“There is the employer’s sabotage as well as the worker’s sabotage. Employers interfere with the quality of production, they interfere with the quantity of production, they interfere with the supply as well as with the kind of goods for the purpose of increasing their profit. But this form of sabotage, capitalist sabotage, is antisocial, for the reason that it is aimed at the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, whereas working-class sabotage is distinctly social, it is aimed at the benefit of the many, at the expense of the few.” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Sabotage: Its Necessity in the Class War” (1916)
“Class struggle is basic to the capitalist mode of production in the region of ‘mental’ labor, just as it is to be found in the realm of physical production. It is basic not because it is a sign of the special quality of mental labor, but because it is simply labor.” George Caffentzis, “Why Machines Cannot Create Value”
Information_University:
Rise of the Education Management Organization
A Special Issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, together with a  companion critical volume
  
1-page proposals
due September 15, 2001. Contact marc.bousquet@louisville.edu

As David Noble, Randy Martin, Gary Rhoades and others have observed: the new realities of managed education strongly correspond to the better-understood realities of managed care. The structural correspondences between the health maintenance organization (HMO) and education management organization (EMO) can be elaborated in many registers: both education and health have been increasingly “marketized,” transformed into sites of unprecedented capital accumulation by way of the commodification of activities and relationships, the selling-off and spinning-off of public assets and activities into private hands, the introduction of market behaviors (such as competition for resources and profit-seeking) into professional cultures, the unapologetic delivery of degraded service or even denial of service to the vast majority of the working class, and the installation of corporate-managerial strata to direct professional labor toward this neoliberal agenda.
 
In this issue of Workplace and a companion volume, leading scholars of critical higher education will address the processes of academic capitalism and management domination under the informational transformation represented by the "network society."

Possible topics include:

The substitution of information download for education >>> Management practices of command and control >>> The university as profit center >>> Privatization of the intellectual commons >>>Informatized teacher labor as flex labor >>> The university as a fusion reactor for casualization more generally, profiting from casual student labor and producing subjectivities compliant with flexible accumulation >>> University partnerships, providing student labor under contract, (providing flex workers with the identity of "student")>>> Teacher work as the source of value >>> Deskilling and displacement >>> The military-education-information complex>>> The "labor of education"--the student's "labor of learning" as productive social work, misdirected in the university's ruthless quest for profit>>> the curriculum evacuated in favor of corporate training and retraining services (“lifelong learning”)>>> corporatization more generally: how does “higher education” serve as the academic-capitalist’s flag of convenience? >>> the “mission differentation” of postsecondary institutions providing tiered learning horizons corresponding closely to the class fractions of their constitutencies >>> the commodification of teaching and research >>> teacher work in relation to other work>>> theories of mental labor >>> the creation of nonteaching education employees to facilitate the technological "delivery" of  course credit >>> Education as a managed working environment: the use of technology to: surveil, punish, regiment, censor, and control faculty and students; to direct how faculty allocate time and effort; to cement administrative control over the curriculum, and to impose supplemental duties including technological self-education and continuous availability to students and administration via email >>> the displacement of  living labor  with automated learning programs tended by software maintenance and courseware sales personnel >>> the new student movements >>> higher education as a global commodity.

The collection seeks essays that understand informationalism as a present reality, not future dystopia.  If we understand informationalism in terms of already existing dominant formations (such as the student as information deficit; laboring "in the mode of information" for management's convenience; commodification and privatization of the knowledge commons):  to what extent is the fantasy of some future fully-downloadable and teacherless education a red herring? 

While those who urge us to organize "against technology" on the rather unlikely projection of an"education experience divorced from the body," the contemporary reality of our campuses--with their vast new buildings, gyms, stadia and food courts--tells instead that the information university provides an embodied experience divorced from education. 

Our problem, then, is not one of breaking the machines. Instead, we may very well employ technology in elaborating our real project--organizing ourselves against informatized domination by capital and university management. 
 
 
 
Informationalism cannot present labor in the form of data without offloading  the costs of feeding, housing, training, entertaining, reproducing, and clothing labor-power onto locations in the system other than the location using that labor power.

So, in reality, it “takes a village” to present informationalized labor to capital. This form of the work process, “flexible,” “casual,” permanently temporary, outsourced, and so on,  offloads the care and maintenance of the working body onto society—
typically, onto the flex worker’s parents or a more traditionally-employed partner, as well as onto social institutions. 

This means especially, in the U.S.,  the health care provided at the emergency room and the job training provided by “higher education.”

It is obvious that the labor of the university teacher is already deeply informatized. Three quarters of all teaching is done by persons laboring according to managment's informatic logic.

Because nearly all of this contingent labor has passed through the system of graduate education, graduate students and former graduate students must become visible as doubly exploited. There is the super-exploitation of laboring contingently, but also a second, silent exploitation. Insofar as their “education” no longer leads to employment but is itself that employment and is continuously evacuated by increasing quantities of “teacher training” and other duties, something that counts as “graduate education” is stolen from them and something else is substituted, something that contributes to the university’s direct accumulation. The apprentice teaching that graduate employees used to do as training for a future career has been transformed by the informatics of university profit-taking into the only teaching career that most graduate employees will ever have.
 

But have we even begun to ask what it means that the university organizes the labor of nearly all undergraduates in this informatic mode?

The average age of the U.S. college student is 26.6 years: almost half of all undergraduates are over 25.  The undergraduate’s always-lengthening “time in school” is increasingly a term of service as a flex worker:  nearly all college students work part-time. 

One-third to one-half of them work directly for the university; in many other cases the university “assists private employers” in finding student labor, creating corporate-university partnerships founded on uniting “scholarships” with the university’s assistance in finding students to work (as at my institution) 20 hours per week in five four-hour shifts beginning at midnight. 

In contexts like these, the university’s contribution to providing labor in an informatic mode is not limited to exploiting the students on its own campus; the university operates within information capitalism to provide flex workers with the enabling identity of “student.”

The university’s role regarding the employment prospects of youth is no longer merely that of a space of socially-supported leisure consequent upon the “warehousing” of “surplus labor” for future full-time employment. 

Instead, the university’s role is now to profit from student labor-power in several ways: as direct employer, as purveyor of the temp services of enrolled students for nearby corporations, and--in no particular hurry—also, eventually, to provide some degreeholding graduates trained and socialized to deliver their labor in the mode of information. Just as in graduate education: the university as profit center requires an ever-increasing stream of undergraduate enrollment, but it has no particular incentive to actually graduate or educate any of the persons comprising this swollen flow.

--Marc Bousquet 

 
Of particular interest will be the university's role in composing labor-power  “in the mode of information.”

Laboring in the mode of information means, above all, delivering one’s labor “just in time” and “on demand,” working “flexibly.” Informatized labor appears when needed on the management desktop—fully trained, “ready to go out of the box,” and so forth--appearing only upon administrative command. When the task is completed, labor organized on the informatic principle goes instantly off-line, off the clock, and –most important—off the balance sheets. 

This labor is required to present itself to management scrutiny as “independent” and “self-motivated,” even “joyful”—that is, able to provide herself with health care, pension plan, day care, employment to fill in the down time,  and eagerly willing to keep herself “up to speed” on developments transpiring in the corporate frame even though not receiving wages from the corporation; above all, contingent labor should present the affect of enjoyment: she must seem transparently glad to work, as in the knowledge worker’s mantra: “I love what I’m doing!” 

As with other forms of consumerist enjoyment, the flex-timer generally pays for the chance to work—buying subscriptions to keep up, writing tuition checks, donating time to “internships” and unpaid training, flying herself to “professional development” opportunities—in all respects shouldering the expense of maintaining herself in constant readiness for her “right to work” to be activated by the management keystroke.

Contrary to the fantasy of the sedentary knowledge worker who “telecommutes” and never leaves home, the actual flex-timer is in constant motion, driving from workplace to workplace, from training seminar to daycare, grocery store and gym, maintaining an ever more strenuous existence in order to present the working body required by capital: healthy, childless, trained, and alert, displaying an affect of pride in representing zero drain on the corporation’s resources.

Laboring in an informatic mode does not mean laboring with less effort—as if informationalized work was inevitably some form of knowledge teamwork scootering around the snack bar,  a bunch of chums dreaming up the quarterly scheduled product innovation. 

Laboring in an informatic mode means laboring in a way so that labor-management feels effortless: the relevant perspective is the perspective of the management desktop, from which labor power can be made to appear and disappear with a keystroke.

Informationalized labor is always "informationalized" for management's convenience.  Indeed:
for labor-management to feel so transparent and so effortless, a great deal of additional effort has to be expended (just not by management). 

For capital to have labor appear and disappear at the speed of the bitstream might, for instance, require concrete labor to drive sixty miles between part-time gigs, gulping fast food on the highway, leaving its children unattended: the informatic mode doesn’t eliminate this effort, it just makes that effort disappear from the management calculus.