Open Education and the emancipation of academic labour

I have previously argued that open education is a liberal project with a focus on the freedom of things rather than the freedom of people (Winn, Joss. 2012. “Open Education: From the Freedom of Things to the Freedom of People.” In Towards Teaching in Public: Reshaping the Modern University, edited by Michael Neary, Howard Stevenson, and Les Bell, 133– 147. London: Continuum). Furthermore, I have argued that despite an implicit critique of private property with its emphasis on ‘the commons’, the literature on open education offers no corresponding critique of academic labour (Neary, Mike, and Joss Winn. 2012. “Open Education: Common(s), Commonism and the New Common Wealth.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 12 (4): 406–422). In this paper, I develop my critical position that an emancipatory form of education must work towards the emancipation of teachers and students from labour, the dynamic, social, creative source of value in capitalism. In making this argument, I first establish the fundamental characteristics of academic labour. I then offer a ‘form-analytic’ critique of open access, followed by a corresponding critique of its legal form. Finally, I critically discuss the potential of ‘open cooperatives’ as a transitional organisational form for the production of knowledge through which social relations become ‘transparent in their simplicity’ (Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Classics, 172)

Foundations of a Marxist Theory of the Political Economy of Information: Trade Secrets and Intellectual Property, and the Production of Relative Surplus Value and the Extraction of Rent-Tribute

The aim of this article is to sketch a preliminary outline of a Marxist theory of the political economy of information. It defines information as a symbolic form that can be digitally copied. This definition is purely formal and disregards epistemological, ideological, and functional aspects. The article argues that the value of information defined in this sense tends to zero and therefore the price of information is rent. However, information plays a central role in the production of relative surplus value on the one hand, and the distribution of the total social surplus value in forms of surplus profits and rents, on the other. Thus, the hegemony of information technologies in contemporary productive forces has not made Marx’s theory of value irrelevant. On the contrary, the political economy of information can only be understood in the light of this theory. The article demonstrates that the capitalist production and distribution of surplus value at the global level forms the foundation of the political economy of information

The Coming Revolution of Peer Production and Revolutionary Cooperatives. A Response to Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Stefan Meretz

This article agrees with Meretz (2014) that the peer producing cooperatives which are proposed by Bauwens & Kostakis (2014) will become parts and parcels of the capitalist economy. Further, it argues that the so called Peer Production Licenses (PPL), originally designed by Dmitry Kleiner (2010), which is the basis of their proposal is a rent seeking instrument. Contra Bauwens & Kostakis, it argues that, from the perspectives of both reform and revolution, GPL is profoundly anti-capitalist. The article critiques Meretz`s understanding of exchange and reciprocity, on the one hand, and his underestimation of GPL`s communist aspect, on the other. On the positive side, the article, explicating the communist nature of GPL-oriented peer production, speculates about the general contours of a society where peer production is the dominant mode of production. The technological basis of this society, the article suggests, will be digital copying and automation. Spatially, it will be based on localities that transcend the current division between the city and country, synthesising agriculture with industrial, affective and symbolic production. The rise of a globally unified revolutionary social struggle which adopts peer production as its platform is indispensible for the transformation of capitalism into such a society.  A global network of revolutionary peer producing cooperatives which break with market and reduce their relations to it to an absolutely unavoidable necessary minimum can be a significant component of this social struggle. The building of these revolutionary cooperatives requires a massive exodus from the city to the country

Transnationalizing Desire: Sexualizing Culture and Commodifying Sexualities

Sexuality, as a conceptual framework, has become a site for several social, moral, and political controversies, economic strategies, existential anxieties and ontological uncertainties. The transformation of sexuality, semiotically and in practice, particularly since the 1950s, reveals itself to be part of wider social and economic processes that have been variously described under the rubrics of ‘globalization’ (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1989; Sassen 1998) and ‘transnationalism’ (Blanc et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992), or the kindred categories of ‘post-modernity’ (Jameson 1991), ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel 1975) and a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2005). In this special issue, we are interested in how sexuality as commodity and practice has come to stand for vast categories of meaning and experience in a transnational context. We explore how various forms of sexuality and desire inform national identities, the sexual policies of the state, and concepts surrounding commodification and subjectivity. We understand ‘transnationalizing desire’ to be the locus of several overlapping political and cultural processes regarding the intimacies of sexuality: how desire and subjectivity are understood on ‘local’ levels, and in turn, how these categories of meaning and experience become appropriated and re-articulated in transnational exchanges. Central to the analytical frameworks included here is how individuals and collectivities imagine the horizons of sexuality and desire, whether through legal interventions of sexual rights and responsibilities, interactions in the international marriage ‘market,’ or in modifying local hierarchies of sexual identity. Resonating in each of these discussions is a tension between ‘local’ practices, identities and values and those that are seen to be transnationally ‘imported’ varieties

Value, Rent, and the Political Economy of Social Media

Fuchs (2010, 2012) argues that users of social media produce value and surplus value in the Marxian sense. Arvidsson and Colleoni (2012) critique this hypothesis, claiming that Marx's theory of value is irrelevant to the regime of value production on social media platforms in particular and in informational capitalism in general. They claim that the affective relations and financial speculations that generate value on social media are not dependent on labor time. This article critically engages Fuchs, and Arvidsson and Colleoni, by revisiting Marx's theory of value. Contra Fuchs, we argue that audiences do not produce value and surplus value-neither for social nor for mass media. Contra Arvidsson and Colleoni, we argue that so-called affective relations (philia) do not produce value either. Instead we demonstrate that social media generate revenue from four primary sources-by leasing advertisement space to generate advertisement rent, by selling information, by selling services to advertisers, and by generating profits from fictitious capital and speculative windfalls. All four, we argue, can be adequately explained by Marx's theory of value