[p2p-research] Explaining the paradox: why is the “information society” destroying universities and precarizing knowledge workers?

[Michel Bauwens]

some may find this interesting, since it explains our social conditions:,
original at http://occupyeverything.com/features/come-on-cognitarians/


Explaining the paradox: why is the “information society” destroying
universities and precarizing knowledge
workers?<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/explaining-the-paradox-why-is-the-information-society-destroying-universities-and-precarizing-knowledge-workers/2010/07/27>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
27th July 2010

 Bizarrely, the number of good white collar jobs seems to be shrinking as
the knowledge economy grows.

*Brian Holmes* reports<http://occupyeverything.com/features/come-on-cognitarians/>
:

(excerpted with new subtitles)

*“Check out “The Structure and Silence of the Cognitariat,” an article by a
UC Santa Barbara professor named Christopher Newfield. It’s a great piece,
clear, concise and packed full of pertinent things you probably don’t know
(find it in the edu-factory journal). *

*Against the backdrop of the ongoing budget crisis of the University of
California, he asks why knowledge societies like the US, Germany or France
would chronically underfund their universities? Aren’t they the crucial
institutions of cognitive capitalism, and maybe even of financially driven
globalization? The seeming paradox is that while the old industrial
corporations needed large numbers of college graduates to perform their
management functions – a need most willingly fulfilled by the publics
universities of the 50s and 60s – the New Economy flagships like Microsoft,
with their pure brainpower products, have managed to severely restrict the
numbers of salaried intellectual workers they employ, mainly by the use of
temp contracts and outsourcing schemes. Similarly but more shockingly wheen
you first find out about it, the universities themselves employ an average
of 70% short-term contractuals and grad students to teach their
undergraduate classes. If you want to see what direction the whole operation
is headed, definitely watch the PBS Frontline reportage on “College, Inc.”
which was still an eye-opener for me despite lots of reading on these
subjects. There you see vocational business schools raking in big money for
often fraudulent degrees. What you don’t hear a lot about anymore are real
careers. Bizarrely, the number of good white collar jobs seems to be
shrinking as the knowledge economy grows.*

** Three different types of knowledge workers*

*Newfield finds the solution to the paradox in the practices of knowledge
management that began to be employed in the 1990s, at the time when massive
numbers of kids who had grown up with the intellectual technologies of
computers and the Internet just started coming on the job market. He quotes
a suit named Thomas A. Stewart who makes a distinction between three
different categories of knowledge. The first and lowest forms of knowledge
are “commodity skills” like typing quick and talking nicely on the phone –
skills which are easily obtained, add no value to the firm, require no
particular concern for the employee and should be outsourced from the
get-go. Next are “leveraged skills” requiring a lot of advanced education
(my old standby of translation would be one, but computer programming is the
classic example). These kinds of skills (“leveraged,” I suppose, by all the
borrowing the owner did to acquire them) do add some value to the firm, but
they can still can be codified, routinized, maybe even partially robotized,
and rapidly gotten out of the way just like the others. What that leaves are
“proprietary skills,” i.e. “the company-specific talents around which an
organization builds a business.” These are the only kind that really matter,
because they allow the firm to develop and own intellectual property, build
a brand and cash in on some rare, secretly produced and closely guarded
service. Now the hidden structure of the cognitariat leaps into view. The
financial discipline of the firm requires it to make the distinction between
the three types of knowledge, and to treat its employees accordingly. In the
best of cases it can even practice “open innovation” which entails giving up
entirely on in-house researchers or creatives and simply scanning the
available knowledge resources, typically found in public universities, whose
production can be creamed off at will for the price of a few small grants,
maybe an endowed chair or a piece of fancy equipment. Under this scenario,
the predatory strategy of the corporation is complete. Only the top
researchers, managers and marketers will take home a real salary.*

*The new hierarchy of knowledge workers in the firm is bound up, in its
turn, with much broader transformations. Christopher Newfield is also the
author of an essential book entitled Unmaking the Public University: The
Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008). Briefly put, his thesis is
that with the expanded educational entitlements of the post-WWII period, the
US began developing an enlarged, fully multicultural middle class that was
potentially hegemonic and that began to transform society in its own diverse
and complex image. In this new formation (which is described in a lot of
cultural studies work) working class traditions and more recent immigrant
cultures begin to fuse into a democratic hybrid, sustained by the models of
success and the possibilities of self-invention that arose in the public
universities. A new kind of language and even a new common sense emerge,
dubbed “PC” by its critics and symbolized, in literary terms, by a complex
artifact like I, Rigoberta Menchu, the oral history of a Guatemalan peasant
activist as told to a metropolitan researcher with a microphone and a
publishing contract. The conservative Right bitterly hated this kind of
leftist talk-literature. But there was a little more to the opposition than
a question of taste. What we called the “culture wars” of the late 80s and
early 90s, says Newfield, was in fact the spearhead of a concerted attack by
older elites against this new, radically democratic class formation – an
attack that culminated with the dominance of neoliberal and then
neoconservative ideology, the skyrocketing inequality of our own time and
now the massive expropriation of middle- and working-class savings in the
infamous “financial crisis.” The book repeats this fascinating thesis maybe
once too often, but it is a goldmine of precise economic and sociological
information for anyone interested in contemporary managerial techniques and
the politics of education in the USA.*

** The three-tiered university system*

*Working from this perspective, Newfield now suggests that we have a
three-tiered university system. First come the top twenty private schools
like Harvard and Yale, or the Ivy League Plus, that educates around 1% of
the society. Next, “a group of about 150 colleges and universities that are
‘selective’ and have good reputations outside their local area.” And
finally, some 3,500 institutions of sort-of higher learning for the hoi
polloi, offering degrees with no particular value on the job market. At this
point the scholarly author gets uncharacteristically angry, plays another
very jarring French chord and claims that our society now resembles nothing
so much as the Ancien Régime with its “Three Estates,” or stratified social
standings. The First Estate, corresponding to the old aristocrats, is the
top 0.1% of Americans who are essentially the bankers and financiers whose
activities are described so well by Albo, Gindin and Panitch – the ruling
class if you don’t mind me sayin’. The Second Estate, corresponding to the
clergy of olden times, are the top 1% who earn over $350,000 a year. These
are the upper votaries of capital and the state, who speak “technical
languages of law, management and finance that are largely indecipherable
even to highly educated non-specialists, and maintain an invisible empire of
ownership structures and lucrative transactions whose existence makes itself
known only through occasional disasters like the 2008 financial meltdown.”
Mon Dieu! The Third Estate – le Peuple – are the rest of us, crammed into
the vast category of the powerless and the silent despite the huge
differences between the top 20% who are still “middle class” and all the
rest who do not just worry over the “fear of falling,” but rather, get the
experience of being pushed off the cliff and feel the indignity of not being
able to pay their rent or their mortgage in the richest country in the
world.*

*What I’m trying to get at is that the budgetary crisis and the conditions
of precarious living that afflict knowledge workers are tightly entangled
with and also sharply cut off from the directive actions of the financial
elites who just robbed the country and strengthened their own positions in
the process. What’s happening in the US is a sweeping and carefully
concerted operation, not to resolve any of the major social and ecological
problems that are staring us in the face, but to assure a strict separation
of the classes. The divide is not into the traditional Three Estates that
make for great satire, but instead into at least five groups: the
aristocratic super-rich; the high priesthood of technocrats and traders; the
merchant class who sell their soul to placate their fear of falling;
everyone else on the roller coaster down to the bottom; and finally, the new
immigrants who believe they can climb this weird human ladder (at least
until they get to the state of Arizona).*

*So here’s another paradox: quite a large number of us in the third and
fourth and fifth estates are well educated, we can speak all the languages
we need. Tell me, what explains the silence of the lambs? *

*Newfield doesn’t answer his own implicit question, except to say that in
the advanced economies “the knowledge worker masses are still middle class
on a world scale,” or in other words, they still have a long way to fall.
Maybe, but an earthquake just happened and the cliff came a lot closer. What
he criticizes in the theories of the Multitudes group is an excess of rosy
optimism: the belief that an inherent contradiction of the knowledge economy
would necessarily produce a revolt against its particularly well-constructed
structure of injustice. Point well taken. With a fairly good grasp of the
American scene I always felt exactly the same, and eventually I found myself
on the political fault line that eventually split up the journal in two,
right in the middle of the financial crisis in 2008. Yet like my autonomist
friends and like Newfield, I still think some kind of mobilization of
educated workers is necessary, desirable and maybe the most passionately
inspiring thing you can do today, if starting from where you are means
figuring out what to make of your scientific, technical, or cultural skills
and your university education. Amid the bewildering complexity of the
predatory knowledge economy, what’s missing is an active egalitarian and
ecological critique of the owning and managing classes, a critique that does
not remain locked away in the university but reaches out to the rest of
society. That’s what we can build in the wake of the budgetary crisis, now
that the new lines of inclusion and exclusion have been drawn and the
writing on the wall is legible to practically everyone. The least you can
say is that it’s getting urgent – after the lies of the Bush era, Katrina,
the bailouts and the foreclosures, the Copenhagen debacle, the BP disaster
that’s directly attributable to the pressures of neoliberal financial
management, etc etc etc. The question is how to do it, when the traditional
centers of education are so deeply instrumentalized?*

*According to Newfield we need a two-track strategy, the first of which
should reveal “the hidden subsidies through which the Third Estate and its
institutions support the other two – in many case, the ways by which public
universities support private industry.” He warns that this first strategy
may set off an internal civil war among the top faculty in research
universities, which I guess is supposed to indicate how difficult this track
will be to follow. The other strategy is “to re-imagine and articulate the
broad social and cultural missions that will flow from the other nine-tenths
of knowledge workers… whose ideas about diversity, equality, justice,
technology for use, sustainable development and so many others are essential
to the indirect modes through which knowledge and education create social
value beyond that which economics can measure.” That sounds easier, to the
extent that it can be done not only or maybe not even primarily inside the
universities, but in self-organized seminars, affinity groups, clubs,
artists’ collectives, cultural scenes, hacker labs and so forth, where the
diverse languages of society mingle and knowledge circulates, hybridizes,
throws off its old skins and moults into new colors. But this time, let’s
try to find a path between the dark black cynical pessimism of typical
American critics and that rosy Multitudes stuff I mentioned just before.
Something more than a snap of the fingers is needed to delegitimate an
extended technocracy that holds all the cards of power in its many active
hands. If you look around, you’ll see that the sites of self-organized
education and action in American society are very few, very fragmented, and
far too often lacking in the subtle kind of creative focus that can at once
rise to the level of the problems that face us, and not get co-opted into
the very jargons and structures they seek to challenge. As the public
universities are downsized (or really, expropriated) under the disciplinary
pressure of the current budget crisis, an entire social process is waiting
to be invented.”*


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