Abstract
Negotiating Neoliberalism, comprising 13 peer-reviewed chapters, presents a coherent understanding of neo-liberalism as an ideological project, the ways in which it is made manifest in all areas of formal education, and the need to develop conceptual and practical alternatives that serve humanity rather than the economy. The focus of the book is equally weighted between discussions of compulsory and higher education and similarly balanced between theoretical and empirical scholarship and research. In addition to the thematic coherence of the chapters, most of the authors engage with Ivor Goodson’s (2015) framework of ‘The five Rs of educational research’: remembering, regression, reconceptualization, refraction and renewal. In their introduction to the book, the editors, Tim Rudd and Ivor Goodson, extend this to ‘six Rs’ with the addition of resistance.
This framework serves the book’s authors well. For example, Mike Hayler argues that formative assessment can be combined with the principles of critical pedagogy to resist data-driven target-setting, and, similarly, Peter Humphreys proposes a more personalized education that is ‘invitational’ and wholly democratic. Ingunn Elisabeth Stray and Helen Eikeland Voreland employ refraction to study UNESCO’s Education for All project through the cases of Norway and Nepal, and conclude that the project is in danger of becoming ‘an exercise of political violence’ (97), and needs to become more sensitive to national and cultural contexts.
Two chapters in the book combine remembering with renewal through the theme of cooperative education. Following a brief history of cooperative education in the context of neo-liberalism, Tom Woodin’s chapter discusses an in-school cooperative of more than 80 students who provide peer support to other students in a variety of subjects. The experience of setting up and running the cooperative has introduced a sense of solidarity and collective purpose among its members. This small example of constituting social relationships differently within a neo-liberal context is in itself an education in the possibility of alternatives that can be expanded both within and outside the education system. Cooperatives, argues Woodin, offer a form of ‘structural innovation’ that is capable of proliferating and maintaining a sense of social struggle.
Richard Hall focuses on academic labour within UK higher education, discussing the influence of ‘human capital theory’ on the way in which the labour of academics is being valorized. What makes the chapter interesting is the way in which he provides a close reading of Marx, through which he exposes human capital theory as a theory of productivity that is made manifest in the intensification of labour time. This now operates in policy and in practice inside higher education and elsewhere. Hall’s response is to work against this reconceptualization of academic labour by advocating solidarity inside and outside universities so that academic labour, including that of students, is recognized as having the same fundamental characteristics as other forms of labour, and is therefore subject to the same crises of capitalism that are the focus of other social movements. Hall is not arguing for the militant defence of academic labour, but for us to see it for what it is: wage labour that is subject to the alienation of the capitalist valorization process and, as such, should be abolished. Resistance to the processes of work intensification is all the while necessary, but the discovery of new forms of social solidarity and large-scale transformation (rather than reformation) of the political economy are the end goals.
A chapter which shares a key critical category with Hall’s is that of Yvonne Downs, who focuses on the difficult concept of ‘value’. She argues that ‘little is known about the value of higher education at all’ (59), and offers critiques of two prevalent discourses: financialization and ‘privileged intrinsicality’. Financialization reduces everything to a single logic of financial value either in terms of individual income or public savings. Privileged intrinsicality is a nostalgic response to financialization that views education as being valuable in and of itself. Like financialization, it reduces the value of higher education to a single logic of value, only this time non-financial and ultimately grounded in a particular (liberal) morality. In order to counter each of these discourses, Downs proposes a form of ‘refraction’ that understands how individual forms of value are always embedded in dominant cultures of valuation. This conception of value as an ongoing process of (e)valuation is referred to as ‘lay normativity’, which is defined as ‘that which already and actually matters to people’ (67). This is a reflexive and pragmatic conception of value that is irreducible to a single hegemonic logic and asserts this process of individual and class-based (e)valuation as an expression of agency.
Returning to their six-point framework for research, Rudd and Goodson illustrate in their concluding chapter that it takes into account supra, macro, meso and micro levels of analysis, positioning the most abstract level of analysis at the top of the ‘axes of refraction’ (i.e. supra). However, in my view, this methodological separation of the abstract (ideology) from the concrete (individuals) has real, practical consequences in terms of the sixth ‘R’ of resistance. What, exactly, are we resisting? Is it, for example, the supra structures of neo-liberalism or the micro agency of chief executives? Stephen O’Brien’s chapter on ‘Resisting neoliberal education’ further illustrates this dilemma, where he writes about resisting ‘these neoliberal times’, resisting a loss of freedom to ‘an all-consuming capitalism’, and resisting the neo-liberal ‘paradigm’. All of the chapters in the book show a concern with the concrete, qualitative specificity of neo-liberalism, as well as recognizing its abstract nature, which suggests we need a methodology that reveals their inherent unity. One complementary approach is to employ Marx’s dialectical epistemology, which is the basis for his method of ‘rising from the abstract to the concrete’ . For Marx (1993: 101), ‘the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many [abstract] determinations, hence unity of the diverse’.
Taking this view reveals that capitalist society is structured by a quasi-autonomous developmental logic (Postone, 1993), whereby socially constructed abstractions have real, determining, concrete existence and power over people. This logic is laid out in the first chapter of Capital in Marx’s (1976) exposition of the value-form of commodities. It is a form of social domination that extends across all levels of analysis, from supra to micro, and, critically, is given substance and mediated by ‘the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value’ (Marx and Engels, 1987: 402). It is his unique discovery of the dual character of labour in capitalism (and therefore the possibility of its abolition) that fully establishes Marx’s mature work as a theory of emancipation.
Discussions of ‘neo-liberal education’ tend to focus on concrete expressions of capitalism (e.g. policy, performativity or professionalism) while rarely engaging with its fundamental categories (e.g. labour, value and capital), let alone being grounded in them (Hall and Downs’ chapters are notable exceptions). As Moishe Postone (1993) has argued, one of the problems with this approach is that anti-capitalist efforts to resist the concrete features of neo-liberalism tend to be both dualistic and one-sided; they identify capital with its manifest expressions (its concrete appearance rather than essence) and, in the act of resistance (e.g. violence, refusal), further hypostasize the concrete while overlooking the fundamentally dialectical nature of capitalism’s social forms, therefore allowing its abstract power to persist unchallenged (Postone, 1980). Thus, efforts to assert an identity and ethic of professionalism – the dignity of useful labour – or, indeed, to create oppositional alternatives can themselves be seen as a form of reification which tends to lead to ‘an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically’ (Postone, 2006: 102).
This suggests that the real power of capitalism/neo-liberalism is not in the structures of its institutions or the agency of certain individuals to discipline others or undertake acts of resistance, but rather in the impersonal, intangible, quasi-objective form of domination that is expressed in the form of value, the substance of which is labour. As today’s dominant form of social wealth, the form of value as elucidated by Marx (1976: ch. 1; 1978) offers the ability to render any aspect of the social and natural world as commensurate with another, to devastating effect. The urgent project for education is therefore to support the creation of a new form of social wealth – one that is not based on the commensurability of everything, nor the values of a dominant class, but on the basis of mutuality and love: ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ (Marx, 1989: 87).