Education in the Age
of Financialization
Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato
University of Illinois
2013
Neoliberalism and finance
capitalism
The shadow economy
Neoliberalism and finance
capitalism
• The rise of neoliberalism is explained by the growing
role and power of finance in the political economy of
capitalism
• "...neoliberalism is the expression of the desire of a
class of capitalist owners and the institutions in which
their power is concentrated, which we collectively call
'finance,' to restore ... the class's revenues and
power...” -- Dumenil and Levy (2004, 1-2)
• Financialization is result of neoliberal restructuring but
has deeper roots -- David M. Kotz (2008)
Finance Capitalism
• Not just quantitative expansion but change in
nature of financial institutions that jettisoned
its traditional loan-making functions to
pursue the creation and sale of its own
financial instruments
• Neoliberalism, beginning 1980 in US,
encourage a shift from state-regulated
capitalism to deregulated neoliberal
capitalism
Financialisation is a systematic
transformation of capitalism
1.
the massive expansion of the financial sector where finance companies have
taken over from banks as major financial institutions and banks have moved
away from old commercial banking practices to operate directly in capital
markets as investment bankers;
2.
large previously non-financial multinational corporations have acquired new
financial capacities to operate and gain leverage as investors in financial
markets;
3.
domestic households have become players in financial markets (the
ascendancy of shareholder capitalism) taking on debt and managing assets;
4.
in general, this change represents the dominance of financial markets and
institutions over a relative declining production of the traditional industrial,
productive or real economy
5.
Financialisation is a cultural change in ideology about unregulated markets
that infuses all policies
New Forms of Capitalism
Cultural, algorithmic, symbolic, bioinformational, educational
New forms of Capitalism
‘Cybernetic capitalism’ is a term we use in order to
distinguish a group of theories, or, better, positions, on the
Left that attempt to theorize the nature of the new
capitalism under neoliberalism. These are "models" that
can be characterized by associated literatures.
1.Informational capitalism
2.Cultural capitalism
3.Cognitive capitalism
4.Finance capitalism
5.Biocapitalism
1. Informational capitalism
The nature of information/knowledge ‘Informational’, ‘Digital’, ‘Virtual’, ‘Cyber’,
‘Fast’, ‘High-tech’ Castells, Shiller, Morris-Suzuki, Schmiede, Fuchs
•
•
•
Informational capitalism: Castells sees informationalism as a new
technological mode of development characterized by “information
generation, processing, and transmission” that have become “the
fundamental sources of productivity and power” (Castells 2000: 21).
Morris-Suzuki (1997) and Schmiede (2006a, b) have used this term and
Christian Fuchs (2007) also writes of an informational capitalism of selfregulation.
Digital capitalism: Dan Schiller and Robert McChesney employ a
traditional Marxist political economy applied out of communication
theory to questions of ownership of global communications: “networks
are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist
economy as never before” (Schiller 2000: xiv). See also Peter Glotz,
(1999).
Cyber-Capitalism: Dyer Witheford, N. Cyber-Marx. Cycles and Circuits
of Struggle in high Technology Capitalism (1999)
1. Informational capitalism
•
Knowledge Capitalism: Michael A. Peters & Tina Besley, Building
Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of
Knowledge Capitalism (2006); Sheila Slaughter & Gary
Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (2004).
Fast capitalism: Ben Agger (1989; 2004) – Also see the journal
website of the same title.
•
Virtual capitalism: the “combination of marketing and the new
information technology will enable certain firms to obtain higher
profit margins and larger market shares, and will thereby
promote greater concentration and centralization of capital”
(Dawson & Foster, 1998, p. 63).
•
High-tech capitalism (Haug 2003), or informatic capitalism
(Fitzpatrick 2002) – to focus on the computer as a guiding
technology that transformed the productive forces of capitalism
and has enabled a globalized economy.
2. Cultural capitalism
The change of culture ‘new culture’, ‘knowing capitalism’, ‘new spirit’, ‘cultural
economy’
• New culture of capitalism: This strand emerges from
work in the ‘new geography’ and sociology and is
epitomized by Richard Sennett’s (2007) The Culture of
New Capitalism.
• Knowing Capitalism – Epitomized by Nigel Thrift’s
(2006) Knowing Capitalism.
• The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski, L. and E.
Chiapello (2005)
• Cultural economy, Michael Pryke and Paul du Gay
(2002)
3. Cognitive Capitalism
Immaterial Labor , ‘Cognitive capitalism’, ‘affective capitalism’’
• Cognitive Capitalism – ‘Affective Labour is a key
feature of the new mode of cognitive capitalism based
on immaterial labour. It is a key aspect of a strategy
based on autonomous peer production.
- Yann Moulier Boutang Le capitalisme cognitif : La
Nouvelle Grande Transformation, (2007);
- Vercellone C. (ed), Capitalismo cognitivo, (2006);
- De Angelis, M. and D. Harvie (2006) ‘Cognitive
Capitalism and the Rat Race: How capital measures
ideas and affects in UK higher education’
3. Cognitive capitalism
•
•
•
Immaterial Labor: Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Schizophrenia and Capitalism (1999); Negri & Hardt (2000: 290) argue that
contemporary society is an Empire that is characterized by a singular global
logic of capitalist domination that is based on immaterial labour.
With the concept of immaterial labour Negri and Hardt introduce ideas of
information society discourse into their Marxist account of contemporary
capitalism. Immaterial labour would be labour “that creates immaterial
products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or
an emotional response” (Hardt/Negri 2005: 108; cf. also 2000: 280-303), or
services, cultural products, knowledge (Hardt/Negri 2000: 290).
Affective Capitalism - Massumi, B. (n.d.) ‘The Future Birth of the Affective
Fact’; Immaterial and affective labor, Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben
Trott (Ephemera, 2007); Juan Martín Prada, ‘Economies of affectivity’ and
Michael Hardt ‘Affective Labor’ Semio-capitalism - Precarious Rhapsody.
Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, Franco
Bernadi (forthcoming)
4. Finance Capitalism
‘Financialization’
• Rudolf Hilferding, Finance
Capital. A Study of the Latest
Phase of Capitalist
Development. Ed. Tom
Bottomore (Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, 1981)
• Hilferding's Finance Capital
(Das Finanzkapital, Vienna:
1910) was "the seminal Marxist
analysis of the transformation
of competitive and pluralistic
'liberal capitalism' into
monopolistic 'finance capital'"
Rudolf Hilferding
Rudolph Hilferding Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest
Phase of Capitalist Development
Chapter 25, The proletariat and imperialism.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/ch25.htm
• "The socializing function of finance capital
facilitates enormously the task of
overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital
has brought the most importance branches
of production under its control, it is enough
for society, through its conscious executive
organ – the state conquered by the working
class – to seize finance capital in order to
gain immediate control of these branches of
production.”
“Contradictions of Finance Capitalism”
Richard Peet, Monthly Review, 63, 2011
• “Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards,
from production to finance; its sphere of operations has
expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe;
the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds;
and its control has extended to include ‘everything.’ We now
live in the era of global finance capitalism.”
• “Financialization has involved increasingly exotic forms of
financial instruments and the growth of a shadow-banking
system, off the balance sheets of the banks. The repeal of
the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 symbolized the almost
complete deregulation of a financial sector that has become
complex, opaque, and ungovernable.”
5. Biocapitalism & Biopolitics
"bioinformationalism"
• Biocapitalism: Based lososely on Foucault’s work on
governmentality and biopower, and Deleuze &
Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism
(1999);
• Rajan, K.S. Biocapital: The Constitution of
Postgenomic Life (2006);
• Eric Cohen (2006) “Biotechnology and the Spirit of
Capitalism”
•
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/biotechnol
ogy-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism
“Bio-informational capitalism”June 2012 vol. 110 no. 1
98-111
•
•
•
This essay builds on the literatures on ‘biocapitalism’ and
‘informationalism’ (or ‘informational capitalism’) to develop the concept
of ‘bio-informational capitalism’ in order to articulate an emergent form
of capitalism that is self-renewing in the sense that it can change and
renew the material basis for life and capital as well as program itself.
Bio-informational capitalism applies and develops aspects of the new
biology to informatics to create new organic forms of computing and
self-reproducing memory that in turn has become the basis of
bioinformatics.
The paper begins with a review of the successes of the ‘new biology’,
focusing on Craig Venter’s digitizing of biology and, as he remarks, the
creation of new life from the digital universe. The paper then provides a
brief account of bioinformatics before brokering and discussing the
term ‘bioinformational capitalism’.
Algorithmic Capitalism
http://truth-out.org/news/item/8887-algorithmic-capitalism-and-educational-futuresinformationalism-and-the-googlization-of-knowledge
•
•
•
“Algorithmic capitalism and its dominance of the market increasingly
across all asset classes has truly arrived.
It is an aspect of informationalism (informational capitalism) or
"cybernetic capitalism," a term that recognizes more precisely the
cybernetic systems similarities among various sectors of the postindustrial capitalist economy in its third phase of development - from
mercantilism, industrialism to cybernetics - linking the growth of the
multinational info-utilities (e.g., Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon) and their
spectacular growth in the last twenty years, with developments in
biocapitalism and the informatization of biology, and fundamental
changes taking place with algorithmic trading and the development of
so-called financialization.”
"Algorithmic Capitalism and Educational Futures: Informationalism and the Googlization
of Knowledge"
Algorithmic Trading and
Cloud Capitalism - May 6, 2010
•
"At 2:32 p.m., against this backdrop of unusually high volatility and
thinning liquidity, a large fundamental5 trader (a mutual fund complex)
initiated a sell program to sell a total of 75,000 E- Mini contracts (valued
at approximately $4.1 billion) as a hedge to an existing equity position (p.
2). The report indicates that liquidity crises ensued because a large
trader used an automated execution algorithm ('Sell Algorithm') that was
programmed to trade large volume (E-Mini contracts) with regard only to
volume rather than price or time and the Sell Algorithm was executed
rapidly in the period of twenty minutes resulting in one the three largest
single-day price movements in the history of the stock market. Under the
heading 'Lesson Learned' the Report suggests that 'under stressed
market conditions, the automated execution of a large sell order can
trigger extreme price movements, especially if the automated execution
algorithm does not take prices into account. Moreover, the interaction
between automated execution programs and algorithmic trading
strategies can quickly erode liquidity and result in disorderly markets.'"
6. New Forms of Educational
Capitalism
•
•
•
Privatization, corporatization and commericalization of education with emulation of
private sector management and global education as tradeable services (WTO;
TRIPPS).
Informatization & the postmodernization of education, the cultural archive &
production/consumption of knowledge.
Investment in human capital, key competencies and generic skills (since the
1960s, after Gary Becker's (1964) Human Capital.
• Emergence of the entrepreneurial self with investments at critical points in the
•
education career cycle - "responsibilization"
Distributed knowledge systems lessen costs of sharing of intellectual capital
(research), academic publishing (dissemination), courseware (instruction).
• Emergence of global online ‘borderless education’, rise of corporate virtual
education providers, and online courses for public universities.
New Forms of Educational
Capitalism (2)
•
Growth of charter schools, UK academies, home-schooling, informal and
24/7 professional education.
•
Emergence of the paradigm of social production (Benkler, 2006) where
co-production & co-creation characterizes ‘active learner-consumers’ and
‘citizen-consumers.’
•
Design principle best illustrated through maxim that ‘architecture is
politics’ and communication systems are a complex three tiers of
content, code and infrastructure where each level might be controlled
and owned or free.
•
Convergence of open source, open access and open education.
• Radical interpenetration of public and private educational spaces and
increasing dependency on technological fix.
•
•
•
•
•
Some Further Explorations of these
themes (1)
Peters, M.A. & Reveley, J. "Retrofitting Drucker: Knowledge Work Under
Cognitive Capitalism", Culture & Organization, 2012: iFirst, 1-17
Peters, M.A. "Manifesto for Education in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism:
Freedom, Creativity and Culture", Economics, Management, and Financial
Markets, 6(1), 2011, pp. 63–92.
Peters, M.A. "Bioinformational capitalism", Thesis Eleven, 110, 2012: 98111.
Peters, M.A. "Three Forms of the Knowledge Economy: Learning, creativity
and openness", Economics, Management and Financial Markets, 5(4),
2011: 63-92.
Peters, M.A. & Venkatesan, P. "Biocapitalism and the Politics of Life",
Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 2011, 2(2).
Some Further Explorations of these
themes (2)
• Peters, M.A.
& Venkatesan, P. "Bioeconomy and the Third Industrial
Revolution in the Age of Synthetic Life," Contemporary Readings in Law
and Social Justice, 2011, 2(2).
• Peters, M.A. and Bulut, E. (Eds.) Cognitive Capitalism, Education and the
Question of Digital Labor. New York, Peter Lang, 2011.
• Peters, M.A. Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the
Crisis of Capitalism. New York, Peter Lang, 2011.
• Peters, M.A., Britez, R.
& Bulut, E. Cybernetic Capitalism,
Informationalism, and Cognitive Labor, Geopolitics, History and
International Relations, 1 (2), 2010: 11-40.
• Peters,M.A. Educational, Science and Knowledge Capitalism. New York,
Peter Lang, 2013
Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor
Edited Michael A. Peters & Ergin Bulut (2011)
• “Algorithmic Capitalism
and Educational Futures:
Informationalism and the
Googlization of
Knowledge”
• “Educational futures require
a global transnational public
investment in infrastructures
that stand against both the
monopolization and
privatization of knowledge
and education.”
TruthOut
Truthout works to spark action by revealing systemic injustice and providing a platform for
transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis.
•
Speed, Power and the Physics of Finance Capitalism
•
Will Global Financialization and the Eurozone Debt Crisis Defeat European
Cosmopolitan Democracy?
•
In a Risk Society, Is Consumption Our Only Tool to Influence Our World?
•
Breaking Open the Digital Commons to Fight Corporate Capitalism
•
Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism
•
Knowledge Capitalism and the "Academic Spring"
•
Freedom, Openness and Creativity in the Digital Economy
Dimensions of Finance
Capitalism
Securitization and Derivatives
Financial and real wealth
McKinsey Global
Institutehttp://regulation.revues.org/docannexe/image/7729/img1.jpg
McKinsey Global Institute
$1.2 Quadrillion Derivatives Market
Dwarfs World GDP (2010)
•
One of the biggest risks to the world's financial health is the $1.2
quadrillion derivatives market. It's complex, it's unregulated, and it
ought to be of concern to world leaders that its notional value is 20
times the size of the world economy.
•
But traders rule the roost -- and as much as risk managers and
regulators might want to limit that risk, they lack the power or
knowledge to do so.
•
A quadrillion is a big number: 1,000 times a trillion.
•
Yet according to one of the world's leading derivatives experts,
Paul Wilmott, who holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from
Oxford University, $1.2 quadrillion is the so-called notional value of
the worldwide derivatives market.
•
To put that in perspective, the world's annual gross domestic
Videos
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4b_Dt1Mq-k
Real News - $1,200 Trillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs
World GDP
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq-FSI9x6fo
LIFE HIDDEN TRUTH 2013 GLOBAL FINANCIAL
CRISIS
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LWm6_6tA
The Crisis of Credit Visualized - HD
WALL STREET AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS:
Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, April 13, 2011
“In the fall of 2008, America suffered a
devastating economic collapse. Once
valuable securities lost most or all of
their value, debt markets froze, stock
markets plunged, and storied financial
firms went under. Millions of
Americans lost their jobs; millions of
families lost their homes; and good
businesses shut down. These events
cast the United States into an
economic recession so deep that the
country has yet to fully recover.”
•
High Risk Lending
•
Regulatory Failure
•
Inflated Credit Ratings
US Senate
Housing Bubble
Housing Bubble
Globalisation of finance
• Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and
globalization are themselves expressions of finance,
closely tied to the development of derivatives markets
and the evolution of an international financial system
where the international rentiers have managed to
significantly increase their share of national income
often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption and
widespread criminalisation of financial practices. The
current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire
capitalistic system based on interconnected global
financial markets.
Global interconnectedness of
finance
• There is a clear sense that the new technologies and
the financial instruments and techniques they have
made possible, have strengthened interdependencies
between markets and market participants, both within
and across national boundaries. As a result, a
disturbance in one market segment or one country is
likely to be transmitted more rapidly throughout the
world economy than was evident in previous eras
(Greenspan, 1998, p. 244).
Financialization of public
sphere
• This is a fundamental shift that represents the
financialization of the reproductive sphere of life itself.
Under this regime the monopolization and privatization
of knowledge and education has proceeded rapidly.
One of the effects of financialisation and the economic
crisis has been to popularize a debate on budget cuts
and "austerity politics" across the board for public
services provided at the state level with massive cuts to
education in all aspects, attacks on collective
bargaining, and the sacking of thousands of teachers.
Charlie Rose Interviews Charles Ferguson on his
documentary 'Inside Job’
Origins of “Credit Crunch”
(RBNZ)
• In 2007-08 the United States, followed by the rest of the
world, experienced a ‘credit crunch’ that, by late 2008, had
developed into the worst worldwide economic crisis since
the Second World War. Although New Zealand was in a
relatively good position, with a healthy banking system and
sound economic fundamentals, the country still entered a
prolonged recession
• Financial markets – places where loans and investments
could be traded as a commodity – became highly
sophisticated and expanded in depth during the last
decades of the twentieth century. By this time they were
computerised and linked world-wide, meaning that any
incident or event could be swiftly transmitted internationally.
(2)
• By mid-2007 it had become clear that the full value of many
of these loans was not recoverable. Loss of confidence in
sub-prime mortgages in the United States triggered a wave
of doubt regarding many of the loans, creating dysfunction
through the whole financial system. Terms like ‘toxic debt’
became commonplace, and countries such as Iceland
experienced very severe difficulties
• From mid-2008 the Bank also initiated sharp reductions in
the Official Cash Rate (OCR), the rate that anchors interest
rates for New Zealand. This had been sitting at slightly over
8 percent, but by early 2009 had dropped to around 2.5
percent, a very rapid rate of easing of interest rates
compared to normal standards
Marazzi, C. (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism
trans. K. Lebedeva. New York: Semiotext(e).
• This global crisis is a new type of crisis, “it is the
capitalist way of transferring to the economic order the
social and potentially political dimension, the dimension
of the resistances ripened during the phase leading up
to the cycle” (85). It is the first systemic and global
crisis of neo-liberal financial capitalism that began with
the crisis of the Fordist model of accumulation and the
consequent deregulation of the banking system during
the 1970s.
Financialization of Education
Student debt, charter schools, investment university
The Chain of Charter Schools
Charter schools
UK "Freedom" Academies
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMl2q-lfzvE
• Michael Gove invites all schools to apply to become
academies
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8wNCMTisc0
• Sponsored Academies in the UK - A Form of
Education Public Private Partnership
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E145YmDDJec&list
=PL0EA60F5417D47E52
• Academies Funding part 1, from 2013
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2uiGwaRojE
Michael Gove unveils sweeping school
reforms
•
•
•
•
•
Education white paper will shake up league tables, transform teacher
training and recruitment and 'shorten and simplify' rules for removing
incompetent teachers
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/24/michael-govesweeping-school-reforms
The education secretary, Michael Gove, has outlined plans to transform
teacher training and recruitment, shake up school league tables to focus
more on children's performance in academic subjects, and make it easier
for headteachers to remove poor teachers and exclude disruptive
children.
In a schools white paper published today ministers said government
funding would cease for graduates who did not have at least a 2:2
degree from September 2012, while the government would explore
paying off the student loans of graduates in shortage subjects who
wished to enter teaching.
For Michael Gove, the Pol Pot of education,
every year is Year Zero
•
•
Matthew Norman, http://www.independent.co.uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/matthew-norman-formichael-gove-the-pol-pot-of-education-every-year-is-year-zero8683331.html
• All intensive research unearths, in fact, is a pair of trifling putative tweaks
to the system. One is lengthening the school day and shortening the
holidays, to bring education into line with working life. The other,
revealed by this newspaper yesterday, is to outsource the running of
schools to profit-making businesses.
• In the utopian future that is Goveworld, the two might dovetail exquisitely.
The nation’s 11-year-olds would reach their desks at 6.30am and put in
two hours of Call Centre Studies, handling complaints about faulty
satellite dishes from angry account holders in Mumbai, before
conventional lessons begin. This has obvious appeal. Apart from the
financial benefits to the venture capitalists who have superceded the
board of governors, this would prepare children for the shifting balance of
economic power in the world they will inherit.
Everything you need to know about the student
borrowing bubble in 17 charts. By Matt
Phillipshttp://qz.com/78889/student-borrowing-bubble-in-17-charts/ $1 trillion in students loans
outsanding
, mortgagaes are the only form of debt Americans have more of
Student loans
College Cost Inflation in US
Unemployment of BAs
The Market for Student Loans
Fig 1
Private Student Loan in
Billions
Student Loans
Danny Weil on student debt
http://www.dailycensored.com/student-loans-the-financialized-economy-of-indentured-servitude/
•
“The financialization of the student loan debt occurs when
student loan debt is transformed into asset-backed securities
(ABS). The value and income payments from the ABS’s are
‘collateralized’ (“backed”) by a specified pool of underlying
assets. None of the ABS can be sold individually. This is why
they are sold to large institutional investors. By ‘pooling’ the
assets into ABS, this allows them to be sold to general
institutional investors. This process is called securitization.”
•
“Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS) are a major
sector of the ABS market. There are more than $400 billion in
assets backing various student loan deals that are issued in the
market. SLABS, like the sub-prime loans, are traditionally a
favorite for fixed income investors”.
(2)
• Now that student loan debt has reached a milestone —
$1 trillion on April 25, 2012, many investors realize
there are many other variables, which affect the timing
and realization of cash flows of student loan
securities. One such factor that was not accounted for
when investors originally invested in SLABS is the
massive student default rates that are sweeping the
country. This coupled with bleak employment
opportunities have forecasters already talking about the
next financial bubble to burst.
“The new prudentialism in education: Actuarial
rationality and the entrepreneurial self”
Peters (2005) Educational Theory
In this essay I examine the ways in which enterprise culture has
been promoted as a style of governance through the market. I
argue that a ‘‘new prudentialism’’ in education rests on the concept
of the entrepreneurial self that ‘‘responsibilizes’’ the self to make
welfare choices based on an actuarial rationality as a form of social
security that insures the individual against risk. This represents a
new welfare regime — one that is no longer focused on the rights of
the citizen, but that is based on the model of the citizen-consumer
who makes investments in the self at critical points in the life cycle. I
begin by providing a brief analysis of the risk society and outlining a
theoretical approach drawn from Michel Foucault. Then in the latter
part of the essay I develop the notion of actuarial rationality in
relation to an ethics of self-constitution and the new prudentialism in
education.
The Literature on
"Responsibilization"
Pat O'Malley, 2009
•
‘Responsibilization’ is a term developed in the governmentality literature
to refer to the process whereby subjects are rendered individually
responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of
another – usually a state agency – or would not have been recognized
as a responsibility at all. The process is strongly associated with neoliberal political discourses, where it takes on the implication that the
subject being responsibilized has avoided this duty or the responsibility
has been taken away from them in the welfare state era and managed by
an expert or government agency. The term ‘responsibilization’ first
appears in the governmentality literature in the mid-1990s where it refers
to a neo-liberal strategy associated with the assumption that under the
governance of the welfare state, liberal subjects had sloughed off or
been divested of the responsibility for governing themselves or assisting
others reliant on them.
•
http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/the-sage-dictionary-ofpolicing/n111.xml
"The age of responsibilization: on
market-embedded morality"
Ronen Shamir, Economy & Society 2008
•
This article explores emerging discursive formations concerning the
relationship of business and morality. It suggests that contemporary
tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government
also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and
business enterprises in particular. The article invokes the concept of
‘responsibilization’ as means of accounting for the epistemological and
practical consequences of such processes. Looking at the underlying
‘market rationality’ of governance, and critically examining the notion of
‘corporate social responsibility’, it concludes that the moralization of
markets further sustains, rather than undermining, neo-liberal
governmentalities and neo-liberal visions of civil society, citizenship and
responsible social action
•
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085140701760833#.UeX
Ndo4rTfA
Financialisation & subjectformation
• Financialisation is understood as emerging out of
conditions which force people to weigh up the market
performance of their financial assets when making
everyday decisions between saving and consuming
(Boyer 2000a, Froud et al. 2002). Financialisation
should therefore also be understood in terms of
subject-formation. It is, indeed, very much about how
financial investment becomes a ‘life-strategy’ (Martin
2002).
• Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden?, Claes
Belfrage (2009),
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569770
802396337#.UeXQho4rTfA
The financialization of the university
Notes from Danny Weil, http://www.projectcensored.org/topstories/articles/the-financialization-of-education-and-sonoma-stateuniversity-part-ii/
The university must be understood as turned over to private capital
markets and thus is a “borrower”, “lender” and “investor”
Debt plays a prominent if not central role in the life of the university
education, like all institutions, cannot be understood divorced from
the economic system that underlies it and which it reflects.
Financialization of education
When we speak specifically about the ‘financialization of
education’, we are addressing how financial motives, markets,
specific powerful individuals, corporations and financial
institutions impact all of public education. In grades K-12 we
can see the financialization of education through the power of
private textbook companies, publicly traded companies like
K12 Inc., Educational Management Corporations that manage
charter schools and that trade on the NY Stock Exchange,
testing corporations that also trade on Wall Street, charter
schools, charter school construction fueled by venture capital,
for-profit services for such thing as school lunch programs and
the corporate financial management of public pension funds, to
name just a few financial activities.
John Bellamy Foster
• “Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have
been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neoliberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot
has been written on the first two of these, much less
attention has been given to the third. Yet, financialization is
now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad.
The financialization of capitalism—the shift in gravity of
economic activity from production (and even from much of
the growing service sector) to finance—is thus one of the
key issues of our time. More than any other phenomenon it
raises the question: has capitalism entered a new stage?”
http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-financialization-ofcapitalism
GlobalHigherEd
• “…universities are proving to be appealing investments for
government stimulus efforts due to the sector’s stabilizing,
countercyclical nature in the short term as well as its
potential to stimulate long term economic growth”
(http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/moodysspecial-comment-report-on-the-global-recession/).
• Moody’s …states in their 2009 report, Global Recession and
Universities: Funding Strains to Keep Up with Rising
Demand that:
• “the global public university’s’ ‘credit quality’ is “steadier”
than that of private universities” (ibid).
At the Campaign for the
Public University
• At the Campaign for the Public University, we have
argued strongly against the financialization of the public
university. We have argued that this is not the same as
the commodification of higher education (which we can
confront as individuals in our pedagogic practices), but
represents a series of measures designed to open
universities to for-profit income streams. This includes
creating a means by which tuition fees can be raised
and the income diverted towards other academic
activities.
The Global Financial Crisis and the
Restructuring of Education
Michael A. Peters, Joao
Paraskeva and Tina BesleyPeter Lang 2014
"Financialization" is a term that describes an economic
system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is
exchanged (whether tangible, intangible, future or present
promises, etc.) either into a financial instrument or a derivative
of a financial instrument. The original intent of financialization
is to be able to reduce any work product or service to an
exchangeable financial instrument. It is an aspect of
increased symbolization, mathematization and
computerization of financial markets that are trends within
knowledge capitalism. Neoliberalism is an expression of the
power of finance that has gathered pace with the
internationalization of capital and the globalization of markets.
(2)
Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and globalization are themselves
expressions of finance, closely tied to the development of derivatives markets
and the evolution of an international financial system where the international
rentiers have managed to significantly increase their share of national income
often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption and widespread
criminalisation of financial practices. The current financial crisis is a systemic
crisis of the entire capitalistic system based on interconnected global financial
markets. This is a fundamental shift that represents the financialization of the
reproductive sphere of life itself. Under this regime the monopolization and
privatization of knowledge and education has proceeded rapidly. One of the
effects of financialisation and the economic crisis has been to popularize a
debate on budget cuts and "austerity politics" across the board for public
services provided at the state level with massive cuts to education in all
aspects, attacks on collective bargaining, and the sacking of thousands of
teachers. This collection provides a an introduction and analysis of
"financialisation" and the fate of public education under "austerity politics”.
References on Neoliberalism
•
•
•
•
•
Dumenil, G. & Levy, D. (2004) Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal
Revolution. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, M. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the college de France
1978-79, http://asounder.org/resources/foucault_biopolitics.pdf
American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics Lectures,
http://vimeo.com/43984248
Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/research_centres/theor
y/conf/rg/harvey_a_brief_history_of_neoliberalism.pdf
Peters, M. (2011) Neoliberalism and After?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1433112051
Some references on Finance
Capitalism
•
•
•
Hilferding, R.(1981) Finance Capital: A study of the
Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. London and
Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/
Kotz, D. M. (2008) Neoliberalism and Financialization,
http://people.umass.edu/dmkotz/Neolib_and_Fin_08_0
3.pdf
Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira: The Global Financial
Crisis and a New Capitalism? Levy Economics Institute
Working Paper No. 592. Mai 2010.