Abstract
After introducing a radical notion of social form, with reference to the work of John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld, the chapter indicates how education in contemporary capitalist society is entangled in a web of social forms. The Introduction incorporates a consideration of abstract labor, crucial for an understanding of value in education. The opening section outlines the nature of capital’s social forms. The second part of the article explores some social forms constituting value in education in relation to the general commodity form. Key social forms here include competition, and monetization, amongst others. Section three focuses on labor-power, and its web of social forms. It indicates how labor-power production through institutionalized education spills over into family life and the wider capitalist society. The Conclusion discusses how the social forms examined in the chapter are always forms of class struggle, and how struggles in education can move on to projects making for the dissolution of capital within its society. We must rupture and break this web of social forms, which is made by our labor, and leave the poisonous spider of capital bereft of social sustenance, whilst drawing on the communist impulse in creating alternative forms of life and education.
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Notes
- 1.
In capitalist production, value is incorporated within commodities that are produced in labor processes. However, it is not sufficient just to produce value as an aspect of commodities. Value produced equivalent to, or less than, money capital invested in means of production, raw materials and labor-power falls short of what is required: surplus value. Capitalist enterprises require value over-and-above that invested in the means of production, raw materials and labor-power, for a number of reasons. They will need to invest in the next production cycle (and may have to borrow from banks for this, therefore paying interest), and may seek to expand their production (needing more resources than for the previous production cycle). They have taxes to pay, perhaps rents (e.g. for premises, machinery), insurance, maybe interest on business loans, but most of all they seek to produce profits. Profits for themselves as owners, or for shareholders, or for private equity investors. The fear of making zero profits drives on human representatives of capital (e.g. company owners, managers) to squeeze as much work out of laborers’ labor-power as possible; labor-power being the living commodity, the only commodity that can create new, additional, value: surplus value. The nature and uniqueness of labor-power as a value-creating social force is explained in more depth later on.
- 2.
In the Grundrisse, Marx points out that ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions …The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master’ (1973b, p. 164—original emphasis). Marx’s second point grounds these abstractions as realities in contemporary society. It has already been noted that labor has an abstract aspect in capitalism (abstract labor). We are ruled and oppressed by many other phenomena that have the dual character of being at once concrete (expressing materiality), yet are also abstract and social in capitalism. In capitalism, people are ‘ruled by economic abstractions over which she has no control … [and] … the economic categories manifest social compulsion by real abstractions as natural necessity’ (Bonefeld, 2019, p. 2—emphasis added). Kurz (2016, pp. 8–22) expands on real abstraction and the abstract aspect of labor (abstract labor) in capitalist society. In capitalism, money is a key example of real abstraction. For Neary and Taylor, ‘money is simultaneously both the most concrete and the most abstract expression of the contradictory relations of capitalist production’ (1998, p. 5). Our everyday lives are shaped by money, both in terms of its concrete materiality (we don’t have enough of the stuff to pay bills, or positively when buying a new pair of shoes), but also as an abstract force hanging over us (fear of debt, bankruptcy etc.). For Simon Clarke, money exists ‘as the supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the reproduction of capital’ (1988, p. 14, in Neary & Taylor, 1998, p. 5). Money socially glues us to the reproduction of capital and its society; it makes the capitalist world go round, and we are key players in the drama given our social addictions to money. Interestingly, the concrete materiality of money has become ever more ‘abstract’ historically, with the development of capitalism. Transitions from pure gold and silver to gold and silver coins (which began well before capitalism), to ‘debased’ coinage (including copper and nickel additions), and then paper money, indicates this. The movement from paper money to debit and credit card payment, with ‘contactless’ payment in recent years, eviscerates the materiality of money further still. In the sphere of education, ‘qualification’ in its relation to labor-power production, could be viewed as a real abstraction. To demonstrate this would require another chapter.
- 3.
A flow ‘is continuous movement’ and ‘Being flows if and only if the twin conditions of continuity and motion are satisfied’ (Nail, 2019, p. 68—original emphases). Value is ‘not separate from the flows that support it’ (Nail, 2020, p. 75). That is, it is not separate from its web of social forms. Capital moves says John Holloway; ‘capital is inherently mobile’ (1995, p. 141). Yet capital’s social forms have the effect of congealing or blocking some of these life-flows, but they are not always successful; in one way or another they mostly fail as our richness and variability exceeds these social forms and their manifestation in institutions and constraining roles. Many years ago, I was a production worker in an engineering factory, grinding rough edges off metal blocks. Yet, given the monotony of the work, my mind was relatively free to roam; the flow of ideas. An example from education: primitive socialisation. As education is involved in the social production of labor-power, then each cohort of youth flows through the education system and is subject to this process. In this productive process, ‘Each new generation has to be socialised into capitalist life in general and capitalist work in particular’ (Rikowski, 2015, p. 37). For more on the notion of primitive socialisation, see Rikowski (2015, pp. 36–8). Thomas Nail explores the concept of flow in depth (2019, pp. 67–96).
- 4.
Contemporary examples in education would include the current strikes by teachers in schools and university lecturers in the UK. These are about gaining advantages, or at least not suffering material loses regarding pay (when set against inflation), and pensions (for university lecturers). They are not primarily about ending the wage form or wage system, state pensions, or much less capitalism as a whole. In capitalism, workers, including education workers are driven to defend their pay and working conditions in the face of attacks by human representative of capital.
- 5.
The difference between labor-power aspects and labor-power attributes is explained in Rikowski (2002a).
- 6.
Simon Frith (1980) indicates employer criticisms of school leavers’ employability can be traced back to at least the late nineteenth century in England.
- 7.
The main reasons for value production being weak in schools in England are, firstly, the capitalist state has not created conditions conducive for significant profit-making. For example, the claw-back clauses in contracts linked to targets (e.g. for examination results) need to be weakened (or abolished), and selling off assets (e.g. school playing fields) needs to be made easier, and so on. Secondly, private operators in schools in England need control of significant numbers of schools so economies of scale can be made (e.g. with joint services such as payroll, recruitment and estate management established). This point is being addressed by policymakers through the forced academization process, where schools are taken out of local authority control on the one hand, and the processes of combining schools into Federations and Trusts is encouraged on the other. School ‘brands’ and companies are in formation through these policies.
- 8.
This section draws material from Rikowski (2019a, pp. 160–65).
- 9.
Remembering that, for Marx, commodities do not have to be ‘hard’, directly tangible and occupying specific space time (e.g. coats and linen—examples that Marx uses in Capital 1977a, pp. 54–75, when pinning down exchange-value and the money form). Theatres, brothels, and musical performances provide services that ‘in the strict sense … assume no objective form … [and] … do not receive an existence as things separate from those performing the services … can be in part subsumed under capital’ and therefore ‘the commodity … has nothing to do with its corporeal reality’ (Marx, 1975, pp. 166–67, and 171). Services here refers to certain experiences that take a commodity form, and labor that performs these services creates value for owners of brothels, schools, transport services, theatres and so on. It is not easy to find worthwhile characterizations of educational services. As Ng and Forbes note, in relation to HEIs: ‘Service literature tends to view services generally whilst education literature tends to focus on the learning aspect of higher education’ (2008, p. 8). They tend to focus on service quality and the marketization of these services in HEIs, while ignoring them as commodities and their commodification.
- 10.
For a detailed portrayal of unbundling see McCowan (2017, pp. 735–39).
- 11.
For more on the insertion of for-profit providers in UK HEIs, see McGettigan (2013, pp. 96–109).
- 12.
‘Free schools are part of an ongoing policy agenda to liberalize the ‘supply side’ of the school quasi-market system in England’ (Allen & Higham, 2018, p. 191).
- 13.
- 14.
As Thomas Nail notes regarding flows of being, it is possible for flows to ‘flow together in a confluence, which is an intersection of two or more flows that intersect’ (2019, p. 86). What is being advanced here is that the various forms of labor-power production described in this section intersect and affect each other’s development and direction. This occurs in the lives of individuals, within their bodies, modes of thought and ideas, and relations with others. These points require development in further work. For more on the confluence of flows, see Nail (2019, pp. 86–96).
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Rikowski, G. (2023). Value in Education: Its Web of Social Forms. In: Hall, R., Accioly, I., Szadkowski, K. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Marxism and Education. Marxism and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37252-0_3
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