Knowledge Socialism: A Dead "Exchange," or a Living Process of "Exchanging," Knowledge?

• In Event: Knowledge Socialism and the Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence

Abstract

Contemporary political discourse concerning the academic labour of students and staff has reinforced a certain interpretation of knowledge as ‘exchange value’ (Hayes, 2019: 2, Marx, 1867). An ‘exchange’ of human academic labour or knowledge can be understood in the form of a verb – where an active process of giving and receiving takes place. Or, an academic ‘exchange’ may be discussed in the form of a noun – where ‘exchanging’ knowledge is described more statically. Herein lies a rather fundamental problem for knowledge socialism and HE, that I will discuss in this paper in relation to ‘general intellect’ (Marx, 1858). This problem concerns ‘the dead knowledge of capital and the ̳living knowledge of labour’ (Vercellone 2007:33), as these play out in HE policy and practice.
Whilst the development of human activities across the Internet in recent decades has provided exciting new ‘postdigital’ possibilities for actively exchanging and disseminating knowledge collectively (Jandrić et al. 2018), in university policy documents a focus has remained on more static notions of ‘delivery modes’ (Peters, 2019) as an ‘exchange’ yielding finite value for ‘the student experience’ (Hayes, 2018 and 2019). The notion of ‘learning gain’ has emerged too, as if it were a static and generic form of ‘exchange value’ (Marx, 1867) that institutions might measure (Millward, 2015), but this simply adds to the dead knowledge of capital. Around campus we find static words such as: ‘lead’, ‘innovate’, ‘achieve’, ‘excellence’ or ‘ambition’ placed across windows and banners. They fail though to tell us who is ‘leading, or ‘achieving’.
Karl Weick pointed out that ‘organisation can be understood as a verb as well as a noun’ (Weick, 1969; Corbett, 2018: 4, Hayes, 2019: 149). Corbett argues that we need to: ‘treat the university as an organising activity rather than an alien organisational structure owned by management’ Corbett (2018: 4). This lies in where we choose from hereon to place ‘value’ in our verbal and textual ‘exchanges’ about human academic labour and knowledge. Knowledge socialism should not become another dead ‘exchange’. There are now postdigital possibilities for it to become a living process of ‘exchanging’, collective knowledge.

References
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Jandrić, P.; Knox, J.; Besley, T.; Ryberg, T.; Suoranta, J. & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital Science and Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A critique of political economy. Retrieved October 10, 2018, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital- Volume-I.pdf
Millward, C. (2015, September 22). HEFCE seeks the measure of learning gain. HEFCE. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20150708130628/http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/author/chris-millward/
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Vercellone, C. (2007). From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,‖ Historical Materialism 15/1. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00263661/document
Weick, K. 1969. The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Author

• Sarah Hayes, University of Wolverhampton