Students as workers

the government certainly wants to push the consumer aspect - or more specifically 'investing in your own knowledge capital - speculate to accumulate' etc

the change in fee structure means education isn't just pre-worker training, it's pre-worker training at the pre-worker's expense and risk.

what's your definition of proletarian, Alan?

There's also the 'client', or 'consumer' angle. I just had my dean lecture to me (don't ask why, long story) about how students are clients, and they (the faculty administration) have to run "the shop" efficiently, they can't have the client students complaining, etc.

that's a very strange way to define things, are CEO's proletarian? Do they have surplus value extracted? What is surplus value and form does it take?

something I've been thinking about for a while now. I don't know what the properly integral understanding of the student is but there are a couple of one-sided judgments that seem to fit.

i)student as commodity, produced by forces alien to him, previously subordinated to academic ideology (itself in a complicated relationship to capital) and nowadays increasingly to capital itself (restructing/rationalisation of the academy, cf. charles' clarke's "what is medievalism for?"). In this sense obviously possessing a moment of the proletarian condition but the character of student production is rather odd, being primarily self-production rather than economic production. Students certainly don't produce the world against themselves and the withdrawal of their labour doesn't attack the economy it just sabotages their own production process. Perhaps there are interesting parallels here with biopower-style critiques of the service economy?

Which leads us to ii)the university as site of the valorisation of social capital(perhaps the jargon is unnecessary here). from this angle the student is almost a petit-bourgeois proprietor (again, interesting relationship to late-capitalist labour?) of himself, as he seeks to secure for himself the relevant mannerisms, relationships, skills and so on to secure his social standing. This is too thin, and obviously is only intended as an objective & not subjective analysis. What I think it brings out is the extent to which the interest of students is objectively the continuation of the production process (insofar as we are talking //realistically// - the extent to which delusional/impossible dreams of subversion or human solidarity &c can take hold of the student body is obviously another issue). This is of particular concern if true for eg. strike action by lecturers, something which we at UCL are about to begin serious work on - perhaps I'll post something about soon. Also interesting w/ regard to France which has 5-yearly student revolts which always last from christmas til the Easter holidays then fall apart as the exams approach.

iii)finally (perhaps) there is the student as future-worker. There are not that many jobs around corresponding to the level of education of graduates. After three years of sociology, psychology, literature and so on (obviously mainly arts degrees) most people are going to be ending up in more-or-less normal jobs, working long and hard to pay off their debts, under attack from the boss & behind him capital, etc. How far this future-fact has any present reality, can serve to mobilise, is a I think up for question. Not much, I expect. even if you know that university is just a last gasp of relative freedom before work starts in earnest, the tendency is always to accept that and make what one can from that period, rather than seriously thinking about the future. eh.

when I get tired I write too much rather than failing to write at all. Sorry for length - can't be bothered editing it.

I think Aufheben made a fairly good critique of the "we are all workers in the social factory" line in their Cleaver-review some issues ago.

from http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/auf_11_operaismo.html

that all seems fairly spot on - not sure if it contradicts anything I said?

the one problem with this is that more and more of the proletariat is finding itself in work that requires nothing more than these sort of "qualifications";

Furthermore this

is not only increasingly bullshit, what with many graduates finding themselves stuck in dead end jobs but overlooks the proletarianisation of previous graduate jobs like teaching and research. Infact in terms of income a great many students will not reach the wages of skilled labour has done in the past.

This is where I think Aufheben hit a stumbling block, their rejection of the social factory and their desire to hold on to some sort of objective category of surplus value, use value and exchange value in the face of what they view as "postmodern bullshit", leads them to make statements that are little more than rhetoric, such as this,

Has there ever been a simple "labour power", has there ever been a labour power reproduced not infused with ideological values, with reproducing hierarchy and division? And if we take such a stance is it only the most marginalised unskilled workers or unemployed who carry the proletarian spirit?

I think revol's comment here leads to another point: that the occupational structure, and the class position of occupations is fluid due to the constant changes wrought by capitalism, and in particular, the tendencies toward proletarianization of occupations on the class edge, so to speak, like RNs and teachers. we have to avoid looking at things in a static way. there is a big fuzzy boundary along the class line because of what capital does to occupations and work. there are in the USA capitalist consultancies that go around to school boards to sell them packages that will provide pre-cooked curricula that, with the huge emphasis on testing nowadays, destroy the "professional autonomy" of the teacher. think of the way that taylorism was used in the early 1900s to destroy remaining artisanal autonomy.

That said, teachers do tend to have an elitist stance towards other educational workers, at least in the USA, and this reflects the meritocratic ideology that is characteristic of the professionals and managers, as a class, and credentials fit in with this as their ticket that shows their alleged "superiority" (even tho there is often little evidence of relationship between work performance and these credentials). in the USA the huge inflation in prices for higher education in recent decades make access for working class students more difficult. the system only has so many slots in the professional/managerial class that students are being groomed for, so they have no need to pump more of the working class into these universities...if it results in more workers with more education and a bigger gap between expectations and reality.

t.

I think we're throwing together a few questions here. Do students produce surplus value? Are students workers? Are students working class? And are students likely to be part of the working class that will become "for itself" and fight against capitalism? The quick answer would be: no, no, some and some.

Students as students (that is to say, not as paid TAs or in the night jobs) don't produce surplus value. They aren't wage-laborers who are made to work for longer than is needed to reproduce their labor power. As students they aren't workers at all. Students can't strike and withold their labor power--which is not to say that "student strikes" (which are really walk-outs) are not effective, but they should not be confused with strikes.

Still, while students are not workers, they may be "working class". I would say you have to look at the class background and class future of those students. It seems to me one of the reasons that identity politics is so strong in universities is that for students your class is to a large extent your parent's class. I would agree with some of the arguments made so far about the proletarianization of students though. At least in the US, a lot of people working shitty jobs these days have a college degree. (On a side note, I have found that the one real skill I learned from my pointless cultural studies degree (bullshitting) has transferred over well onto waiting tables, where I have to bullshit customers to buy more

The last point is will students be part of the "class for itself". I would say that those who come from working class backgrounds and are more likely to end up in working class jobs will be more likely to be. But people don't rebel simply because surplus value is extracted from them. Unemployed people, cashiers, some soldiers, will hopefully be on our side in struggle, but they don't produce surplus value. Even being functionally a wage laborer is not what makes people rebel. It's all the shit that tends to go with being a wage laborer: doing boring repetitive tasks, doing shit you don't care about, having someone over you bossing you around, stress and being pushed to do things faster and faster, the physical and mental pain of it not to mention poverty. These kinds of things are imposed all over capitalist society, not only on wage laborers. Some definitely happen to students. But that doesn't mean they're workers or produce surplus value. (A student strike is not as disruptive of business as a transport strike.) There is a lot of variation in students, and you'd have to do a more specific analysis to see where what kinds of misery are imposed on them and therefore which ones are likely to rebel and make common cause with the workers. I would say you have to do the same kind of analysis on various kinds of teachers (who are formally wage laborers) to see if they are middle class or working class.

With all that said, generally speaking, I agree with the Aufheben statement.

Unless you go down the marcusian road of students and other social groups being somehow 'outside' the social relations of capital or somesuch nonsense then obviously a student is a worker. Whther the degree directly leads to work or not it is still a part of the economy. Students not doing full time jobs fills up the part time sector with young people prepared to take shit wages, because they beleive they'll get better wages in the end, or because they are spared the full social cost of life by being kept in a campus shaped bubble also it alleviates pressure on the rest of the labour market. It is not correct therefore to view a students university life, and their role in the economy as a part time worker as seperate. Plus a student will generally repay the cost of their degree at some point, thus a degree is a social wage, something given in exchange for future labour, so to claim the student is a 'consumer' is deeply flawed.

tHmnm i'm not so sure on that definition. I'd say that considering the latin source of the word proletraiat is worth doing, since the roman mob was one constituing largely of the unemployed, with a smattering of artisans and casualised workers and it certainly didn't directly produce much surplus value as a labour force, yet obviously it produced social value.

tend to agree with both ^

the aufheben thing seems out of date. i mean i did a business degree which was explicitly there to produce "the managers of the future", and the class composition was by no means overwhelmingly 'middle class' and the jobs people got afterwards were often general office stuff (one guy became a stockbroker, most people got jobs like me, fiddling with spreadsheets all day). there were waaay more graduates than graduate jobs.

this may be to do with the fact such a large proportion of the population goes to uni now (quite possibly skewed against the lower-paid sections of the working class, but that doesn't mean if you aren't perma-skint and living on a council estate you're not working class, unless you buy into Blairite ideology), whereas previously it was more for a minority being groomed for social management functions.

but it's a little problematic to talk about students in general as workers, we can perhaps say the role of student is an essential one for the self-valorization of capital - but the same is true of the role of management and directors etc. however, in a bipolar social relationship between the ideal poles of pure capital and completely dispossessed prole, students are clearly nearer the prole end than management etc, as degrees are so widespread now the knowledge doesn't even constitute a self-owned psuedo-means of production so much as a necessary precondition to compete in the labour market.

couple this with the marketisation of education which makes p/t work essential for many students (we thus can't separate waged work and essay writing - both are necessary to the role of student), and we could say something like "the role of student is increasingly a proletarian one, consisting essentially of intense on-the-job training at the workers' expense - the fact some students become capitalist functionaries no more changes this than the fact some workers become petit-bourgeois or entrepreneurs"

The problem with arguing that "we are all workers in the social factory" is that it glosses over actually existing differences within the workforce. While no jobs can be completely reduced to "simple labor power", some jobs come pretty close, such as assembly line workers whose every movement can be calculated down to fractions of a second. As has been pointed out by many, an increasing number of former middle class jobs are being proletarianized, such as clerical workers being reduced to punching numbers in front of a computer all day. But if we argue that we are all equally proletarian because we are all subordinate to capital, the whole concept of proletarianization looses its meaning.

well that would be an idiotic thing to say, thankfully i've never suggested it. Just because we cannot have some measure of proletarianism against "surplus value extraction", and because we have to understand that the proletariat is a subjectivity doesn't mean you can just announce everyone is equally proletarian.

Students aren't workers.
Studentdom is a transitional kind of situation were you're not yet one thing or another. (This is why students can, if they're so inclined, kid themselves that they're something they're not - ie something that isn't really in their future, if u see what I mean. Course we can all kid ourselves about this to a degree.)
A lot of students will go on to become workers (increasingly so over the recent years), but a lot will join ambiguous middle-class type professions, and some, like James Wooley, will go on to lead the Tory party, or generally join the ruling class. So you can't class students as a group as workers.

The social factory idea is one I know fuck all about. My impression is it comes from clapped out Marxist academics trying to kid on they have something to say post May '68 etc. It may well be its origins are before that, I don't know. If they've tried to interpret students as workers, it wouldn't surprise me.
Personally, I've got no problem with old concepts like surplus value etc. Workers being wage-labourers havin surplus labour extracted still seems to describe the situation ok to me.

The arguments about students being overwhelmingly middle class is not only out of date it is also deceptive. Students are not a homogenous mass. I also wouldn't be surprised if the class composition of Aufheben affected their experience of universities. Go to the University of East London or something.
Graduates are earning less than ever and as Revol has said having a degree is becoming a standard thing. It's like saying A-levels are middle class based on the evidence of the 60s.

Capital is investing in students for it's own benefit, I didn't stop being a worker for a day when I went on a health and safety course.

ps there(s been no rioting in France this year and last year exams were put back due to anti-CPE stuff in ,any unis.

Oh for fucks sake this is just idiocy, by that logic anyone could potentially be a member of the ruling class in twenty years time so therefore can't be classed as a worker.
Plus what ambiguous professions would you be referring to? And why would you use the word 'middle class'? Its just sort of the vile nonsense terminology used by liberal sociologists that reinforces divisions within the proletariat and evades dealing with real class lines that exist in society.

Your right its an old concept, one that was fucking out of date in 1900. The whole point of proletarianisation is that it moves/moved from formal subordination to real subordination over time as capital expands.

Nicely put

You could argue - and I'm not sure whether I would or not, but hey -- that "student" as a seperate layer is society is either coming to an end, or is over.

When I was a student, there were full grants & tuition fees were paid. Thus, while I had holiday jobs & that, I didn't need to work during termtime, and I didn't leave university crippled with debt. In a sense, this was the boat that most students were in, even though how they arrived in that boat differed widely (some had rich parents, others didn't).

The attacks on grants, the introduction of student loans, and tuition fees undermines the coherence of students as a layer in society. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it's just something that (might be) true. It does, however, make organising students as students look a bit odd in a certain light, since working class students are pretty much proletarianised from the get go, and non-working class students have little or nothing in common with them.

This is me thinking on my feet, so feel free to shoot me down.

[What I've just written is pretty much informed by Gramsci's work on intellectuals, where he points out that the existence of a layer of "intellectuals" in society in contingent on a certain form of social organisation. All good, blindingly obvious stuff. ]

Well that's killed that thread.

It was deliberately ambiguous. .

I do think the middle class label is overstretched but at the same time there is no fucking way in hell that doctors, lawyers, architects and various strata of senior and middle management are not middle class, and many of those will have next to nothing in common in terms of social economic position as some jumped up provincial egg head like the button, or even my pretentious self.

That just works on so many levels.

i knew the button would love that, he just loves the whole working clarse provincial boy done good, overeduacted and cynical of the middle classes bosom which presents itself to him.

You've met the mrs then?

if your missus heard you interpret "it" in relation to her what would she say and more importantly how many weeks would you be picking Judith Butler out of your arse for?