Challenging the Capitalist University

This is an abstract submitted by Professor Mike Neary for inclusion in the forthcoming conference in June at the London School of Economics: Governing Academic Life: http://www.governing-academic-life.org/

CHALLENGING THE CAPITALIST UNIVERSITY – research, teaching and the recovery of revolutionary communist science

Contra to Foucault’s assertion that the state is a ‘mythicised abstraction’ (College de France Lecture 1979), this paper argues that the state is a real abstraction whose concrete violent political substance is derived from the dynamic dysfunctionality that lies at the core of the capital relation: the struggle between Capital and Labour. The importance of the power of abstraction for the social sciences was developed by Karl Marx in his mature social theory in Capital and the Grundrisse where he revealed the real nature of Capital’s other violent real abstraction: Money. It is the concept of abstraction in relation to Money as a form of Capital that provides the basis for Marx’s major theoretical breakthrough in the Social Sciences. By applying this methodology to the Capitalist University it is possible to reveal not only the logic of ‘academic capitalism’, but to develop strategies to challenge the Capitalist University based on the dynamic contradiction that lies at the core of the production of capitalist knowledge: the dysfunctionality between research and teaching, and to establish a framework for action out of which new forms of revolutionary communist science might emerge. The arguments made in this paper will be set against the work of Ball (2008) and Jessop (2008), specifically their views on the nature of state regulation and its consequences for higher education, and illustrated with reference to two experiments in reframing the relationship between teaching and research inside and outside of an English university: Student as Producer at the University of Lincoln and the Social Science Centre, Lincoln.

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Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).

Student as Producer is based on a number of intellectual projects, including critical social theory. Walter Benjamin (1892 -1940) was a central figure among a group of critical social theorists writing in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. His article, Author as Producer (1934), is a key text for the development of Student as Producer

Author: Mike Neary

2 thoughts on “Challenging the Capitalist University”