Empire Goes to College
On Gigi Roggero’s The Production of Living Knowledge (Temple University Press)
Recent college graduates seem to have more debt than marketable skills. Could this actually be a good thing?
In a speech at the 2011 Left Forum in New York, British journalist Paul Mason described the bleak prospect confronting many graduating students in the rich countries of the world:
In my generation students had a liberal education, we didn’t pay for our education, we had a lot of time, we didn’t have to work, and we got jobs. Now, students are a key part of the workforce. Their casual labor keeps the coffee bars going, the cocktail bars going. They are part of an education industry, some tens of billions of dollars’ worth in the world. It’s a straight swap: You pay this, you get this commodity called a degree or a higher degree. They’re pretty crucial to the financial system: Citigroup alone made $200 million from its student-loan book in 2007. They’re tested to within an inch of their lives, every month, every year. The jobs they get are like indentured labour. “Wow, you get a job for a consultancy firm. I only have to stay with them for three years.”
Their life was going to be better, and now it looks like it’s going to be worse.
During the Golden Age of postwar welfare capitalism, young intellectuals and students in the universities were a relatively privileged class. They enjoyed a measure of ease and bohemian freedom that is scarcely imaginable to the grad students and adjuncts in today’s university. As Jeffrey J. Williams observes in an essay on intellectuals in an article at Dissent, “Gone is the relaxed, privileged way of life, whereby one got a job because one’s adviser made a phone call, and one received tenure on the basis of two or three articles and had a decade to mull over a book.”
The neoliberal transformation didn’t stop at the campus’s edge. As academic labor is increasingly defined by its precarious nature (more than 50 percent of teaching in higher education is now done by part-timers — over two-thirds in English departments), the university no longer constitutes a bulwark against the imperious demands of the market. As the economic crisis and the defunding of public higher education bear down ever more strongly on young people, we are confronted with the emergence of a hybrid figure — the student/worker with an average of $24,000 in student loan debt and a string of unstable, poorly paying jobs stretching to the horizon.
It is this “double crisis” — the interconnected crises of the global economy and the contemporary university — that Italian scholar-activist Gigi Roggero analyzes in The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. A leading member of the Edufactory and Uninomade collectives, Roggero situates his critique within the tradition of Italian autonomist Marxism, or post-Operaismo (“workerism”). Since its emergence in postwar Italy, autonomism has always been something of a heretical current within the larger body of Marxist thought. Its leading theorists — Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and Antonio Negri, among others — eschew the defeatism that is prevalent on the left and see revolutionary openings where others see only passivity and defeat. Their starting point is the “Copernican revolution” in Marxist thought instigated by Tronti, who argued that capitalist development is an ex post reaction to active working-class struggles for autonomy. Instead of the playthings of history, workers assume a heroic posture in the autonomist imagination, constituting the dynamic and creative side of the labor-capital dialectic. Unlike most other revolutionary Marxists, autonomists also reject the state, the party, and the trade union in favor of unmediated manifestations of working-class struggle that bypass all hierarchical and representative structures and refuse the imposition of work itself.
