There's another Historical Materialism at York in Toronto quite soon.



Here is an affectionate parody of the happy Marx of North America. In solidarity!

TONIGHT Tuesday 16th March - Education Activist Network meeting for London & SE

Following the success of the over 300-strong Teach-In last month, events have accelerated.

Ballots for strike action are underway or imminent at King’s, UCL and Westminster, along with a number of FE institutions. Student sit-ins have taken place in Essex, Sussex, UCL and Westminster. Now Sussex UCU are set for strike action following an unprecedented 80% turn out in their ballot, with an overwhelming majority for action, and the break-up of a student occupation by riot police.

There is clearly a need to coordinate action and to share lessons from our collective fight against education cuts, and to build solidarity with the suspended students and striking lecturers in Sussex. We are calling on activists from London and across the south-east to come together TONIGHT at 6.30pm at King’s:

Organising the resistance: the fight to defend education

Speakers from Sussex, King’s, UCL, Westminster.

Tuesday, 16 March 2010
6:30pm
Room S-2.08
Strand Campus, King's College London

Leaflet and more updates on:
http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/

This piece is by Jan Byrne. Called 'Surgery or Burglary', it features a copy of One-Dimensional Woman nestling in the corner as a sort of immanent critique.

[I had seven minutes today! Here is what I said, which won't be new to any of you who've read me before on these things - I think it was relatively well-received, though the RSA really does have some, um, interesting audience participants. Luckily, they didn't go after me so much. There was no THAT MAN AT THE BACK WHO ASKS A QUESTION ABOUT THE HIJAB EVEN THOUGH YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT THE ECONOMY AND SHIFTS IN LABOUR and/or ACCUSES YOU OF HAVING SOME NOTION OF ESSENTIALISM AND BESIDES HAVEN'T YOU READ HARAWAY YOU GODDAMN OLD-SCHOOL MARXIST? this time, which is good, cos I'm kind of sick of him].

‘I principally wish to enforce the necessity of educating the sexes together to perfect both ... [children] should be sent to school to mix with a number of equals, for only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.’ – Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).

Wollstonecraft’s proposed solution to the problems of gender inequality was education, for it was only when boys and girls came to see each other as companions rather than as strange creatures to be half-celebrated, half-feared that humanity would truly come to understand and appreciate its moral and intellectual character. The context here is important – as we know Wollstonecraft was writing in the wake of the French Revolution and, along with many others in her circle, was strongly committed to republican ideals – equality being first among them. What Wollstonecraft desired was true equality – the discourse of rights should not simply pay lip-service to the rhetoric of the universality of mankind, but actively seek to bring it about, particularly when half of that mankind was treated as second-class citizens. Wollstonecraft would be disappointed, I think, to see that today in Britain even though girls and boys are, in the main, educated together, and girls are excelling academically, the supposed difference between the sexes is culturally wider than ever – Wollstonecraft’s dreams of mutual respect and companionship have vanished in a puff of pink smoke. The hyper-sexualisation of contemporary culture and the resurgence of determinist ideas about supposed differences between boys and girls and men and women have been well-documented of late in, among other books, Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls. The return of sexism indeed.

But who stands to benefit from the resurgence of the idea that the sexes are fundamentally different? Certainly we can point to increased revenues for companies that manufacture princess gear, but this is hardly the point. I argue in my book that we need to look to shifts in the kinds of work for at least the beginnings of an explanation. The service sector accounts for roughly two-thirds of Britain’s economy. Whilst this figure accounts for a broad range of jobs, what increasingly comes to characterise employment, whether it be waitressing, data-entry or lecturing at a university is precariousness: that is to say, a sense of insecurity, and a lack of protection in the form of pensions, sick pay and so on. What does this have to do with gender? We know that, historically, women’s mass entry into the workplace – and now there are more women in employment than men in the US for the first time (Jan this year) – corresponded to a depression in overall wages. That is to say, where the previous model, at least in its ideal version, was that the breadwinner’s wage (almost always male) would pay for a wife and a family, now the expectation is that (assuming a relationship) both partners must work in order to achieve anything like the same standard of living. Ironically, the qualities that used to characterise women’s labour – low-wages, insecurity – have now become the model for all work, regardless of the gender of the employee. If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, the message from school and elsewhere regarding future employment was that there were to be no more jobs for life, but that this was a good thing – thus we were told to be ‘flexible’, to have a ‘good attitude’ and so on. This demand to be a perky employee is obviously not just something that affects girls, but, given the so-called ‘the feminisation of labour’, both in terms of the type or quality of work and the quantity of women in the workforce, it is no surprise that women have come to be the face of work in general: the agency worker, the cleaner the teacher, the nanny, the nurse and so on. How does this relate to the sexualisation of culture? We are used to thinking of sexuality as a tool for appealing to the opposite sex, but if instead the primary demand becomes the desire to be seen as a good worker, then there’s no reason why anything you have on your side – be it sexuality or intelligence or both – can’t be used to market yourself. Indeed, if you don’t present yourself as some kind of walking CV, then you are doomed to a life of economic and social marginality. There may be laws against sexism in the workplace, but there are no laws against self-sexism and auto-exploitation.

Feminism has often seen work as the opportunity for women’s emancipation, and historically there have been few long-term social revolutions with more impact than women’s mass inclusion into the workforce. However, if we remain uncritical of the exploitative dimensions of this work, then there will be no gender equality for anyone.

Anarchism, Nomadism and the Working Class: Lessons from Deleuze

Talk by Amedeo Policante (Politics, Goldsmiths)

Thurs 18 March 6-8pm – Senior Common Rm (RHB). Drinks provided and everyone is invited.

Part of the ‘Libertarian Impulse’ seminar series run by the Research Unit for Politics and Ethics (RUPE) Department of Politics, Goldsmiths.

For further details contact: Dr Saul Newman s.newman[at]gold.ac.uk and check out the RUPE website.

[I interviewed Jacques Rancière a little while ago. The whole thing will be up on ephemera at some point soon, but in the meantime, I thought some of you might like what he has to say about the internet. I know I did. Thanks to Jon Melling for the transcription].

[at this point I asked Rancière about the relationship between the book as he describes it in The Ignorant Schoolmaster and the internet]

'...So with the internet of course the question is different, but I think certainly it makes sense how many people – people in France who call themselves republicans – those people who think that the transmission of knowledge is the only way to liberation. And yet at the same time they are irritated about the internet – because precisely the internet, in a sense, is a refutation of the certifying process. Jacotot describes it: the certifying process is that you must start from this point and go to this point and there is a right way to go from the first point to the last point. We can see the fervour with which people make these incredible statements: “Why, the internet is horrible! There is all this knowledge but people don’t know, they can’t know, they need to be guided!” But the point they are entirely able, is that is very easy to go from one link to another link, it’s very easy even I think for a beginner after one day on the internet to discern what information is reliable or not. It is very easy to go from the most superficial to the most elaborate. So I think it is an interesting case because the internet is a living refutation of a pedagogical model of ‘the good way’.

And this is why there is a very strong polemics against the internet in France, in this milieu of so-called republican intellectuals, very strong accusations against Wikipedia, for instance. “But on Wikipedia, who knows who is writing the information? There is no control etc. etc.” My answer is about Wikipedia is that on Wikipedia you can see the information, but the people are asked to verify it. Of course this never happens in a normal encyclopaedia, in a normal dictionary or encyclopaedia, so the people occupy a position of authority. So I think what we can see on the internet is an erasing of the hierarchical model, of the person who has the authority. It’s obvious to all people that if you are doing research on the internet it’s very easy to come very quickly to forms of knowledge which are very serious knowledge, and verified and so on. But the idea that you can get to this so quickly is intolerable for the supposed elite of the ‘learned’ people.'

Have a look at the current edition of Indieoma, which includes an exclusive tribute by Roberto Saviano (who wrote Gomorrah) to Miriam Makeba the civil rights activist and singer who died whilst performing in support of Saviano in Napoli in 2008 (there's a Miriam Makeba tribute concert taking place in Rome on Sunday).

They also have Lorenzo Marsili giving an interview on race relations and free speech in Berlusconi's Italy, and loads else besides.

If you are a student at a London university and are eligible to vote in the ULU 2010 elections, I strongly recommend you vote for Clare Solomon. Clare is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met, and she manages to do frankly inhuman levels of political work - she was key in the SOAS student occupations last year and is involved in the Students not Suspects campaign against immigration rules, among many other all good things. Vote here.

Also - not that this should matter - she has great hair.

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I'll be on Resonance this evening on the following show:

Documents

Wed 3 Mar 17:00 – 17:30 GMT (no daylight saving)

"Documents was the name of the Surrealist journal founded and edited by George Bataille; a forum in which practitioners from varied disciplines contributed work on an equally diverse range of topics (such as jazz, archeology, Picasso and voodoo). Documents the radio series is sort of similar, consisting of five episodes each based around a different theme, which the artist and writer Susan Finlay then discusses with her invited guests, and in relation to a selection of images. The transcripts of these discussions (together with the previously 'unseen' images) will provide the basis for five limited edition artist's fanzines, also called Documents."

As Long as Women will Exist with Dr Nina Power

The presenter:

Susan Finlay is an artist and writer whose art often incorporate writing and vice versa. For six months in 2005 she ran the not-for-profit exhibition space, Vision-On; and from 2008-2010 she was an editor with The Coelacanth Press. Her novel, Arriviste, was published in 2007 by Five Lines in the Sand, and she also contributes to a variety of arts publications.

[Event occasioned by the launch of The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Rough notes from the talk this evening - am in much disagreement with what Berardi says, I have to admit, but haven't quite yet worked out how best to put it, as usual. Please excuse any typos/mishearings - the room was massively over-crowded, and I myself coughed through some really important bits, although not on purpose.]

Bifo: I am interested in new paths in subjectivation. My book is about the history of radical thought 1960s-end of 20th century. It’s a book about the process of subjectivation in the framework of Workerist, neo-Marxist, post-structuralist thought. I’m trying to find the relation between It neo-Marxism and French post-structuralism. In a way this is old history. But post-industrial society and the precariousness of labour is the context. I tried to find new conceptual tools in order to understand the new frame of subjectivation in precarisation. I try to repose that Baudrillard must be reread in this context. Baudrillard has been almost criminalised by all of us on the question of subjectivation. But I don’t care about the old philosophical/political conflicts. I try to argue that Baudrillard was the only one who understood depression, psychopathology, subjectivation. Psychopathology takes the place of Marxist alienation. The loss of self in the struggle for the re-conquest of the soul – all this idealistic paradigm which is evident in the conceptual functioning of alienation – all this is more and more replaced by a new framework of alienation which is psychopathology.

We have to come to terms with the 21st century. We have to accept the idea that we are completely inside this new frame, which was anticipated by Deleuze and others. I try to re-propose the problem of subjectivation by what? Precariousness and the destruction of any idea of a progressive future. The problem of subjectivation is to be rethought in the wake of the failure of the promise of ‘yes we can’. ‘Yes we can’ was an exorcism, a Freudian lapse. It is a sign of the end of any possibility of change in the human process of subjectivation. I come from Italy, and Mexico, and I want to speak about some Italian subjects through Mexican eyes. Between Baroque eyes and semio-capitalism. Where the main object of capitalism is signs, material goods, semiotic goods. If we accept Deleuze’s idea that production of a new subjectivity we have to start from the mutation of capitalism. This is what I want to try to do.

Immaterial and semiotic production is a tendency: the dissolution of the old industrial-mechanical foundation of the determination of value. When social production is more and production of semiotic/material goods, intellectual/cognitive ability of workers, the material value of labour becomes almost impossible to define. Baudrillard speaks of the dissolving of the relation between labour-time and value. We are facing the most deep, real nature of capitalism. The foundation of value is violence. Violence is the only possibility of defining the relation between goods and price and labour and value. Violence in the field of language. Christian Marazzi is an important reference here – he best explains, I think, the essential linguistic nature of capitalist production nowadays. Not only because goods are increasingly semiotic but mostly the relations of social forces can only be defined in the context of linguistic displacement. Umberto Eco too: language is to invent, to create, to lie, to metaphorise, to displace. Language creates a multiplicity of meanings in the sphere of exchange.

I want to speak about the Baroque. We are accustomed to the idea that modern capitalism and modernity are the long existing product of the Protestant break in western culture and that capitalism is the social sphere of the bourgeoisie. Little has been said about the living economy and class, the redefinition of the relationship between capitalism and the ruling class: does the bourgeoisie exist? Compared to a hundred years ago? Does the bourgeoisie still exist? The class of the city, the territory: it has an affective relation to labour, the product. But now everything is changing – from the point of view of labour: capitalism is not the government and the possession of territory, but the ability to displace. The place tends to be a non-place. The bourgeois class has been destroyed by the deterritorialisation of capitalism. Time/Labour/Value – their relationship has been dissolved. We need a different paradigm for social power. I tried to find it in Mexico.

A Mexican philosopher, Echeverria, says forget about postmodernism. At the beginning of the modern age, we have two different streams of modern culture: the bourgeois, Protestant strand which is serious about the relation between labour and territory and time. They are ‘trustworthy’, they are doing very bad things, but there is a second, marginalised stream which is Baroque culture (remember Deleuze on Leibniz and the Baroque). Stop reading Spinoza, read Leibniz! You need to understand how the world is! Spinoza is not useful: Leibniz is paranoid and nasty but at the same time he is creating multiple worlds, multiple levels of consistency, of productivity. Semio-capitalism is conceivable if you start with Leibniz. If you want to understand contemporary capitalism, you need to understand its recombinant phase – you have to consider that labour is an infinite sprawl of available time. Capitalism’s ability to produce is a recombinatory ability; it’s fractal. Leibniz is the conceiver of the recombinant machine, thus the source of the recombinant nature of contemporary capitalism.

Italy: for a hundred years, Italian culture has tried to produce a different relationship between language and capital. Fascism was not only a crazy, criminal history but also the deep understanding of a second modernity inscribed in modern capitalism, a baroque modernity. See the Futurists, Malaparte in ‘Leaving Europe’ says that Italian fascism is the ability to subvert the reactionary character of the baroque into a progressive force. To be able to produce new sources of language, the multiplication of points of enunciation. Baroque is the erasing of any possible of thought, of a fixed relation between labour and time. It is violence, arbitrary forced creating power. This is the basis of fascism. In the 60s and the 70s in the kingdom of force, between workers and capital, workers could re-establish democracy for themselves. Autonomous workers in Italy has to be understood in the context of the delegitimisation of value.

Who knows about Malintzin and other Mexican thinkers? She is the woman of who became the translator and the lover of Cortes. When Cortes wants to talk to people in the native language (Nahuatl) he knows Marinale, Marina...but in the tradition she is called Marincene, or Malinche. She is the person who meets Cortes and thinks he is the messenger of God. But which God? The one with the cross or Quetzalcoatl? Malinche becomes the voice of the enemy, but why should she be against the Spaniards? The history of modern cultures starts with her. What’s the moral? From the point of view of workers’ subjectivity become the truth against the capitalist truth, we are lost. Everything is definitively lost. The no-global movement wants to change the world. We cannot. But at the same time, the experience of Malinche living at the end of the world, during the invasion of a meta-language, you are lost in the precise sense that you are no longer yourself. Our modern identity is no more. We have to restart the protest, creating the ideal framework of the relationship between the infinite truths that semio-capitalism is producing. I think Italy is over, that it does not exist. This is the reality. The relationship between our life and territory is definitively destroyed, this is our new starting point.

Questions:

Guy: Negri asked Deleuze about resistance under semio-capitalism. Deleuze says it will have something to do with hijacking language, or spaces where language cannot work. I want to ask you if you agree with this, and with the idea of societies of control, and what about pirate radio, as in Radio Alice, which you were involved in.

Bifo: I ask instead when resistance is impossible. Should we think that subjectivity is possible only when we resist. Deleuze says when we escape we are not only fleeing but that we are looking for new weights. Depression never appears in Deleuze and Guattari, they never say the ‘d’ work. But at the end they write the most beautiful book, What Is Philosophy? Which is about depression, even if they don’t say it, growing old. It’s a problem of speed, of velocity. The relationship between brain and chaos is the problem of politics: where is harmony in the field of chaos?

Lorenzo Chiesa: what is the relationship between what you’re trying to do with your idea of the Mestizaje and exodus in Virno and others?

Bifo: There is nothing productive in the relationship of opposition. When Virno says exodus, he simply conceives another process of autonomy. What does exodus mean when there are more than one ways of escaping. I am fascinated by Marinche because it is a very special type of exodus which produces the affect of South America these days. The co-existence of different temporalities, this is fascinating in Mexico. Virtual infinite temporalities in the same sphere.

Another guy: What about Europe? It wants to exist as a territory, no?

Bifo: Europe has been one of the last hopes of the radical, Operaismo path. Negri talked about the French referendum. I think we should reframe our view of some kind of hope for Europe. Deleuze and Guattari voted in a different way in the 1999 referendum – Deleuze voted No and the post-everything Guattari voted yes! This is telling about the contradictory subject of Europe. Greece and debt – the German-Greek debate is crucial – ‘if we start paying those who have not respected the rules, that’s the beginning of the end!’ The present financial crisis is the beginning of the end for the European entity. I don’t see any European intellectuals! Is Glucksmann an intellectual?! The financial identification of Europe is at a dead-end. Europe freed from the dictatorship of the central bank is autonomous!

Another guy: I consider myself a utopian socialist. Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism is really important, and Marcuse and, um, Nina Power’s ‘One-Dimensional Woman’ [the stenographer blushes horribly]. Post-Fordism says we put our own ideas into our work. You’re referencing Baudrillard, and the only way we can fight is within this virtual world. People’s souls have been put into computers but I think there are ways we can fight – through the virtual world, not through ’68. What’s your opinion? I’m sorry for being Romanticist!

Bifo: Baudrillard has written too many things! Some points he makes are absolutely crucial. You say hyper-reality, and, ok, it’s a possible point of entrance into Baudrillard’s castle. I am especially interested in this idea of aleatority between time and value. This is the essential difference between Marx and Baudrillard. What is the main contribution of Gramsci to 20th century thought, it’s the relationship between social organisation and class. In Gramsci’s discussion of intellectual labour, we can start the struggle here. Now we see that the relation between intellectual labour and production, it’s a problem of integration. The Baudrillard move is aiming to focus the difficulty, the multiplication of perspectives when labour and language become the same. This goes beyond Gramsci. The emergence of the cognitariat, of a class of linguistic producers, people who cannot touch their own bodies. This kind of integration between intellectual labour and production results in psychopathologies of embodiment. Baudrillard makes it possible to imagine this virtual separation.

Guy: I’m from Mexico. You’re calling for Malinche, she is Indian. In terms of what is most exciting about Latin America is the way of breaking away from European left and right, but it’s not about ethnic identities. Chiapas is very grounded territorially, the Cocaleros are very located. You talk about Labour = language, and ‘Our Word is Our Weapon’ is the most famous book coming out of Zapatista movement. How do you see the relationship between deterritorialisation and this grounding.

Bifo: Is the different temporalities that interest me. You see different phases of the same historical time. This is the only possibility of living the future that involves autonomy. I’m thinking about the singular experience. I don’t see any possibility of changing the world, but of singularities. Communism is the possibility of creating communities where singular forms of life become possible. Latin America is teaching us the possibilities of different temporalities. She is Indian, true, but her son is the first Mestizo.

Same guy: Decolonial thought is very important – one of the things about modern subjectivity is to eradicate colonisation. We need to decolonise Europe more than we need to decolonise other places.

Bifo: I don’t see any process of decolonisation. Latin America is non-linear. We are speaking about singular process.

David Graeber: what about sense of apocalypse and catastrophe that hangs over the Malinche story? Of Aztec culture in general? Everyone knew the world was coming to an end, but who got everything? Cortes and the dice. If you want to be a Malinchista today what is your relation to the gambling nature of the financial system? Is there a sort of hope in some perverse way?

Bifo: The end of the world is a singular event too. You have to start from the idea that the end of the world is singular – my world, my community, etc. The second modernity that I mentioned is more vicious but is also more carnal. It’s not a question of coming to terms with capitalism or Berlusconi but of recognising that the world is nothing because it’s starting from me!

Some woman: you said that ‘yes we can’ is a Freudian slip, but this means that hope is dead, which I don’t go along with. But are there individual strategies that we can adopt? I’m not sure what an autonomous soul at work would look like. The way out is here, somehow, not elsewhere.

Bifo: If we look at the impossibility of the political will of Obama to meet any small result, we may say that ‘yes we can’ has been an extraordinary Freudian lapse, or an exorcism. The final declaration of modernity. The power of will is over. Look at Afghanistan – you cannot go and stay at the same time! All over the world, mafia and power is the same! The mafia is the Italian state! Corruption is not something to do with marginal groups – there is nothing BUT that! Look at Russia! We do indeed have an infinite war, as Bush Snr said. But I also see the exhaustion of this reality; the human side of it is exhaustion. I see withdrawal as the strong possibility of the time to came. Withdrawal is not simply withdrawal, but the way to find some new words. I don’t see any political possibility, and I think Obama knows that he is playing a game with no way out. What next? Withdrawing and ‘Malinching’, trying to find a way to start a new way of perceiving the world.

Guy who spoke before: what about art? Tatlin, or Guernica or The Outsider or Nausea. These are works of autonomy within capitalist society.

Bifo: when I say singularisation, I think about the starting process of autonomy which is not trying to change the world but to begin a withdrawal.

Alberto Toscano: does it suffice to take this depression you describe and turn it into the euphoria of collapse? In the 19th century you have virulent debates among anarchists that everything is stratified so we will start new spaces and move to other places. So I wonder if your strategy isn’t really new at all. Everyone one of you who goes to a farm is one less of you going to do something useful. You brought up these multiplicities of times and so on, but given workerism’s hostility to Hegelianism, this story about the exhaustion of value out-Hegels Hegel. The history of capitalism in Europe is by no means just this story of modernity where everyone works in factories and so on, but it’s not total. Violence is present throughout. The end of Fordism is given so much significance that its collapse is seen as a total catastrophe, as opposed to just capitalism’s shift to something new. Why is this depressed time a collapse?

Bifo: you touch a sensitive point when you speak of a Hegelian tone. If you are a Hegelian young, all your life is a war of liberation – you cannot Aufheben the Aufhebung! I come to terms with my Hegelianism every day! We should take very seriously this paradigmatic change – this passage from mono-level and mechanic and industrial and territorialised capitalism to this semio-capitalism. You say violence is a constant. I used the word violence. But it’s too strong, but what I want to stress is that when there is no law – and I don’t mean politics – I mean of value, of determinability of human time. It’s in the kingdom of indeterminability that we have to be able to think.

Guy who asked first question: if the law of value is no longer true, if the relationship between labour and value has gone, then we are in something like Schmittian time, the state of exception.

Bifo: But the state of exception is a state of exception. We have to think in terms beyond voluntarism, government. We need the creation of singular worlds.

RADICAL BOOKSELLERS TAKE ON AMAZON

Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of World War Two, a group of pacifists opened Housmans radical bookshop (online bookshop here) at its current address at 5 Caledonian Road, in London’s Kings’ Cross. Ever since, Housmans has worked hard to continue its mission of promoting ideas of peace, human rights and a more equitable economy by which future wars, and all their inherent suffering, might be avoided. At a time when independent bookshops are closing down left, right and centre, it is reassuring that Housmans is still holding its corner.

The biggest threat to independent bookshops has been the rise to dominance of the online bookseller Amazon.com. Amazon has achieved an unrivalled supremacy over the marketplace, but this near-monopoly wasn’t achieved without the usual unethical practices that are so common to the world’s biggest corporations.

What is wrong with using Amazon?

In 2001 the Guardian first reported on the poor working conditions in Amazon's warehouses, and nothing much has changed since. In December 2008, a Sunday Times reporter went undercover to their Marston Gate warehouse near Milton Keynes and discovered that staff were required to work seven days a week and were punished for taking sick leave, even if they had a note from their doctor. According to Unite the Union, Amazon continues to see trade union representation as illegitimate.

But it’s not just Amazon workers who suffer at the hands of the multi-national corporation. Publishers are also squeezed for every penny, as Amazon forces them to supply them at rates so low that it leaves authors and publishers out of pocket – particularly damaging smaller publishing houses. Amazon’s dominance of the market means that publishers have little choice but to comply with their demands. Aside from the ethical considerations, this affects readers in reduced output from small presses, and diminished availability of radical titles.

Providing an ethical alternative

And so into this arena steps Housmans Bookshop. Housmans, in conjunction with Gardners Books, has just launched its own online bookshop to rival Amazon. Although still prioritising their stock of radical interest and progressive politics, the site is also able to provide around half a million general titles.

“Many of our most politically conscious colleagues use Amazon, and when asked why, it’s because they know of no alternative. But now, wherever they live, people will be able to support independent and progressive bookselling from the comfort of their own home. I think it’s essential that we are able to provide an alternative to help dent Amazon’s monopoly,” explains co-manager Nik Gorecki. “It’s up to sympathetic book buyers to do the right thing, and buy their books elsewhere.”

“This year Housmans celebrates fifty years of trading from our Caledonian Road address, but in order for us to be here another fifty years we have to stand up for ourselves, and trust in ethically-minded book-buyers to support independents. The staff at Housmans has fought many battles over the years for causes we believe in, and this is one battle we can’t afford to lose. Please support the shop that supports your campaigns!”

Housmans Bookshop
5 Caledonian Road
King's Cross
London N1 9DX
Tel: 020 7837 4473

www.housmans.com

IDEAS TO CHANGE THE WORLD

MARXISM 2010

1 – 5 July, Central London

A five-day political festival hosted by the SWP featuring over 200 meetings, debates and discussions, music, theatre, film and an art exhibition.

BOOK BEFORE THE END OF MARCH AND RECEIVE A £5 DISCOUNT!

Tickets and info: http://www.facebook.com/l/25b50;www.marxismfestival.org.uk / 020 7819 1190 / info@marxismfestival.org.uk

Once again, we will be bringing thousands of people from across the globe together for five days in London to discuss “ideas to change the world”. Marxism this year will take place in the context of the ongoing global crisis, with wars and poverty stalking the globe and the threat of catastrophic climate change hanging over us. But it will also take place as resistance to a bankrupt capitalist system is beginning to rise across Europe and beyond. And it will come right after a General Election when debates about resisting the Nazi BNP and the way forward for the left will be crucial.

It will be a vital moment for all those who want to see an alternative to the ravages of capitalism to come together to share experiences and ideas, forge the resistance and discuss the socialist alternative. Don’t miss it.

AND there is a £5 discount on the tickets if you book before the end of March. That means the ticket prices currently are: waged - £40; unwaged - £27; HE student - £20; FE/school student - £10. And your ticket price includes free accommodation in London, free crèche facilities for children, and cheap food and transport.

Participants confirmed so far for Marxism 2010 include: Tony Benn, Gary Younge, John Holloway, Jeremy Corbyn, Gareth Peirce, Mark Serwotka, Alex Callinicos, Hester Eisenstein, Gerry Conlon, Istvan Meszaros, Moazzam Begg, Ghada Karmi, Michael Rosen, Nina Power, David Edgar, Danny Dorling, Ben Fine, Alfredo Saad-Filho, Jeremy Dear, Alan Gibbons, Costas Lapavitsas, Haifa Zangana, Roy Bailey, Sheila Cohen, Sam West, Graham Turner, GM Tamas and many more!

BOOK NOW AT: http://www.facebook.com/l/25b50;www.marxismfestival.org.uk / 020 7819 1190 and invite your friends, family, work mates and students to this event

They are an excellent lot in Sussex.

[NOTE: Schedule updated]

OXFORD RADICAL FORUM :: 6-7 March (this weekend!)

We are proud and excited to present to you the THIRD Oxford Radical Forum, taking place this Friday - Sunday, 6 - 7 March.

For those who don't know, the Oxford Radical Forum is a three-day event bringing together activists, speakers and academics to discuss and debate key issues for the left and critical political thought, from climate-change to women's liberation, culture, race and resistance.

::Please note that all sessions take place in Wadham College and some sessions run simultaneously.


FRI

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2:30 – 3:45

:: DIRECT ACTION WORKSHOP
Seeds For Change

Seeds For Change Network is a non-profit training and support co-op helping people organise for action and positive social change. Currently based in Oxford and Lancaster, all members of the network have a background in grassroots social and environmental justice campaigning, on issues such as peace, roads, and GM, and they have been involved in setting up and running various community resource centres.http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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4:30 – 6:00

:: ENGLAND’S POST-IMPERIAL MELANCHOLIA
Paul Gilroy

Paul Gilroy is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the author of several critically-acclaimed and influential books including The Black Atlantic, After Empire and the seminal There Aint No Black in the Union Jack. Gilroy’s work has been characterised by a sustained engagement with issues of race, empire, cultural identity and the relationship between these in society, as a conscious contribution to the struggle against racism and imperialism.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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6:45 – 8:15

:: THE BLACK AND THE RED: MARXISM & ANARCHISM TODAY
Paul Blackledge and Ruth Kinna

Paul Blackledge sits on the boards of the Historical Materialism and International Socialism journal and is Reader in political theory at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History and co-editor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Essays and Articles and also written and published widely on issues from ethics to historiography, from anarchism to the working class and Rugby.

Ruth Kinna is Senior Lecturer in politics at Loughborough University and the editor of Anarchist Studies. Her publications include William Morris: The Art of Socialism and Anarchism: A Beginners’ Guide. She works both on recovering traditions from late nineteenth-century socialism as well as on contemporary anarchism and on art and utopianism.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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8:30-…

:: FORUM DINNER

All Forum attendees welcome…

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SAT

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11:00 – 12:15

:: COMMONWEALTH AND CONVIVIALITY: ANTI-CAPITALISM AND THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE
Kate Soper and Jeremy Gilbert

Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University, is the author of The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently.

Jeremy Gilbert, University of East London, is the author of Anti-capitalism and Culture.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

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1:15 – 2:30

:: AGAINST THE COLONIAL PRESENT
Patricia Daley and Priyamvada Gopal

Patricia Daley is a lecturer in Human Geography at Oxford University. She is the author of Gender and Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region. Another of her projects examines the condition of new African diaspora communities in Great Britain. Her charitable work includes acting as a member of the advisory panel of the Windle Trust, a non-governmental organization that provides scholarships to African Refugees.

Priya Gopal teaches English at Cambridge University. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence, a study of writers on the Indian subcontinent whose work was engaged with questions of political and social transformation. She writes occasionally for newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom and India on topics such as empire and multiculturalism.http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/priyamvadagopal

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College


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3:00 – 4:15

:: FIGHTING FASCISM, RACISM AND IMMIGRATION CONTROLS IN BRITAIN TODAY

Teresa Hayter and

Speaker from Unite Against Fascism

Teresa Hayter is a long-standing and renowned activist against racism and immigration controls, and has been centrally involved in the ‘Campaign to Close Campfield’ detention-centre. She is the author of Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls (Pluto) and previously wrote, among many others, the influential book, Aid as Imperialism. She is also a visiting lecturer at Oxford Brookes University.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College


Simultaneous with:

:: BODY POLITIC DRAMA WORKSHOP>>
Caitlin McLeod and Cara Verkerk (Warwick University, Theatre Studies Finalists)

"Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women's bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female." This will be an informal, playful workshop/discussion with the intention of opening up dialogue between young women. We will focus on the disjunction between the reality of our bodies and the destructive and powerful 'Beauty Myth' that is imposed on us every day.

Venue: MOSER THEATRE, Wadham College

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4:45 – 6:00

:: DISASTER POLITICS IN HAITI: AID, EXPLOITATION AND THE ARMY
Peter Hallward and Richard Seymour

Peter Hallward is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (Verso), is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University and is part of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. As well as being an expert on Haiti and continental philosophy and theory, Hallward is engaged in an ambitious project to develop a notion of collective, self-determining political will - ‘The Will of the People’.

Richard Seymour is most well-known for the highly-popular blog Lenin’s Tomb. He is also a political activist and author of the praised book The Liberal Defence of Murder, a critique of humanitarian and liberal justifications for war and imperialism. Currently Seymour is working on a book on David Cameron, which promises to do for the Conservative leader something similar to what Alain Badiou achieved with his recent book on Sarkozy.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

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7:00 – 8:30

:: ONE MILLION CLIMATE JOBS – NOW!
Jonathan Neale and
former Vestas worker and occupier (TBC)

Jonathan Neale is a leading activist on climate issues and is the International Secretary of the Campaign against Climate Change. He is the author of Stop Global Warming: Change the World, as well as many, many others, on subjects as diverse as mutineers and the Sherpa climbers of the Himalayas, as well as fiction and theatre for children. Neale played the role of Karl Marx for the European premiere of Howard Zinn’s play, Marx in Soho.

Venue: NEW SEMINAR ROOM, Wadham College

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9:00 p.m. – 3:00 (a.m.!)

PERFORMANCE // SPOKEN WORD // GIG // DJs
@ “THE CELLAR”
Featuring Babygravy and others

An eclectic mixture of live music, spoken word and comedy, arts-performance, and – after midnight – serious dance music until late.

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SUN

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1:15 – 2:30

:: UTOPIAN ORGANIZATION IN MUSIC
Adam Harper

Adam Harper is the writer behind Rouge’s Foam (http://rougesfoam.blogspot.com/), a blog of forward-thinking essays on the aesthetics of contemporary music. Topics he’s written about include recent trends of political nostalgia in art and experimental pop, new rhythmic techniques in dance music and the ideological restrictions of modern classical music. He is currently adapting some of this writing into a book for Zer0, to be called ‘Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-making’. Having studied musicology at Oxford and Goldsmiths College, he now lives in Peckham, London, composing music for film and theatre and writing for the modern music magazine Wire.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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3:00 – 4:15

:: MILITANT MODERNISM AND THE RUINS OF BRITISH UTOPIA
Owen Hatherley

Owen Hatherley is an architect and wrote the recent manifesto, Militant Modernism, a work dedicated to the architecture department at Southampton City Council. He is currently working on a book for Verso which seeks to excavate utopian elements in ‘the ruins’ of twentieth-century, British modernism. He also blogs at The Measures Taken and Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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4:45 – 6:00

:: WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Nina Power and Laurie Penny

Nina Power is author of the book, One-Dimensional Woman, and the popular blog Infinite Thought: http://cinestatic.com/infinitethought/. A Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, she is the co-editor of Alain Badiou's On Beckett and his Political Writings. Nina has published widely on topics including Iran, humanism, vintage pornography and Marxism; she also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers' Magazine.

Laurie Penny is a feminist activist and keeps the popular blog http://pennyred.blogspot.com/ She is staff writer at One In Four magazine, and also contributes to Red Pepper and Liberal Conspiracy. She was a parliamentary researcher for the Labour party. A socialist, deviant, reprobate, queer, aspiring author, she lives with toast-eating pagans in a little house somewhere in London, smoking and drinking and plotting to subtly re-arrange the world to suit her ideals.

Venue: OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College


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7:00 – 8:30

:: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN FRANCE AND THE NOUVEAU PARTI ANTICAPITALISTE
Stathis Kouvelakis

Stathis Kouvelakis is a lecturer at King’s College London (KCL) and an activist in the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) and in the KCL University and College Union. Intellectually, his two main projects are a thorough critique of the chief concepts and assumptions of liberal political thought and the study of Karl Marx’s early philosophical formation, in the context of revolution; his Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (Verso) was translated into English with a preface by Fredric Jameson.

OKINAGA ROOM, Wadham College

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8:45 – …

DRINKS AND FAREWELLS

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Daniel, a really great ex-student of mine, points out that photo-essays might have an even better future as backdrops for Grime videos. I think he is right.

[I found this image by socialistgamer: it's his notes from yesterday. Thought this was a great summary!]

Take Back Education, February 27th 2010, King’s College, London

First Session: Jenny Sutton, Jim Wolfreys (President KCL UCU), Juan C Piedra (Justice for Cleaners), Sarah Young (Sussex University Occupation), Sean Vernell (UCU LSE)

Jim Wolfreys

If you look at HE/Adult Ed/FE today, you would say the world has gone mad. Many students want to go, but Mandelson is talking about cuts and caps. There are fines of £3700 per student if universities go over their quotas. Every HE/FE/Adult Ed institution will be affected. this is not just about the defence of individual depts, but for education in Britain in general. King’s want 10% cuts, but the university just bought the east wing of Somerset House which cost 29 million pounds, plus they have 202 staff who earn over £100,000. 17 members of staff earn more than the PM! And these are the people saying 200-500 jobs must go. This isn’t modernisation, this is feudalism! If you’re a manager, and most are men, you have to have a nice suit and shiny shoes and a colourful tie, and an important-looking pen. Some need convertibles – for blue-skies thinking! But we think £100,000 is enough for a salary – they could save 9 million pounds for the university.

We are dealing, though, with restructuring. Reshaping universities along market lines. They pay lip-service to consultation, but this is a sham. While this is going on, they are pushing for redundancies and the reapplication of everyone for their own jobs. The managers are reading from a script, literally. The Orwellian language they use is completely full of holes. There is a demonstration at the Wittington Hospital today – similar thing. They are saying that they have a ‘new vision for health’ – which basically means getting ridding of A+E. We are all being told to work more ‘flexibly’ – cutting 10% of staff is supposed to be minimal according to documents sent to students at King’s, and won’t impact negatively on its international standing – but this makes no sense! We need not just challenge the financial cuts but to produce an alternative version of what education is: we want salary caps at £100,000, we want senior management to reapply for THEIR jobs. Universities should be a place where business and management should be held to account – they don’t like it because their vision is based on turning everything into profit, targets. We need a strong and confident movement to defend the right for education for all: rather than this sorry neo-liberal vision that they are trying to impose on us all.

Jenny Sutton (branch secretary UCU)

Standing against David Lammy in Tottenham, Trade Union and Socialist Coalition. ‘Education, education, education’ has obviously been betrayed by New Labour. ESOL and Adult Ed particularly hard-hit. What Labour are saying is that some members of our community are not worth educating. ESOL gives people basic literacy as well as English, empowerment particularly for women. But the government don’t care that they develop as people, from diverse communities. Not only adult ed getting cut: in Britain there are 7 million adults who can’t read and write functionally. If you are over 18 and haven’t reached the minimal level of attainment you are no longer funded – but there are no opportunities. The army deliberately target working-class areas, comes into these colleges. Britain is the only country in Europe that employs 16-year-olds in the army. The gvt is choosing not to fund education: they have the money. We should value everybody in our communities: we have to say to Labour – you’ve had 13 years. We have to have an alternative solution.

Juan C Piedra

Coordinator of Justice for Cleaners campaign and the committee for Ecuadorians in Britain. We have had similar experiences in Ecuador where there are similar threats to close the university down. We understand that your fights against cuts are against neo-liberal attack. We and students and workers shouldn’t pay for the recession – the bankers should pay. We don’t see why we should pay for war either when that money should be going to education and health. This coordinated attack doesn’t just affect students and lecturers, but those who clean and work in the universities. There are 2 types of cleaners: those who work directly for the university who get £12 and get other benefits. The others work for contractors, we earn 5.80 an hour and have no benefits, we live in constant fear of losing employment, especially if we have union links. 200 cleaners at UCL, only one is a member of the union. Ask yourselves why. They chose to fire me on the basis that there were ‘no longer any jobs’. AT SOAS there is an important campaign going on: the London living wage has become a major campaign and they are fighting to be counted as direct employees of the university. Management are confident in attacking workers: but we need to see cleaners as part of the campaign to defend education as a whole. We should unite every sector in a joint campaign. I don’t want to sound pessimistic but I have the feeling that the government will say that it is we, immigrants, who are responsible for the need for cuts. They were say that we are illegal immigrants.

Sean Vernell (UCU)

Student against worker, public sectors against the private, these divisions will go on and on. But unity is our strength. EDL and fascists will try to play upon despair of individuals, we need to provide hope. 300,000 students places are going: 300 million pound cuts. Class implications are great – no surprise that London Metropolitan is under attack and places where working class students attend. MPS and journalists don’t send their kids there. Widening class divisions in our society – but class was supposed to be an old-fashioned barometer! But this is a class attack: 1945-79 there were four education acts. 79-2006 there have been 36 education acts, and every single one has pushed through a market agenda. It’s not just about education it’s about the private sector. We need to organise the resistance in two ways: strikes, occupations, demonstrations, etc. But also ideologically: not business-led models but wider benefits for communities. Tower Hamlets! London Metropolitan! Leeds! Can we win, of course we can. We are the hope. Let’s make sure we have a wide, unified political struggle to defend education for all.

Sarah Young

Rounds and rounds of cuts are parts of general attack. At Sussex cuts are brutal, for staff, crèche, everything. Students have a crucial role to play: students are capable of radical and political action. The potential to see this on larger scale is important. Students can build up confidence of staff. We had unions come to talk to us, and raised money. We need to encourage lecturers and other staff to take action – all-out indefinite staff. Sham of consultation with management. We occupied, 500 students storm building, scaring management so much that they called the police on their own student body. 100 students occupied for over 28 hours. Many were involved in protesting for the first time. Management launched propaganda campaign against us, closed building and library, we counteracted and more students joined us. There will be more occupations at Sussex. Portsmouth have said that they will occupy too when Sussex goes on strike. This is exactly what we need. Occupations and strikes should take place all across the country, pre-emptively at places that haven’t had cuts as well at those that have already.

Questions:

Man: we are being told to pick up the tab for bank bailouts. General strike in Greece this week: the banks are demanding blood from the Greek working-class. We need to see the wider context.

King’s student: No cuts campaign. We have to protest! We need to show our lecturers what support they have. We saved canteen at King’s through organising, and management will lie and say that protest makes no difference, but it really does.

Another man: lecturers and students, and community coming together to defend universities. Demo on the 20th March. When individual colleges come out we need to say these are our colleges, this is our education.

Woman from Herts: if we go to management and say we are everyone who works in universities, then management have to take us serious. In Greece, they said we don’t abide any bureaucratic mechanism whatsoever, so they took to the streets. This is what we need to do too. We need to take action now.

Essex SU guy: the recession isn’t over, look at the unemployment figures and public sector. We need pre-emptive action in universities and other places that haven’t yet suffered cuts. If we want to fight for another education we also need to fight for another world.
Another guy: we need a European movement. Bologna/Lisbon.

Guy from Tower Hamlets: we struck against cuts and the whole culture. We sat opposite suits who had completely different culture. We are right next to Canary Wharf, separated by a single road. The strike lasted 4 weeks and by the end we had management on their knees. 150 branch meeting yesterday where we voted for another round of strike action – we need solidarity.

Woman involved in Justice for Cleaners: students are incredibly inspirational. Students can be more imaginative than trade unions. We are part of each other. If you just think ‘fight the bureaucracy’, it’s not enough: we are in a situation to say kick the bureaucracy and move the bureaucracy.

Student from California: cuts proposed in UK are very similar in US. 37% tuition hikes in University of California. Our Governator is ‘terminating’ the Californian education system! The working class are paying for this – so there were massive occupations. It was a big fuck-you to the establishment. There’s a big mass action going on at Berkeley right now. They will say we are being violent to discredit us. There are war criminals teaching at Stanford. All of us: it’s key for us to unite across countries.

James from NUS: the NUS has played a disgraceful role in past few years. They have pushed for graduate tax/fee for rest of your life. Wes Streeting said recently that students need strikes like they need a hole in the head. They don’t want to talk about cuts. Divide and rule tactics: we should say it’s free education or nothing. Free education or occupation.

Woman from Leeds University UCU: Building for strike was incredible – up till recently it had all been top-down edicts from management, but when we went round to talk to staff the response was brilliant. We’ve got to fight because we’ve got to win.

Session Two: Alex Callinicos

Cheers! For those of us who work in King’s it’s great to see so many people here today. Universities in a Neo-liberal World – I tried to show how neo-liberalism tries to shape universities all over the world. British universities are current being held up as the model for European universities. Recently in Paris – it was scary as they described the way French universities are being transformed along the lines of the British model. What’s happened is the subordination of universities to the logic of competition. The best way of understanding this is to understand that competition has been internalised – every dept, academic is forced to see themselves as competing with all the others. The RAE was introduced by Tories in 1980s, key way in which funding is allocated to universities. This has been used to extend the logic of competition, forces universities and academic to see each others as rivals. Students are told that it’s all about them, you’re the people that really matter, the national student surveys are important and so on, but this isn’t true: teaching comes second or third or fourth from the standpoint of universities. The so-called research universities develop along the US model: someone famous teaches there, then you discover that you never meet or see this famous person. Students are increasingly taught by PhD students, who are part of the casualised and part-time workforce. Don’t believe that universities are about students – they’re not. They should be! The learning process should involve everyone, but it realy doesn’t.

Universities are also being transformed into business enterprises. Now this is just ‘common sense’, that universities are ‘business’ with the hierarchies peculiar to universities. Managerial hierarchies. FT articles – number of managers in universities has increased by 33%; number of academies by only 10%. If you want to understand the economic rationale it’s to do with ‘harnessing knowledge’ to enterprise. Universities are donkeys that pull along the ‘great’ chariot of business. Universities are the ‘strip mines’ (the most destructive form), according to the government. This process is accelerating. Language gets more and more Orwellian – RAE becomes REF (Research Excellence Framework). 25% will depend upon Impact – in other words, direct economic payoff. But if you write books about Marxism, how we will demonstrate our positive contribution to the British economy! But this is serious: this is about direct benefit to big business. This represents a serious deterioration in the aims and status of universities.

The gamblers who bankrupted RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) were hours away from not having enough money to put in cash machines – but these are the people being rewarded, the public sector is being expected to pay for this. Cuts to education need not happen if we stopped rewarding these gamblers. Neo-liberalism in universities is part of much larger changes in economy. We should tell the bankers to go to hell – or prison, because many of them are crooks. But we were are getting instead are reductions in the public sector.

Something like half the staff in HE are on temporary or part-time contracts. This process is being accelerated. At King’s, we all have to produce ‘activity statements’ and they’re going to decide who will lose their jobs if anyone is seen to be ‘under-performing’. In this prestigious Russell Group university, we are being reduced to casual workers. In the 80s you had to commit gross moral turpitude (whatever that is) to be sacked! – in 1988, they eliminated tenure. We are ALL being casualised. How do we respond? Organisation, solidarity and resistance. I’m a great critic of bureaucracy, but we need trade union and student organisation. Something like 30% of staff are in the UCU at King’s – we need more to join. We need to resist the transformation of Student Unions into these commercialised shells. Student Union reps are often mini-mes of management. We need solidarity – the attacks affect us all, academic and non-academic staff. They often start with non-academic staff. We have to see ourselves as part of a collective that is under attack. Resistance: to be a collective is not just about saying this – you have to be a collective in action. Sussex, Leeds, Tower Hamlets – we need to take action to force management to back down. What they are doing can’t be rationalised – New Labour say they want a ‘knowledge economy’, but they are limiting student places and sacking academics. This is about power. They think they have it; we need to assert our own power.

Stathis Kouvelakis

We live in a very dangerous moment, which is paradoxical. On the one hand, we have this economic crisis which shows the failure of neo-liberal policies. On the other hand, we have opportunists who use this crisis to accelerate this neo-liberal purge, all over the world. If there is all this talk about Greece, for example, it is because they want to make it a laboratory for you. They know there is high resistance, strong unions and so on – and yet portray it as the ‘weakling’ of Europe.

The irrationality that Alex mentioned is not in the minds of government and management but in the structure itself. Universities do not ‘sell’ their output. You cannot sell your degree; this idea that you have ‘bought’ you degree just amounts to corruption. It’s only to the extent that the degree represents the outcome of a whole process – the production of a degree – which is opposed to the production of commodities that it makes sense. It is a very socialised process, but this is something distinct from commodity production. All the use of the language of competition is fundamental for understanding from what is happening, but in universities something different is at stake. Neo-liberalism is about privatising the cost of these very important costs of education broadly speaking. Who will pay? Capitalism needs the outcome of knowledge production but it somehow needs to find it for free. Capitalism had to make a certain number of concessions after WWII. But this is what they want to destroy – this is the real meaning of top-up fees and everything else. You are not buying a degree, you are covering the costs where the state has retreated. It has nothing to do with the ‘price’ of a degree.

They want to reduce the autonomy between the economy and the way in which higher education and education as such operated. Both in terms of research and internal organisation – neoliberalist capitalism cannot accept spaces which are somehow different. They want an education apparatus to produce just the kind of ‘skills’ they need at that moment. It is a total integral social logic.

They want to normalise universities ideologically. In the sixties, for example, students and academics revolted against the function of universities as perpetuating the technocratic logic of capitalism. And they succeeded partly – dominant classes and groups lost control in part. They are worried about this happening again. You don’t need to ‘believe’ you just have to accept that things are ‘normal’. For example, that students are consumers. But all of this is absurd! But you have to believe as if this is true. Likewise we have to pay for rooms we teach in with internal budgets! We have to sell our degree to fee-paying students. The battle over universities goes to the heart of the struggle of the way in which neo-liberalism works.

Questions

Mark Campbell (London Met): stratification of HE. Supposedly research universities, sure, but there’s the bottom-end of the sector. [post-92 institutions: bung ‘em in, get ‘em cheap, stick everything on the web, post-92s are becoming more like training colleges. They want to limit the education they give to workers and lowering the expectations of working-class students.

Gareth (Brunel): lots of talk of a ‘lost generation’. You’d have thought they would expand student numbers – but they are of course reducing them. There is already a skill-shortage of engineers, but look at all the talk about the need for green energy development! We went to a meeting with a senior management who was talking about impact – but what does impact mean? If you’re working for BaE and working on a missile that will kill more people in Afghanistan will that count? You can guess his answer.

Student: students are falling into the logic of feeling like they are paying for their degree, that they want value for money. How do you stop staff and students being split by management? How do we stop students seeing themselves as consumers?

Warren (retired Prof): I lived through first round of cuts. Organisation, solidarity and resistance – these need to be created. In 1996/7, right before the Labour election I want to a panel chaired by Margaret Hodge and she said you can’t expect things to get any better under us. It got worse. We have disguised neo-liberalism. The two main political parties are basically the same: Mandelson is applying a policy of scorched-earth neoliberalism. We tried to boycott the RAE, but many colluded. Academics are being asked to apply for their own jobs. We need to avoid the mistakes we make in the past.

Student from King’s: we need to stop thinking of neoliberalism as a force of nature, like the weather. But there are contradictions all over the place. Students want different things taught in universities. Students are also workers, increasingly. We should stop thinking there are big differences between them.

Cliff from USA (Manchester Met): attacks on universities in the US are a form of class cleansing. Language has been appropriated by the language of the market, but we need to counter-appropriate language. We need to establish parallel free institutions – like a free student’s union, for example.

Man: effect on scientific research. It’s not only Marxist professors who have a problem justifying impact: science has the same problem. ‘curiosity-driven research’ and serendipity have always played a role. Application-driven research will destroy scientific work.

Jim Wolfreys

Neoliberalism has changed. Under Thatcher it was overt authoritarianism. It’s a much more insidious process now – the reflection on language is important, but the authoritarianism is still there. They want to close down the autonomy of research: to managers it’s fine if they come from other sectors. So we have someone from BP, for example, who is used to screwing the environment brought in to screw up the university. But when people say ‘no’ it’s really important because the system is based on passive acceptance. But behind that language they have nothing to back it up. We need to defy them and say no – then the house of cards will crumble.

A guy: RAE is powerful mechanism from winning consent from academics. It produces a superleague of academics. A lot of academics are not yet our allies – but now they are under attack, they might see things in a different way.

Student: the system of neoliberalism is rational, not irrational. Think about ‘shock therapy’; they just want to destroy left resistance.

Student (Glasgow): internal competition is right – depts. are being pitted against one another. Management spent ridiculous amounts of money on offices, which info we got hold through freedom of information. In Glasgow we have idea of ‘easy services’, neo-liberalism gone mad. What is education for? For me, it’s about the truth, so let’s start standing up for it.

Student: Shock therapy is everywhere. People could organise their own teaching.

Stathis

on rationality/irrationality: irrationality is in the system itself. A system in which billions starve is irrational by definition. If we don’t react now, neoliberalism will become even more brutal and authoritarian than before. Struggle starts in language: neoliberalism involves NewSpeak – we have to counter that. When students ask if there is an alternative to consumerism we need to respond: do you want to start your life in debt? Free education is absolutely essential. Education is a right, it’s yours, you are entitled to it, it’s something that society should provide. The whole logic of their system will leave only a handful of elite universities for very few people, the rest will become ‘degree factories’. Is a meaningful life possible without concrete possibilities for freedom and emancipation? It has to be directly experienced and lived.

Alex

on rationality/irrationality: they are being irrational according to their own ideology of education. The ruling class is responding to the crisis of neoliberalism with yet more neoliberalism but it’s a mistake to think they are totally in control. Naomi Klein and the Shock Doctrine idea is wrong on Iraq, for example: the war is an enormous blow, not a success, one shouldn’t underestimate our enemies – they are bastards – but we shouldn’t overestimate them either. The contradictions are important. Let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture: their system has blown up the world economy and they’re desperately trying to sort it out.

Academics have been the unwilling executioners of various terrible policies. But there is optimism – there are many struggles in many universities. Sometimes management tactics help us – look at King’s. 22 jobs to go in Arts and Humanities – they identified 11 – they need 11 more so they’ve asked everyone to reapply for their jobs. Now this is crazy because now everyone feels that their job is under threat. It helps to explain why strike is looking increasingly possible here. Academics have experienced a process of proletarianisation. It used to be that academics had a privileged status. Now that supposed academic elite are discovering that it’s them and us with reference to the management. The AUT used to say ‘rectify the anomaly’! Now we have a different kind of unionism in the universities via the UCU. It is a dangerous and scary situation but we have the capacity to transform the balance of power in universities.

Final Session

Terry Eagleton, Lesley McGorrigan (Officer Leeds Uni UCU), Michael Chessum (NCAFC), Nikos Lountos (Panteion University, Athens), Marieke Mueller (No Cuts at King’s Campaign), Alison Lord (Tower Hamlet’s College)

Jim Wolfreys: just to remind you that staff are balloting for strike action at King’s next week.

Terry Eagleton

I’ve been in HE for an embarrassingly long time. I don’t just teach Shakespeare, I worked with him. What I’m witnessing now is the most savage attack on HE I’ve ever seen. Paleology before profits may not be the snappiest of slogans, but we’re heading, the gvt should stop talking about education and talk about ‘skilling’ or ‘tooling’, because that’s what they want. We have instead soul factories with academics as managements and students as consumer proletarians. Education as a kind of technology which hardly needs to pass through consciousness. Minimal communication between students and lecturers – they need your fees otherwise they would do without people altogether. Why shouldn’t we accept money for lectures, or clothes or cakes, seems to be the logic...universities are derided as idiosyncratic, but that distance is precisely what enables them to operate as centres of critique. We are witnessing the death of universities as critique. Universities for a long time have been stripping out big, critical ideas because they make people uneasy. Universities are told to talk about ‘real life problems’: but we’ve been working on these problems for years! Poverty, inequality, imperialism and so on. I didn’t see research grants flowing our way...there are two incompatible views on education: for the economy or for society. Universities ARE contradictory places where dissent can breed – but no truly civilised society would sell education to its young, no more than we would sell breast milk to babies or bandages for the bleeding.

Lesley McGorrigan

At Leeds we got management to withdraw the threat of immediate redundancies. Management hadn’t consulted with the union at all, but now they have to. Academic freedom is back on the agenda. We won at Leeds because we had the biggest, most solid strike planned and management knew this. We’ve won a lot but we’re all vigilant because we know what management are like. It’s a war. The announced job cuts and a very poor severance schemes; 9 faculties were under review, biological sciences was under threat, people were being asked to apply for their own jobs, like at King’s. They were trying to restructure the university, we knew it was serious. The meetings over this period were huge – we’ve recruited 200-300 new members, making us one of the biggest branches in the country. We’ve fought against fixed-term contracts, downgrading pay-scales and so on. We split union reps up and got them to knock on doors of members – we had national help too. Members become flesh and blood. Management monitored our blogs and so on – we looked very organised from the start. When the management saw students actively supporting their lecturers this had a massive impact. We presented a united campaign: we saw what had happened at Tower Hamlets and elsewhere and saw what we could do. We’re going to put pressure on the union for a coordinated national campaign. We won at Leeds because of the threat of strike action, and we are being listened to by people in power. They don’t want a serious of strikes before the election: now is the time to do so.

Michael Chessum

This moment really is the big one. We have the opportunity to attack the political impotence of the system. Will there be an occupation at UCL? I’d bet money on it! What is NCAFC? We have no elected officers, we have local and national meetings. This is part of the bigger movement against cuts on universities. Throughout history students have played the role of detonator for working class struggle. We are not guaranteed to win every fight, but we have won the London Living Wage campaigns at SOAS and elsewhere. Whatever government gets in at the next election doesn’t pretend to give a shit about education. ‘Your university is a factory: demonstrate, strike, occupy’ was the slogan of the Sussex movement. We need to carry it on.

Alison Lord

Tower Hamlets A level and vocational English teacher. FE was all about second chances, academic, vocational, giving people a chance to liberate themselves through education at all levels. We give students workshops and support to give students a chance at social mobility. Most ESOL provision was threatened – which is why we began action. We took militant action very very quickly – we got the strike action through very quickly. We had rallies and demonstration, we did political campaigning, we got the public involved. We were on strike for 21 days, and we one. We raised £25,000 most of that through the trade unions and the community. Voluntaries redundancies happened and provision was cut, but we won unity in the college. Management are now being pushed back because we are so strong. FE is under massive attack – 10-25% of funding is being cut. Some will go to go to the wall, which means massive loss of provision for society. We lobbied the UCU for a quick response so they’ve written to all colleges telling them to fight cuts so there could be, and is likely to be, action ahead. Leeds shows you can stop management in their tracks – we can win and we will win!

Nikos Lountos

the media in Greece are trying to tell us that the Northerners, the British and Germans, and so on, hate us because of the struggles going on in Greece. This meeting helps us understand that this is in fact a common struggle, all around Europe. It unites students and workers all over. We are just seeing the first signs of this pan-European struggle. Recently, in Greece, two million workers walked out of their jobs, all schools and universities were closed, no newspapers ran. The scale of the strike is important as is the fact that it was organised from below. The equivalent of New Labour was voted back in a few months ago - but they were surprised by both the depth of the economic crisis and the strength from below. In 2006/7 we had a whole year of occupations in universities. We learnt a lot about the possibilities of organising and protesting. December 2008, a policeman killed a 15-year-old student. We had a whole month of protests and struggles: the government are afraid of a workers’ revolt. We should not think that we can make any concession to the system. They are trying to divide us – black, white, immigrants, men, women. It is not only an economic but a political and ideological battle. The same people in power who talk about the madness of the markets are the very same people who tried to sell out education to the same markets! The last decade has provided us with the networks and the organisation to fight back. The crisis opens up an opportunity to not only take back education but to take back our lives.

Marieke Mueller

Just over a year ago, management announced first round of cuts. We organised very quickly between staff and students. The money is there, look at the fact that they bought this wing of Somerset House (more than £20 million). We organised protests, we drew in students from different departments, many who had had no previously political organisation. But whose university is this? We got our canteen back, which is important but now the cuts are becoming much more vicious. Staff asked to reapply for their own jobs, students are responding to this too. It’s about defending the whole college, not just one department. 13th March protest at Somerset House. King’s is historically a very conservative university – but this really changed last January when students occupied over Gaza. This brought a whole new culture of debate into the college. This is the pre-history of the organisation against the current cuts. Now we need a national student movement.

Questions:

Jim: Monday 3-5 lobby at Westminster protesting 285 redundancies. Lobby of council at King’s. 20th March 29th April, united day of action across the country in FE and HE. Wed students in name of students at King’s 3pm. U of London: elections coming up.

Someone: Equality must be heart of what we do. We need to end factionalism in the movement.

Someone from Essex University: we need to share these stories on other campuses where cuts are increasingly on the agenda. Demo on 20th March: but also local teachings are important.

Someone else: hearing about a few victories really changes things. Let’s not stop.

Clare Solomon: I’m standing for President of ULU – we have a blog. We are doing this for the whole movement.

Someone from King’s: 3000 people joined the stop Philosophy cuts at King’s. We need more forums like this. We need bulletins and bringing people who are new to politics in.

Rumours has it that King's management are worried about the numbers of people turning up at tomorrow's Take Back Education, and may try to turn away people who haven't registered already. So register!

MARXISM IN CULTURE: PROGRAMME FOR SUMMER TERM 2010

Friday 30 April
No End & No Beginning: Pop, Periodization, Problems c. 1989
Joshua Clover (University of California, Davis)

Friday 14 May
Symposium on Frederic Jameson
Matthew Beaumont (University College London), Gail Day (Leeds University), Nina Power (Roehampton University), and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths)
This seminar starts at the earlier time of 4.00pm

Friday 28 May
Photography in May ‘68
Antigoni Memou (University of East London)

Friday 11 June
Marx, Hegel and the 'Truth Claims' of Critical Realist Photography: A Political-Aesthetic Reading of the initial chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
Simon Constantine

All seminars start at 5.30pm, and are held in the Wolfson Room (unless otherwise indicated) at the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House, Malet St, London. The seminar closes at 7.30pm and retires to the bar.

Organisers: Matthew Beaumont, Warren Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Maggie Gray, Owen Hatherley, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou, Nina Power, Pete Smith, & Alberto Toscano.

For further information, contact Andrew Hemingway, at:
a.hemingway[at]ucl.ac.uk or Esther Leslie at: e.leslie[at]bbk.ac.uk

Take Back Education Teach In: Saturday 27th Feb, 11-4pm, Kings College, (Registration from 10.15am)
www.educationactionlondon.blogspot.com

Please see below for a provisional timetable. Over 370 people are booked up for the event already. If you haven't yet booked up do so now and please bring as many friends and colleagues as possible - We don't want anyone to miss out!

The venue is:

Strand Building
King's College London
London WC2
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/campuses/strand.html
There will be further directions when you arrive.

11am-12.30 Opening Plenary

The crisis in our universities and the battle for education

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Juan C Piedra Justice for Cleaners

Jim Wolfreys President KCL UCU

Sarah Young Sussex Uni occupation

Michal Rosen poet and education campaigner


12.30-1.30pm lunch


1.30-3pm workshops


1. The corporate takeover of our universities (RM: Lucas Theatre)

Stathis Kouvalakis lecturer and radical theorist

Alex Callinicos lecturer and author Universities in a neoliberal world


2. Reclaiming our student unions (RM: S-1.06)

James Haywood NUS NEC

Daff Addley LGBT NUS


3. Education for liberation –what should our education look like? (RM: S-1.27)

Patrick Ainley author 'Education Make You Fick, Innit?’

Gargi Bhattacharyya professor of sociology and author


4. 1968 – what can we learn from the fire last time? (RM S.2.23)

Mike Gonzalez 1968er and author


5. Education for all – challenging Islamophobia, racism and points based immigration (RM K2.40)

Assed Baig Staffs SU President

Arun Kundnani Institute of Race Relations (invited)


3-4pm Final Plenary

The tasks ahead – taking back our education

Terry Eagleton

Lesley McGorrigan Officer Leeds Uni UCU

Nikos Lountos Panteion University, Athens

Alison Lord Tower Hamlets UCU

Student from No Cuts @ Kings

www.educationactionlondon.blogspot.com

[This looks absolutely brilliant; am already sad I won't be able to make it. You should though!]

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

From Structure to Rhizome
Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions

Cine Lumière, The French Institute
17 Queensberry Place, London, SW7 2DT
tel. 020 7073 1350

16 & 17 April 2010

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the ‘great books’ of postwar French theory transformed study in the humanities in the Anglophone world. These books were all, in one way or another, transdisciplinary in character. Yet their reception has primarily taken place in an array of specific disciplinary contexts, isolated from a broader understanding of the intellectual dynamics, forms, significance and innovative potential of transdisciplinarity itself. This conference aims to redress this situation. Each speaker will reflect on the transdisciplinary functioning of a single concept in French thought since 1945, with respect to a founding text, a particular thinker or a school of thought.

Speakers:
Éric Alliez (CRMEP, Middlesex University)
'Rhizome'

Etienne Balibar (University of Paris X/Irvine UC)
'Structure'

Andrew Barry (Oxford University)
'Network'

Tom Conley (Harvard University)
'Writing'

François Cusset (University of Paris X)
'Theory'

Patrick Guyomard (University of Paris VII)
'Object a'

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond (University of Nice)
'Science'

Alain de Libera (EPHE, Paris/University of Geneva)
'Subject'

Peter Osborne (CRMEP, Middlesex University)
'Transdisciplinarity'

Michèle Riot-Sarcey (University of Paris VIII)
'History'

Stella Sandford (CRMEP, Middlesex University)
'Sex'

£45 / £20 students (free to members of the CRMEP, but booking is essential)

Advance registration: please write to Tom Eyers, at TE122[at]mdx.ac.uk.

Cheques should be made payable to ‘ Middlesex University’. Send to: Prof. Peter Osborne, CRMEP, Middlesex University, Trent Park campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ, United Kingdom.

Supported by the Cultural Service of the French Embassy

A ghost-reader captured on the tube by the impeccable Joel.

A recent piece by me over at the excellent New Left Project. I highly recommend you watch the episode of The Review Show on feminism that I link to if you didn't see it already: if only to see what they don't talk about as much as what they do.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi presents his new book ‘The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy’ published by Semiotext(e), translated by Francesca Cadel and Mecchia Giuseppina with a [great!] preface by Jason E. Smith.

Tuesday 2nd March, 6-8pm,
Lecture Theatre, Ground Floor Ben Pimlott Building,
Goldsmiths, University of London SE14 6NW

Co-hosted by: Department of Art, Sociology Methods Lab & Micropolitics
Research Group.

Free, open to all.