The condition of the working class: Representation and praxis

Copyright © 2013 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is the accepted version of the following article: Wayne, M. and O'Neill, D. (2013), The Condition of the Working Class: Representation and Praxis. WorkingUSA, 16: 487–503, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/wusa.12076/abstract.This essay reflects critically on the political context, production process, ideas, and strategies of our feature-length documentary film The Condition of the Working Class. It explores why we were inspired by Friedrich Engels' 1844 book of the same name and how that book connects with the contemporary neoliberal capitalist project that has dominated the political scene internationally for several decades. We conceptualize our film as a constellation, in the manner of Walter Benjamin, between the 1840s and the contemporary moment. The essay explores the production process of the film, which involved setting up and working in conjunction with a theatrical project. The essay reflects on the theatrical work of John McGrath and its connections with our own work. In the final section of the essay, the authors consider the finished film in more detail, analyzing how the film focused on the process of theatrical production and contextualized that process within wider spatial and temporal frames. The film and the theater project explore the possibility of reconstituting in a microcosm a working class collective subject that has been atomized and demonized by 30 years of neoliberal policy, which in the context of the present economic crisis seeks to drive its project even further

Beyond public and private: a framework for co-operative higher education

Universities in the UK are increasingly adopting corporate governance structures, a consumerist model of teaching and learning, and have the most expensive tuition fees in the world (McGettigan, 2013; OECD, 2015). This paper reports on a 12-month project funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) to develop an alternative model of knowledge production grounded in co-operative values and principles. The project has been run with the Social Science Centre (SSC), a small, experimental co-operative for higher education established in Lincoln in 2011 (Social Science Centre, 2013). In the paper we discuss the design of the research project, the widespread interest in the idea of co-operative higher education and our approach based on the collaborative production of knowledge by academics and students (Neary and Winn, 2009; Winn 2015). The main findings of the research so far are outlined relating to the key themes of our research: knowledge, democracy, bureaucracy, livelihood, and solidarity. We consider how these five 'catalytic principles' relate to three identified routes to co-operative higher education (conversion, dissolution, or creation) and argue that such work must be grounded in an adequate critique of labour and property i.e. the capital relation. We identify both the possible opportunities that the latest higher education reform in the UK affords the co-operative movement as well as the issues that arise from a more marketised and financialised approach to the production of knowledge (HEFCE, 2015). Finally, we suggest ways that the co-operative movement might respond with democratic alternatives that go beyond the distinction of public and private education

La crisis actual y el anacronismo del valor: una lectura marxista

La teoría crítica de madurez de Marx fundamenta la dinámica direccional de las sociedades modernas en las categorías de mercancía y capital como modos de heteronomía y dominación: se trata de la dominación de las personas por el tiempo, por una forma históricamente específica de temporalidad. En dicha teoría, esta dinámica y la aparente centralidad ontológica del trabajo se convierten en los objetos de la crítica y no en su punto de partida: se trata de un planteamiento que se presenta de modo explícito como históricamente específico y pone en cuestión todos aquellos que se reclaman de validez universal o transhistórica. Dentro de este marco, la dualidad de la forma mercancía como valor y valor de uso subyace tras la dualidad de la forma capital como proceso de valorización y proceso de trabajo. Esta dualidad genera una interacción dialéctica que da lugar a una dinámica temporal compleja que empuja la creación de valor hacia adelante, a la vez que vuelve a éste cada vez más anacrónico. La tendencia, a largo plazo, de este despliegue histórico se resuelve en la obsolescencia de la producción fundada en el tiempo de trabajo, en el valor y en el trabajo proletario -para Marx la abolición del capitalismo no supone la auto-realización del proletariado sino su auto-abolición-. Esta posibilidad emerge actualmente en forma invertida: incrementos del trabajo superfluo, del desempleo y el precariado; transformación de una cantidad creciente de dimensiones de la vida en formas de pretendida riqueza -indexadas a precios y beneficios- que, supuestamente, garantizarían la realización futura de cada vez más complejos instrumentos financieros (como si la riqueza fuera independiente del valor en el capitalismo). Lo que se plantea es pues la posibilidad de analizar el final, impulsado por las crisis económicas, de la configuración (fordista-keynesiana) de post-guerra del capitalismo como expresión de esta crisis secular del proceso de valorización. Crisis en la que aún estaríamos inmersos

The politics of collective repair: examining object-relations in a postwork society

In this article we look at repair as an emergent focus of recent activism in affluent societies, where a number of groups are reclaiming practices of repair as a form of political and ecological action. Ranging from those that fight for legislative change to those groups who are trying to support ecological and social change through everyday life practices, repair is beginning to surface tensions in everyday life and as such poses opportunities for its transformation. We survey a few of the practices that make up this movement in its various articulations, to take stock of their current political import. While we suggest that these practices can be seen as an emergent lifestyle movement, they should not be seen as presenting a unified statement. Rather, we aim to show that they articulate a spectrum of political positions, particularly in relation to the three specific issues of property, pedagogy and sociality. These three dimensions are all facets of current internal discrepancies of repair practices and moreover express potential bifurcations as this movement evolves. Drawing on a diverse methodology that includes discourse analysis and participant observation, we suggest some of the ways in which this growing area of activity could play a significant role in resisting the commodification of the everyday and inventing postwork alternatives

Hegel, Adorno and the origins of immanent criticism

‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four different claims that interest me. (i) Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. (ii) Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. (iii) Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. (iv) Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected

The Immanent Potential of Economic and Monetary Integration: A Critical Reading of the Eurozone Crisis

The Eurozone crisis has revealed fundamental flaws in the institutional architecture of the European Economic and Monetary Union. Its lack of political steering capacity has demonstrated the need for a broad but seemingly unachievable political union with shared economic governance and a common treasury. Agreement on further measures has been difficult to achieve as different actors have imposed different criteria for the success of the Eurozone from the outside. As part of the heritage of Western Marxism, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School sought overcome such problems by identifying criteria for social criticism from the inside. Building on their understanding of immanent critique, I argue that the Eurozone contains the internal normative principles necessary to support greater political integration. While the citizens of Europe must provide the democratic legitimation necessary to realize this latent potential, the flaws revealed by the crisis are already pushing Europe towards greater transnational solidarity

Tutor and teacher timescapes : lessons from a home-school partnership

A partnership project was developed in which parents volunteered to support teachersin training years 1-3 children in computer skills at a primary school in a small, lowsocio-economic community. This article identifies the ways teachers and the &lsquo;tutors&rsquo;(as the volunteers were called) understood the value of the project. &lsquo;Being a teacher&rsquo;and &lsquo;being a volunteer&rsquo; were structured by different forms of social engagement,which in turn influenced the ways individuals were able to work with each other incollaborative processes. We argue that the discursive practices encoded in homeschool-community partnership rhetoric represent ruling-class ways of organising andnetworking that may be incompatible with those of people from low socio-economicbackgrounds. When such volunteers work in schools their attendance may be sporadicand short-term whereas teachers would like &lsquo;reliable&rsquo; ongoing commitment. Thismismatch wrought of teachers&rsquo; and volunteers&rsquo; differing everyday realities needs to beunderstood before useful models for partnerships in disadvantaged communities maybe realised.<br /

Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid

Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom‐of‐the‐pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities – the practices, technologies, and representations of time – which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums: from the invocation of clock‐time discipline to the professional time of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the enchantments of the not‐yet. But the appeal of BoP, we suggest, does not turn either on the here‐and‐now of survival or on an impossible pipe dream of prosperity, but rather resides firmly in the medium term: a foreseeable future of modest desires, which nonetheless remain tantalizingly just out of reach for most. By examining how these temporal conflicts play out in attempts to fashion a cadre of self‐willed, aspiring entrepreneurs, we reveal the limits to entrepreneurial agency, and the contradictions inherent in the mission of (self‐)empowerment through enterprise upon which the ideology of inclusive markets is built