Amia Srinivasan, Heidegger and the University strike

Amia Srinivasan writes in the LRB

Despite the Tory government’s campaign to transform higher education from a public good into a private concern, students are not customers, not yet, and we who teach them are not sellers of commodities, not yet.

Srinivasan is a Philosopher- i.e. she teaches, for pay, a subject which created by a rich guy called Plato who opened a School called the Academy, which charged fees to wealthy students.  Philosophy was a commodified service provided through the market- just like the skills imparted by Sophists or Wrestling Coaches or Dance Masters.

This is not to say that a Feudal Lord, or the Church, or a Nation State could not use tax revenue or other types of rents to fund Higher Education. In this case, teachers- when not slaves, where paid through the market though students were accepted or rejected on the basis of the 'command' of whoever was authorizing expenditure on their education.

A public good- in Economics- is one which is non rival and non excludable. This means, if it is supplied to one person, no one else can be excluded from gaining it. The Academy, speaking generally, operates in the opposite manner. Worthwhile courses are likely to be oversubscribed and so educational opportunities are rationed either on the basis of price or merit or some combination of the two.

Marx clarified that commodities exist even where there is no market. Engels' theory of 'simple commodity production' refers to a situation where a good or service may be produced for self-consumption- the possibility of exchange not having been contemplated. Plato may well have exchanged instruction in Philosophy for instruction in Mathematics. This would be a case of 'simple commodity exchange'.

After the Second World War, Britain rationed Higher Education mainly through the State, not the Market. Thatcher did not do much to reverse this outcome, though one or two Private Colleges and one Private University came up. It was under Labor that the American model was adopted. Market based commodification was considered the best way to transform the British working class into a highly skilled and highly productive workforce able to compete with other advanced countries in an increasingly Knowledge based Global Economy.

Srinivasan says 'teachers (at British Universities) are not sellers of commodities.' This is not the case. They sell teaching services to a College or University in return for a salary. The students pay the College or University or else their fees are tendered by some Charitable or other body. Universities could be disaggregated so that they resemble what obtained in ancient times. Scholars would contract with individual teachers for tutoring in their specialty. Indeed, there is a flourishing market for Private Tutors in the United Kingdom.

Srinivasan's article is motivated by her experiences during the recent strike of University staff in England.

We are still participants in the project of the university: a project of free and collaborative inquiry, of mutual respect, of imagination. The fact that most academic labour is not yet entirely alienated – that even now it contains a spirit of vocation and reciprocity – generates a seeming paradox.

If it is true that 'academic labor is not yet alienated' in some respect then it must be the case that Academics are not proletarians. They are not engaged in Class Struggle. They may go on strike for the same reason that oligarchs may order a 'lock-out' or embargo. Though they themselves may become richer or benefit in some other way by industrial action, what they are doing goes against the interests of the working class.

In striking, lecturers apparently double down on the logic of commodification we seek to resist: we become waged workers in a dispute with our bosses, the anger of our student-customers a means to improving our conditions.

What makes the strike of academics reprehensible is that its members belong to the privileged class with respect to the commodity whose supply they seek to restrict in a manner which harms no one save those who aspire to a like privilege.

But it is in fact the refusal to strike – invariably defended as a form of teacherly concern – that betrays both our students and the university we share with them.

Fascists may equally well argue that the refusal to kill Trade Unionists and Socialists and Jews represents a betrayal of the working class because Trade Unions and Socialist Idealogues and people inspired by the Jewish Faith are, in some occult manner, working against the interests of the 'sons of the soil'.

When people insist that the university is simply a place of love, and not also a place of work, they offer cover to exploitation – of staff, of students, and of the ideals of the university itself.

When people insist that the Nation is simply a place of love- not a place where Leftists and Jews and Homosexuals are pitilessly massacred- they offer cover to exploitation of gullible sons of the soil by plausible rogues intent on collectivizing rectums for the unholy purpose of politically correct sodomy.

Last week, one of my philosophy colleagues showed up at the picket line in front of Exam Schools, I assumed to cross it. (Earlier that week I had seen another philosophy lecturer shuffle out of the building with what I would like to think was shame; he had been delivering a lecture on ethics.)

Philosophy lecturers should shuffle around with a hang dog air because their lectures on Ethics are utterly shite. But this is not the reason Amia herself attributes to his abject appearance. She thinks he felt ashamed for crossing a picket line so as to do the job he was paid for and serve the students who looked to him for instruction.

If Amia thinks the lecturer should feel shame because he let down his colleagues and thus may have contributed to their getting a smaller pay award, then she should say so. Why does she mention Marxist notions like 'commodification' (i.e. production for exchange) or 'alienation'? Such notions do not apply to those in so privileged a position that they have a great surplus of the thing in comparison to those who are paying dearly to acquire a portion of it.

Why is Amia pretending to understand Marxist economics? Earlier in her article she mentioned a 'teach-out' she attended. This supplies us a clue as to her motivation.

Last Wednesday, at a time when I would have been delivering an undergraduate lecture on feminism, my students organised a teach-out on some of the themes of the course: capitalism, work and reproduction. I sat at the back of a crowded seminar room in Balliol College – the Oxford colleges don’t recognise the UCU, which means that when we strike it is only with respect to our university, not college, contracts – and listened as students spoke about wages for housework and sex work, marketisation and commodification, Rosa Luxemburg and Silvia Federici.

I suppose this article is Amia's attempt to profit by the instruction her students, very kindly, accorded her.

She goes on to speak of another Lecturer whose action she admires-

He was supposed to be delivering an undergraduate lecture on metaphysics and epistemology. Instead he put on an armband and took some leaflets. As his students came out of the lecture hall, confused by his absence, he handed them leaflets and spoke to them about the strike. He was still their teacher, just teaching them something new. Those who insist that striking lecturers do not love their students fail to see that love can still be work, and that the picket can be a classroom.

 Nobody insists that 'striking lecturers do not love their students'- though, more often than not, it is a case of sexual harassment simply. What we insist on is that people we pay to do some work for us actually do that work, not love us immensely while remaining bone idle. The picket can be a classroom- but one where the only thing one learns is how to picket. Similarly a Philosophy classroom can't be a picket- even if it is presided over by a cretinous bully like Angana Chatterji- because it does not represent a collective action in restraint of trade.

Heidegger, it will be remembered, welcomed Hitler's ascent to Power and, as Rector of Freiburg, happily presided over the expulsion of Jewish students and faculty. How did he justify himself? The answer is that he, like Amia, invokes a doctrine of necessity which is superior to Knowledge which the latter must bow down to.

Heidegger says

' An old story was told among the Greeks that Prometheus had been the first philosopher. Aeschylus has this Prometheus utter a saying that expresses the essence of knowing: τέχυη δάυάγκης άσ ϑєυєστέρα µακρώ (Prom. 514, ed. Wil). “Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.” That means that all knowing about things has always already been surrendered to the predominance of destiny and fails before it. Precisely because of this, knowing must unfold its highest defiance. Only then will the entire power of the concealedness [Verborgenheit ] of what is rise up and knowing will really fail. In this way, what is opens itself in its unfathomable inalterability and lends knowing its truth.

In this article, we see Amia being seduced by a Heideggerean motif which, sadly, had a corollary in the mischegoss of the Left. The notion here is that 'positive' knowledge, commodified and supplied by Colleges competing with each other for customers, must yield to some dark force- a materialistic determinism whose chthonic roots are inaccessible to the Academy's Promethean leaps or Apollonian flights- and thus only by becoming 'negative' can knowledge bitterly partake of the truth of Being- by way of the detour of a futile struggle for which it is entirely un-equipped.

What is the truth of the matter? Services suffer from 'Baumol Cost disease'. As Baumol came to recognize this can be overcome by export based specialization. The UK will see a shakeout of substandard 'generalist' Institutions and courses. But it will retain, by reason of acquired advantage, plenty of high paying specialist Institutions imparting marketable skills or efficient 'market signals' to students of various descriptions. But, in Higher Education, you will see few whose habitus is Lower class. There may have been a time when the garbage man and the lollipop lady coveted PhDs in Gramscian Grammatology, but those days have long passed.