Within and against the corporate-university: anti-austerity struggles in England

Interview with SEBASTIAN LYCHE - by IVAN BONNIN (@ivnbkn)

The following article is an interview with Sebastian Lyche, student at Goldsmiths University, on the struggles within and against the universities in the UK. We asked Sebastian on the struggles within and against the universities of the UK. We are in an agreement with many of Sebastians´ arguments; especially the one about an emerging, increasingly hybridized common subjectivity that expresses a condition of precarity transversly diffused across several social segments. Furthermore, we hold the same position on the discourse about the development of an explicit antagonism against the power of the 1% (the financial powers), which the State and its repressive apparatus protect. However we find the discourse on the public to be more problematic: the description of a public sector being necessarily “better” than the private one does not fully convince us. Are we sure that the government is effectively made more accountable as it is periodically voted? In order to answer this question, we believe that it is not possible to overlook the issues on the liberal representation in general, on mass abstension, on the corruption of the political class, etc. Then, are we sure that public services are always more accessible and of better quality than privatised services? Generally, yes, but not always. This surely is an issue which deserves to be further investigated. Nonetheless, Sebastian’s discourses – which describe very efficaciously the complex relation between the contemporary State and neoliberalism – invite us to reflect on an issue that also Silvia Federici pinpointed in an interview curated by Antonio Alia: “the discourse [we should focus on] is how to connect the struggles for the Common and the current workers’ struggles within the public sector – nurses, teachers, etc. -, so to conjugate knowledge and resources and build new relations alternative to the State and the market.

What does “austerity” mean today in England and what is its relation to the university? Is it a policy as diffused as it is in the South of Europe? Or do you believe that there are some differences in its implementation?

The British government's austerity programme constitutes a series of spending cuts, deregulations and privatizations in the public sector. So far in higher education, we've consequently experienced the outsourcing of campus services to private contractors, a triple-rise in tuition fees and various course closures. Education is thus progressively commodified; students are increasingly positioned as consumers demanding career skills and labour is increasingly subject to wage repression and casualisation. Similar processes are being experienced across the public sector in Britain. Welfare claimants have also been subject to benefit cuts, bedroom tax and disciplinary workfare schemes. Allegedly this strategy serves to rectify a budget deficit precipitated by the eurozone crisis and too much public spending in the past. However we've experienced this neoliberal drive to privatize and deregulate economic activity for over fourty years now. Austerity is the continuation of an ideological attack on the public welfare state which was inaugurated by Thatcher, Reagan and the Washington Consensus. The resulting wage repression in conjunction with financial deregulation is largely responsible for precipitating the credit crunch to begin with. Even the IMF has now recently urged the chancellor to ease off austerity in order to rescue growth and accelerate recovery. On that note, I don't believe that this is an urge which has been extended to Southern Europe. Which leads me to believe that austerity there is still more widespread than it is here. The influx of migrant workers from Southern Europe might also suggest that working conditions there are more precarious. However austerity is not just ineffectual and irrational. Even though it might inhibit economic growth and recovery for a while, it's also facilitating a highly rational strategy of capitalist accumulation by public dispossession. The government's affinity for corporate welfare and tax cuts is one rather clear indication of this. Not to mention the rise in managerial wages, the Royal Wedding in 2011, Thatcher's state funeral this year, the construction of an Olympic village and the militarization of London leading up to the 2012 Olympics. The neoliberal project is progressively centralizing wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public of theirs. This upwards redistribution of wealth re-produces a dependence on that same minority's wealth for growth. Neoliberalism has retained the modern fetish for compound growth, but only insofar as it is powered and consumed by corporate-financial elites.

Which are the main transformations provoked by the increase of university fees and by an increasing student debt? Can we talk about a restrained accessibility to the university? Further more, is the social composition of the university changing?

Personally, I haven't been studying here long enough to witness any visible changes in the social composition of the university. However I would say that it already appeared to be over-represented by the predominantly white middle-class when I started, three years ago now. Since I live and study in South East London, the exclusion of local, working class people, and particularly people of colour is quite clearly visible. I've also spoken to several local people outside the university who've complained that they won't be able to afford higher education with the new tuition fees.  

Considering the increasing corporatisation of the university, do you think the dichotomy between the public and the private still makes sense? What are students actually fighting against, is privatisation or corporatisation?  

Neoliberal critiques of the 'nanny state' usually rely on a binary distinction between the public vs. private; the efficient and rational entrepreneurial logic of the market vs. the inefficient and irrational, bureaucratic logic of the public state. The central aim of neoliberal policy is thus to expand market rationality into the realm of the public. One of the main problems with this discursive formation is that it omits the way that privatization reterritorialises power relations within bureaucratic circuits of control outside, but always in connection to - the state. First of all; large, private enterprises are usually organised along bureaucratic structures of management themselves. The main difference is that private business managements are accountable to their shareholders whereas public sector managements are accountable to an elected government or council. Periodic elections do not make our bosses accountable to us. Both of these hierarchical structures produce alienation. Ultimately I think we should reconfigure a conception of public commons which isn't mediated by a bureaucratic state. Nevertheless, I would still argue that an elected government is more accountable than a corporate boardroom. Workers in the public sector consequently benefit from better job security and rights to union representation, sick pay, holidays, pensions etc. Public goods and services are also cheaper, more accessible for everyone and less commodified. This is why it is worth defending. Second of all, the public-private distinction has been produced within the field of (neo)classical economics, not the other way around. As I mentioned earlier, neoliberal capitalism does not actually constitute the withdrawl of state support; but rather a change in its form. The central object of neoliberal governmentality is to facilitate the development of a social environment conducive to the production of homo economicus; a particular subjectivity rooted in European modernity and classical liberal discourse. At the present conjuncture, neoliberalism is thus expanding the 'economic man' produced by liberalism further into the realm of the social. The neoliberal subject is constituted by the entrepreneurial self; the flexible, self-directed, rational individual, fully responsible for navigating the social in their own self-interest using calculated cost-benefit analyses. This specific form of homo economicus has been adapted to meet the requirements for economic production in a dynamic, globalised knowledge economy. Consequently, the neoliberal state does not intervene as much on the market, as it does on the conditions of possibility of the market; playing an active role in the production of the laws and institutions necessary for its operation. This does not necessarily involve the whole-sale privatisation of public assets. Many social institutions have remained public, but nevertheless adopted structures and practices from the field of corporate management. The principles of life-long training as an economic imperative for example, is reflected in processes of marketisation in the public university. University managements are policing departments to ensure sales, efficiency and profits. In turn, academic departments are compelled to transform in accordance to this market rationality or face extinction. London Metropolitan for example has cut 60% of its courses in academic departments including philosophy, performing arts, history and Caribbean studies; courses which have become unpopular because they offer poor employment prospects. Universities thus increasingly operate as corporations marketing expert knowledges which offer employability. These developments should also be mapped against the growth of an increasingly casualised underclass which is disadvantaged in terms of access to an increasingly specialised segment of the labour market. University managements have outsourced the lowest waged workforce, such as cleaning, catering and security. The private corporation thus progressively operates within or in partnership with the state. I've heard students and staff speculating about the future, whole-sale privatisation of the public university. However for the moment, it is these processes of corporate modulation which the recent student mobilizations are resisting.  

Which are the continuities and which the discontinuities of the current student movement compared to that of 2011? Do you agree with the perspective of an increasingly meddling among student and workers’ subjectivities?

I think it still might be premature to characterise the recent wave of mobilizations as a 'movement'. At my university there was around 100 participants in the occupation called in solidarity with striking staff in the first week of December. Nevertheless, it's difficult to mobilize short-term occupations and in spite of this there still 11 student occupations across the country. Whereas the student protests in 2010 mainly focused on tuition fees, these occupations were also couched in terms of opposition to broader processes of marketisation; wage repression, redundancies, outsourcing of services and student debts, as well as the closure of the University of London Union. Preceding these occupations, many students also participated in the 3cosas campaign; demanding the same sick pay, holiday pay and pensions for outsourced workers in the University of London as those in-house. Following a 2-day strike in November, the outsourced cleaners won a series of limited concessions in these areas. This campaign is particularly emblematic of an emerging subjectivity centred around the common, lived experience of precarity. The efforts last year to establish a pop-up union in opposition to outsourcing at the University of Sussex should also be understood within this context. With enormous debts and a highly precarious labour market awaiting undergraduates, students see increasingly little difference between themselves and the casualised workforce. This is producing a growing assemblage of solidarity networks between undergraduates, postgraduates, teaching staff, support staff and activists. Hopefully these gestures of solidarity can also be extended beyond the university campus, in order to support and learn from other sections of the multitude struggling against casualisation.

How do you read police repression in political terms? Do you think that the #copsoffcampus issue raised by the students can somehow favour their encounter with the “No Justice No Peace” cry for Mark Duggan?

This emerging sequence of political resistance has been systematically met with the same violent, state repression: Last summer, the police arrested an activist for chalking the 3cosas on a University of London building. The president of ULU was also recently arrested for resisting the closure of his union. The university of Sussex has also witnessed the draconian suspension of five student activists. The violent police eviction of Senate House and the concomitant High Court injunction against 'protest by occupation', consequently mobilized thousands of students in a series of protests demanding 'cops off campus'. The same week, new details emerged from the inquest into Mark Duggan, whose fatal shooting by the police in August 2011 triggered riots across the country. The new details revealed that Mark Duggans hands were up and clutching a mobile telephone when he was shot by the police. As the police repression of the 'cops off campus' demo became increasingly violent, students chanted 'you killed Mark Duggan!'. If anything this is an indication that students faced with police brutality increasingly identify with other dispossessed and marginalised groups in society such as the rioters in 2011. A multitude of subjects are quickly becoming aware of the monumental state intervention required to impose wage repression, precarity and debt.