My presentation at Open Education: Condition Critical, 20 November 2014. See: http://www.richard-hall.org/2014/11/19/for-a-political-economy-of-open-education/

1. For a political economy of
open education
Professor Richard Hall
@hallymk1 rhall1@dmu.ac.uk
richard-hall.org
Open Education: Condition Critical, 20 November 2014

2. 1. Open education reveals a revolutionising of the means of production
and the disciplining of academic labour.
2. Open education is a crack through which we might analyse the interests
that drive value production and accumulation, and their relation to
power.
3. What is to be done? A re-imagination based on mass intellectuality and
open co-operativism.

3. [O]nly in association with others has each
individual the means of cultivating his talents in
all directions.
Only in a community therefore is personal
freedom possible...
In a genuine community individuals gain their
freedom in and through their association.
Bottomore, T.B., and M. Rubel, M. 1974. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in
Sociology and Social Philosophy. London: Penguin.

4. Openwashing: n., having an appearance of
open-source and open-licensing for marketing
purposes, while continuing proprietary
practices.
“I think the answer is more transparency about
our politics. I think, in fact, the answer is
politics.”
Watters, A. 2014. From open to justice #opencon2014. http://bit.ly/1xIzz20

5. Value emerges as a form of sociability (as capital) from the
unity of three circuits. It is formed of moments of the
circulation of money, of production, and of commodities.
The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose,
as the compelling motive.”
Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.
Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it,
means that other forms of human or humane value in the
production of commodities are marginalised.
Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism. 25(2): 11

6. open education: a UK export/industrial strategy
• conventional universities no longer hold all the cards on
how the higher education market develops.
Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London:
Social Market Foundation, p. 69. See: http://bit.ly/1mhl2By
• our goal is bold and simple: to build a bigger knowledge
economy
Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second Machine
Age. London: Social Market Foundation, pp. 27, 29. See: http://bit.ly/1q7P8OF

7. open education: enterprise for all
entrepreneurial activity enacted through new combinations of
technologies and practices to inject novelty into the circuits
of capitalism.
competitive success rooted in a new productive environment
that accommodates power:
• first in expanding the time-scale for returns (debt);
• second in expanding the arena for competition (public).
Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 52-3.

8. we need to keep our foot on the accelerator
of innovation
not just about reaching new audiences, but
about revolutionising the traditional learning
and teaching experiences.
Bean, M. “Bean warns universities over digital ‘irrelevance’.” THE, 8
November 2014. See: http://bit.ly/1tTNrq0

9. Open education: a transnational framework
•TTIP: open markets in services//open access to procurement
[see, Council of EU: http://bit.ly/1vOSUxF]
•Labour content of services and products
[see, Bain & Co.: http://bit.ly/11h3YsD; Gartner: http://gtnr.it/17RLm2v]
•“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex
standalone products and services to participating in more open,
interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around
learners [and learning outcomes]”
[see, Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp]

11. Open education and transnational joint-ventures
•designed to leverage surplus value in ways that traditional
universities could not do alone;
•the commodification of vast arrays of data, and the creation of
new services;
•reflects the need to make academic labour productive of value.
e.g. Coursera partners:
•venture capital: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New
Enterprise Associates, GSV Capital, International Finance
Corporation, Learn Capital Venture Partners;
•educational publishers like Laureate Education; and
•transnational bodies like the World Bank.

12. it is impossible to understand the role of open education
without developing a critique of its relationships to a
transnational capitalist class
pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class,
and State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP.
See also: Ball, S. 2012. Global Education Inc. London: Routledge.

13. Mass Intellectuality and
Open Co-operativism

14. open education and the general intellect
the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of
the general productive forces of the social brain,
is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to
labour, and hence appears as an attribute of
capital, and more specifically of fixed capital
[machinery].
Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

15. open education as struggle?
the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the autonomous
organisations that exist within and between both the factory and the
community
with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of “working class
power… at the level of the social factory, politically recomposing the division
between factory and community.”
Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press: Austin, TX, p. 161. See:
http://bit.ly/Y3w2Pf

18. ‘a little more of a
politicised relation to
truth in affairs of
education, knowledge
and academic practice’

19. 1. A false idea of material abundance (growth, accumulation,
debt).
2. A false idea of immaterial scarcity (Trans-Pacific Partnership,
Transatlantic Trade and Investments Partnership).
3. The pseudo-abundance that destroys the biosphere, and the
contrived scarcity that keeps innovation artificially scarce.
we need a global alliance between the new “open” movements,
the ecological movements, and the traditional social justice
and emancipatory movements, in order to create a “grand
alliance of the commons.”
Bauwens, M. & Iacomella, F. 2013. Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization
Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons. http://bit.ly/Rolqqb

20. open co-operativism
• democratic governance and regulation of transnational worker co-operatives
• connect to the circuits of p2p production and distribution
• open, democratic, autonomous, social focus of co-operatives
• framework for common ownership of products, assets and
commodities
• reclamation of public environments for the globalised, socialised
dissemination of knowledge (e.g. copyfarleft)
• connected and global educational commons rooted in critical
pedagogy
• conversion, dissolution or creation: transitional and pedagogic
[Hall, R. 2014, On the Abolition of Academic Labour: The Relationship Between
Intellectual Workers & Mass Intellectuality, TripleC, 12(2). See:
http://bit.ly/1sZcvrJ]

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