06.03.2025
Struggles in the cathedral
Overproduction in the knowledge economy, zero-hour contracts and a funding crisis. Peter Kennedy puts his faith in ‘transitional demands’ and breaking the labour movement from the chimerical aim of ‘advancing human capital’
Tertiary education (the further and higher education sector) is caught in the headlights of a funding crisis, which threatens to curb decades of rapid expansion.
Doped on a financial concoction of state grants, home student loans, extortionate fees extracted from international students and banking debt - in order to meet the needs of a mythical ‘knowledge economy’, requiring masses of specialist-knowledge workers - the sector became based on an ideological mission to ‘enhance human capital’ and increase ‘employability’, transforming education into a commodity and instilling a work ethic.
It goes without saying that the ‘usual suspects’ - students and workers - are expected to pay the price, with unions struggling to resist, and students piling up debt, as the sector pushes through redundancies, freezes fixed capital investments and closes whole departments. A perpetual round of systemic sackings - euphemistically termed, ‘voluntary terminations’, ‘mutual redundancy packages’, ‘compulsory severances and ‘shrinking staff’ - is underway to ensure the ‘resizing of programmes’ and ‘re-engineering of departments’ (ie, shutting some down).
The terminology used is testimony to the corporate business mindset ensconced in tertiary education. Those wielding the axe care little about disciplinary boundaries (engineering, architecture, mathematics, arts, social sciences, medicine and ad-lib training are all subject to attack) or about the consequences for educational quality. In good old-fashioned, hard-nosed business terms, bureaucrats of knowledge point to the cold economics of the situation: an over-production of graduates relative to what the capitalist labour market can bear.
Organised tertiary-sector workers have engaged in periodic strikes and work-to-rules, to reverse and defend against further cuts and reduce the gap in real wages after years of below-inflation wage settlements. Yet the cuts continue to prevail - as do the exploitative, part-time, fixed-term and zero-hour contracts that have become normalised. Their focus has rarely broadened out to defend the broader purpose and meaning of education for its own sake. As such there is little scope for workers to mobilise around protecting and indeed expanding education for human fulfilment per se. Defence and resistance are only framed within the limits of education as a function of the requirements and limits of capital expansion: ie, education as human capital, limited by the requirements of the labour market, and shaped by capitalist demand for graduate labour. Caught within this capitalist yoke, trade unions in the sector are losing their own struggle as exploited workers, as well as the struggle to break with this one-dimensional rationale for education.
In order to break with this one-dimensionality, workers must tackle and break free from the worst kept secret in tertiary education: the real mismatch between the propensity for the capitalist economy to deskill and degrade the status of jobs across the board, while at the same time building cathedrals of education, churning out an expanding supply of graduate labour (the real reason for the capitalist state’s unwillingness to bear the costs of expanding tertiary education).
Of course, new jobs in AI-related sectors have and will continue to arise. One particularly rose-tinted speculation, published by the World Economic Forum, claims that “by 2025, 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms”.1 New jobs in health, scientific and technical services and education; less in manufacturing, transport and storage, and public administration. Yet we also know full well two rapacious compulsions inherent to capital: (1) that applying science and technology and redesigning jobs is written into the ‘DNA’ of capital accumulation, with labour-displacing consequences; and (2) the brave new world populated by (as yet unknown) jobs will be quickly fragmented and broken down into tasks, under the sway of capital. Inherent to capital’s DNA is abstract labour as a reality that insinuates production relations as well as market relations of exchange.
Indeed, this labour-displacing DNA is manifesting in debates about the so-called ‘hollowing out of the labour market’, with, at one end, a relative minority of highly prized jobs (higher professional, managerial and technical) and, at the other end, an increasing preponderance of low-status, low-skilled and relatively insecure jobs. In which case, the mass expansion of tertiary education on such a scale appears irrational. And yet the state has poured money into accelerating this expansion for decades, resulting in an increasing proportion of graduates competing with non-graduate workers for non-graduate jobs. It does not seem to make sense.
The question begs, is there another underlying rationale? The answer is yes, for the following reasons. The army of student-workers are placed at the disposal of an expanding service-sector capitalism, keeping it afloat on manipulable labour - working at those fast-food chains, bars, hotels and leisure complexes for minimal wages.
Moreover, student labour has helped anchor wages and conditions across the range of occupations that make up the preponderance of low-status, low-skilled, insecure jobs, fostering competition between graduates and non-graduate labour. In other words, the dual identity of student/worker has certainly helped to underpin profits in this labour-intensive sector.
Then there is the ideological role performed by an expanding tertiary sector, for both students and staff caught in its web. The way funding is organised facilitates the commodification of the meaning and purpose of education, drawing on market moralities and instilling the work ethic.
Home students are enmeshed in market transactional relationships with the state, imparting a consumer value-for-money mentality. Degree-level students ‘pay’ the course fees with funding received from the government, then repay it with interest - via the government quango, the Student Loans Company.
The underlying rationale is that the universities and colleges merge as ‘Education plc’: enterprising businesses; corporations, complete with producers (tutors) and consumers (students) of a commodity (education). And, as with all commodities, value is in exchange rather than use - the circulation of certificates promising access to a graduate career. The development of the corporate infrastructure of education follows suit: libraries transformed into communication malls; classrooms into workshops; knowledge rearranged by units of time spent on modulated packages of discrete learning, aligned to click-and-collect assessment proforma, with a certificate of one shade or another awaiting at the end of the production line.
Nevertheless, the underlying commodification and internalisation of the work ethic cannot be ignored either. They derive from capitalist relations of production, premised on commodity fetishism as the essential form of control over workers. Hence, there is an argument to be made that the superstructure of this expanding realm of tertiary education is bolstering a failing commodity fetishism characteristic of ‘late capitalism’, and this is due in no small way to the systemic problem of what to do with surplus labour.
Marx noted that the relative displacement of labour for capital functions as surplus labour, in the form of a reserve army that allows for economic expansion and contraction in periods of boom and slump, while also acting as a disciplinary mechanism over working class wages and conditions of employment. Surplus labour also serves the vital function of redistributing labour from old to new industries, entering new jobs. However, he also noted that this functionality of surplus labour simply cannot go on forever: the point is reached when labour displacement creates surplus labour way beyond these functional requirements of capital.
The explosion of interest in AI, notwithstanding the hype, indicates society has been and is increasingly at such a threshold. Well-heeled consultancy companies, hired prize-fighters of capital, warn their paymasters about the profound labour-displacing capacities of new technologies now and in the not so distant future, across mental and manual labour, from the lower-skilled to the higher professional.
But where, one might ask, is this mass surplus/idle labour today? Where is the mass unemployment problem? We can say this too is one of those worst-kept secrets the capitalist class is forced to manage rather than allow large-scale unemployment to surface, for three reasons:
- The capitalist state would need to increase taxes on profits, and/or accumulate increased borrowing/debt to manage the bourgeoning costs of unemployment benefits.
- Large-scale unemployment would lead to large-scale resistance and calls for more radical solutions (from the perspective of capitalists) such as universal incomes of one sort or another that weaken the ties forcing workers to sell their labour-power.
- Large-scale unemployment would drastically reduce the capacity to consume the expanding realm of commodities to the point of crisis and stagnation.
Far better (for capital) if the available work is stretched by transforming contracts into more part-time, casual, impermanent, insecure jobs, which workers compete for and compete to escape from into the ‘promised land’ of more secure, higher-status work.
Hiding surplus labour in this way has been the focal point of state policy since the 1980s - facilitated by anti-trade union laws, privatisation, restructuring (breaking) public-sector institutions into an atomised internal market competing for resources, the deregulation of employment contracts and - last, but not least - the revolving door of strictly means-tested workfare benefits.
Stretching labour to hide the reality of large swathes of unemployment has also gone hand-in-glove with the management of capital displacement (which now may itself be breached re AI). The most crucial issue has been how to square the impact on workers’ capacity to consume all this precarity, and this has been mostly ‘resolved’ (in the short term at least) by the mountains of debt made available to maintain consumption now, with the promise it can be paid for in the future.
Trade unions are certainly fighting a valiant rearguard action against cuts to the system - but these fall far short of the radical change required. A significant number of those at the ‘coalface’ - students and academics - will be aware of the limits of the education system and open to more radical change. Socialists should, as a minimum, resist cutbacks and closures, but with awareness that the real defence of education must be directed towards education for the pursuit of knowledge and creative potential per se. A transitional demand would be to break links the labour movement may have with the chimerical aim of ‘advancing human capital’, push for free universal education and a universal wage for all.
All this in a world of surplus labour that is already banging on a door labelled ‘freedom from necessity’.