Abstract
There is renewed interest in Karl Marx’s critical concept of alienation, applied to the context of higher education, to explain the growing dissatisfaction of academic labor. Academics feel that new primarily economic priorities have supplanted ideas of working for the common good. Constant competition, expressed through rankings, evaluations and funding metrics, stresses performance and output. Indicators mean more than substance. Commercialization and commodification of higher education has been subjected to wide critique, not least in the literature on increasingly transnational academic capitalism. As universities are subjected to increasing pressures to produce—graduates and innovations—these pressures are passed on to academics, who struggle to reconcile their personal motivation and the ideal of collegial and cooperative academic work with the imposed extraneous motivation of endless assessments and competition under precarity. Knowledge production in ‘academic factories’ is characterized as commodity production. As a result, the dissatisfaction and ill-being of academics is only increasing. This chapter discusses Marx’s concept of alienation as a critique of the capitalist mode of production in higher education, illustrated in dialogue between two national contexts—the UK and Finland. Finding avenues of disalienation may require a radical reimagining of the current form of academic labor.
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Notes
- 1.
For Marx, self-alienation often takes the form of putting yourself under the authority of others: under religion, the example he uses is the relationship between a layman and a priest (McLellan, 2000, p. 92). Under conditions of capitalist wage-labor, this would mean managers and bosses as proxies of capital.
- 2.
Marx differentiates between Entäusserung and Entfremdung in his works, which in Marx (2007[1961], pp. 10–12) have been translated as alienation and estrangement, respectively. For space, this chapter does not engage in deeper separation between the two concepts.
- 3.
This is why commodity fetishism was also discussed already in the previous section, although that term is used in Capital and not in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
- 4.
‘Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947/1997, p. 123).
- 5.
Fromm assumed that the lower you are in the social division of labor, the more alienated one would be. However, Marx made no subjective differentiation between degrees of alienation, because the problem is objective-structural.
- 6.
For Jaeggi (2014), alienation is relationlessness, meaning our relations to others and to ourselves have been broken: we no longer feel like active individual subjects of the neoliberal promise, but rather objects being squeezed by merciless outside forces. While Jaeggi’s work on alienation is insightful and largely supports the connection of capitalism and alienation on the neoliberal subject, her work departs from a materialist reading.
- 7.
- 8.
This applies particularly to the new type of administrative model, the foundation university, which centralizes power and breaks with the previous tradition of self-governance (Poutanen et al., 2022).
- 9.
Though Finnish universities do not, in 2022, charge tuition from Finnish or EU students, there is strong push for tuition fees.
- 10.
By extending Marx’s critique of ground rent into alienation means that labor is also alienated from that commodified land and nature (Harvey, 2023, pp. 108–109). This is, once more, appropriation through dispossession (Marx, 2007[1961], p. 83). The same logic can be applied to alienation relating to closing of the academic commons (Harvie, 2000) and foreclosing on autonomous academic time. Hartmut Rosa (2010) has made a convincing connection between alienation and the acceleration of modern work, visible also at universities.
- 11.
Kalekin-Fishman and Langman (2015, p. 925) note that not all, who experience alienation, are aware of it. Thus, it is difficult to capture alienation reliably in surveys. Prominent and established senior academics in relatively secure positions may feel that claims of alienation are overblown, until they experience the negative implications firsthand: in Nordbäck et al. (2022, p. 10), one senior researcher describes their own realization of disempowerment: ‘What I knew from research I now experienced myself’.
- 12.
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Poutanen, M. (2023). Breaking Bonds: How Academic Capitalism Feeds Processes of Academic Alienation. 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_4
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