen a growing interest in the issues of science and higher education, academic labour and student mobilizations among authors who arise directly from the Marxist tradition (see. Harney & Moten 1999;Gulli 2009;Roggero 2011;Winn 2015;Neary 2016;Szadkowski 2016;2019a;2019b;Hall 2018;Arboledas-Lerida 2020;Rikap & Harari-Karmedoc 2021;Welsh 2020;2021). However, they rarely relied on the findings of mainstream HER or were published in HER core outlets.…”

Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

“…The importance of these distinctions across the category of labour lies in their implications for critique and struggle (Harvie 2005; Moraitis & Copley 2017), particularly in the Autonomist tradition. In an explicit departure from the Classical Marxist distinction between productive and unproductive labour, it is from the finer distinctions within unproductive labour that labour ‘ un productive of value for capital’ (Harvie 2006: 4), and thus potentially contributory to the non-capitalist commons (see Szadkowski 2019a), can be carved out of labour that is either co-productive or reproductive of labour-power. Struggle therefore can be located in our attempts to transition from the latter to the former and into a sphere of truly unproductive labour lying ‘outside measure’ (Harvie 2006: 20), beyond ‘value’s fantasies of homogenizable time and space’ (Moore 2015: 57), and thus beyond the ‘calculating and ordering’ of capitalist power (Hardt & Negri 2000: 357).…”

“…What is decisive in this ‘social production of space’ (Lefebvre 1991) is the establishment of ‘bounded, nameable, and identifiable’ territory in some respect , so that a quasi-property relation can be effected (Harvey 2015: 41, 100). This can in actuality be far more ‘immaterial’ than is usually credited, and in the governing of academic life it has been spearheaded by the techniques of measurement immanent to audit culture (see Strathern 2000; Szadkowski 2019a). Gatekeeping practices are those practices that contribute sufficiently to this ‘production of space’ that generate the ‘grid of intelligibility’ necessary for a ‘territory’ to be produced in the form of ‘knowledges’ (Elden 2007, 2013; Foucault 2002, 2007; see also Fuller 2019) and which can have an immaterial quality by virtue of their relational character that makes them difficult to identify.…”