Social Epistemology

A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy

ISSN: 0269-1728 (Print) 1464-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsep20

In, Against, and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for

Higher Education in Crisis

Krystian Szadkowski & Jakub Krzeski

To cite this article: Krystian Szadkowski & Jakub Krzeski (2019): In, Against, and
Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis, Social Epistemology, DOI:
10.1080/02691728.2019.1638465

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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1638465

ARTICLE

In, Against, and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education

in Crisis
Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski
Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article introduces a general framework for the critique of the uni- Critical university studies;
versity in crisis that originates in the Marxist tradition. After indicating Marx; critique; crisis
the limitations of current proposals regarding the source and shape of
this crisis, the article emphasizes the dialectical matrix that lies behind
the nexus of crisis and critique, which is responsible for closing and
deactivating the contradictions emerging within it. To break this theore-
tical deadlock, we use the ‘in-against-beyond’ figure formulated on the
grounds of Open Marxism. Referring this figure back to the project of
Marx and Engels from The German Ideology allows us to explicate a
program and research method for critical university studies, which relies
on the integrity of three moments of critique: an inquiry into the experi-
ence of being within the university subsumed under capital; going
against its rule and interrupting the processes of accumulation; and
rendering visible what lies beyond the current form of the higher educa-
tion in crisis.

Introduction
Universities all over the world are in the eye of the storm of rapid transformations. For a few
decades now, authors from across the political spectrum of academia have been competing in the
development of narratives on the crisis of contemporary higher education. And so corporatization
(Schrecker 2010), commodification (Oliveira 2013), privatization (Ball and Youdell 2008), market-
ization (Jongbloed 2003) and the expansion of academic capitalism within the walls of the
university (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Münch 2014) have all been proposed as all-embracing
discourses on the ills of the sector, as well as the starting point for reflection on the potential
solutions to the crisis thus defined. We agree that while the need to develop a critical approach
seems to be self-evident today, we think that the situation demands both a more careful reassess-
ment of the contours of the crisis of the university, and reflection on critique as a method to
operate in, against and beyond its tight embrace. The two stories presented below are used to
grasp the reality of this crisis as experienced by academic labour.
On 22 February 2018, the largest industrial action ever taken in the higher education sector in
the United Kingdom began. The University and College Union (UCU), a trade union representing
around 110,000 academic and non-academic staff across the UK, initiated a strike against the
decision of the university employers gathered in Universities UK (UUK) to abolish the ‘defined
benefit’ system within the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) responsible for pension
provisions (Bergfeld 2018). This meant the annual loss for pension recipients of between £2,000

CONTACT Krystian Szadkowski krysszad@amu.edu.pl Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University,

Szamarzewskiego 89, Poznań 60–568, Poland
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

and £10,000 (depending on the source of the estimation), and was presented as inevitable in the
face of the mounting deficit of £17.5 billion (The Economist, 3 August 2017). This situation was
particularly striking because employees were contributing annually at the rate of £2.1 billion and
the fund was paying out just £1.8 billion to actual pensioners (Hesketh 2018). More than 42,000
academics, with the support of the student body, library and administration workers took action,
which affected more than 1 million students, as 575,000 teaching hours were estimated to have
been lost during the 14-day strike (Gibney 2018). After 13 April 2018, when an agreement between
UCU and UUK was reached, to form the Joint Expert Panel and engage in the further valuation of
the USS, the UK higher education system was left in turmoil, the crisis was ongoing and its
structural elements remained intact.
Another example comes from the field of academic publishing. In his opening keynote at the
STM US Annual Conference,1 on 11 April 2019, Olivier Dumon, Chief Product Officer at Elsevier, said
that the major thing happening in science at the moment is that ‘The world of research is being
pulled in the capitalist world’. This is a rather frank statement by a representative of the company
that is hugely responsible for the recent capitalist transformation of science. Being the owner of
a 25% share of the entire academic journal market, as a result of years of acquiring new titles
(Tennant 2018a, 8), the SCOPUS journal database and a wide set of digital research infrastructure
and analytical products (such as Mendeley, SciVal, CiteScore, SSRN, ScienceDirect; see. Posada and
Chen 2018), it is achieving an unusually high profit margin of 37%, generating 76–79% of its
revenue from digital products, and bringing its owners, RELX Group, an adjusted operating profit of
£826 million each year (Tennant 2018a, 7). Elsevier covers and capitalizes on all moments of the
research process, not only by providing the infrastructure supporting the process itself, but also by
controlling the production and circulation of knowledge, as well as by providing data for the
systems of evaluation (at institutional, national, and global levels). In addition, due to a growing
pressure from universities (e.g. University of California) or entire science systems (e.g. Germany,
Norway) that have withdrawn from subscription contracts with Elsevier, the company is becoming
increasingly reoriented towards the provision of data and analytical services, and is also beginning
to play an important role in the process of constructing the future of open access (as is evident
from the recent inclusion of Elsevier in the Open Science Monitor initiative by the European
Commission, Tennant 2018b).
A key point in these two examples is that, although the reality of the university suffers directly
from the negative consequences of the functioning of capital in its financial form (financial markets
where workers’ pensions are invested) or commercial form (Elsevier), it takes an external position to
the sector itself. At the same time, it effectively transforms the very foundations of the university’s
functioning and generates crisis. The corporate management structure itself, or the commodifica-
tion of some of the functions of individual institutions, although they admittedly have serious
consequences, will not make the formally public university turn into a capitalist factory. Capital
penetrates all the higher education systems and transforms the ways in which they function, while
crossing their borders. Narratives on the capitalist crisis of the modern university that ignore how
capital operates within the sector are not only analytically inadequate, but also politically ineffec-
tive. Therefore, in what follows we aim to introduce and explicate a general framework for the
critique of the university that originates in the Marxist tradition. We argue that in the face of the
ever-growing presence of capital in the higher education sector, a Marxian notion of critique
remains not only valid but necessary. Especially when we define our task as a radical transforma-
tion of higher education and the way knowledge is produced and disseminated.

The Nexus of Crisis and Critique

Critique, after all, is intrinsically linked to the concept and the phenomenon of crisis – that is,
something that requires a choice between alternatives (Koselleck 1988). The Latin word criticus
meant decisive or conclusive. In contrast, the ancient Greek kritikos, meaning ‘to be able to
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 3

distinguish’, and in its infinitive form krinein – to separate, to choose, to decide. For Greeks, the very
word ‘crisis’ held a wide range of meanings – separation, a decision which outweighs the balance,
choice or a judgment (Koselleck 2006). But also, a decision in the sense of critique. A critique can, in
this context, be understood as a subjective evaluation or a decision made within a difficult conflict
and/or crisis.
Such an understanding of crisis is perhaps best seen in the medical etymology that derives from
Hippocrates. In this sense, a crisis is a turning point in the course of a disease, which can bring
death or recovery to the patient, which largely depends on the diagnosis of the doctor (critic) and
the measures taken by him or her. Although this metaphor is widely used by those interested in
going beyond the current state of affairs (Holloway 1992; Rikowski 2015), it is marked by a certain
ambivalence. It can be traced to uses that not only emphasise the transition to a new state but the
act of restoring health to a patient. These two views on crisis define, in our opinion, a subtle and
yet fundamental difference in the two mutually exclusive concepts of critique. While the first
merely dissects and analyses crisis to secure the current state of affairs, the second opens up the
future.
What is, however, most important is that the modern university stems from this very nexus of
critique and crisis. The first perspective, focused on maintaining the status quo, can be observed
after all in the inaugural voice of the modern debate on the Western University, this being the
intervention by Immanuel Kant (1979) in the emerging university crisis, arising from the conflict
between the faculties. The key for us is to understand the way in which the author of the Critique of
Pure Reason intended to stave off this dispute. Bill Readings directly points to this element: ‘The life
of the Kantian University is, therefore, a perpetual conflict between established tradition and
rational inquiry. This conflict is given a historical force and becomes a project for progress by
virtue of the fact that it is dialectical’ (Readings 1997, 57 – emphasis added). It is precisely this
dialectical closure of conflict that weighs heavy on the university in crisis. Therefore, going beyond
this crisis calls for a method that is capable of rupturing these dialectics and opening up and
reinvigorating the conflict.

Opening the Future

To untangle this nexus and rupture the dialectics that binds together that which is at odds, we first
need to turn our attention to Open Marxism. As a current born out of the crisis of Marxism during
the 1980s, it challenged claims made by both the orthodox Marxist deterministic view of historical
development, as well as Althusserian structural Marxism, with the spectre of scientism that lingered
in its shadow. It did so primarily by emphasising the contradictory nature of society and primacy of
class struggle, which, in turn, gave rise to a view of the future as not determined but open to
different outcomes. Therefore, the claim about the open horizon of the future provided the
grounds for rethinking the relation between crisis and critique, as well as giving them a new
meaning: ‘crisis understood as a category of contradiction, entails not just danger but an oppor-
tunity. Within the theory, crisis enunciates itself as critique’ (Bonefeld, Gunn, and Psychopedis 1992,
xi). Re-establishing the relation between crisis and critique is, however, only a first step in rejecting
the closure. The solution to this problem requires us to turn to the next distinctive feature of Open
Marxism: negativity, or the rejection of modern dialectics.
Although in the beginning, Open Marxism was conceived as a broad current of thought that
brought together such authors as Hans-Georg Backhaus, John Holloway and Antonio Negri, in the
course of its development important differences arose. First and foremost, in regard to dialectics.
While authors such as Negri emphasised the need to reject dialectics all together, others turned to
Adorno’s project of negative dialectics to gain a foothold for revolutionary theory and praxis
(Holloway, Matamoros, and Tischler 2009; Bonefeld 2016). It is important, however, to stress that
although these differences have important implications for both theory and praxis, as they gave
rise to two distinct variants of autonomism – positive and negative (Holloway 2009) – they stem
4 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

from a common insight. That dialectics in the form we have inherited from modernity, the very
same dialectics that is responsible for containing the conflict, has to be rejected if we want to go
beyond the current state of affairs. What has to be rejected is thus the very notion of closure, the
promise present in modern dialectics that at the end we will be able to find a resolution,
a reconciliation (Holloway, Matamoros, and Tischler 2009, 7). It is this common belief, shared by
the above authors, that must guide our attempts to firmly establish a Marxist method of critique
with regard to the higher education and science sector, in which these modern dialectics are still at
work.
Moreover, the notion of negativity allows us to distinguish Open Marxism from those readings
of Marx that take a more economic approach. Instead of merely questioning the cogs and wheels
of the capitalist economy dismantled by Marx, Open Marxists advocates for contesting the very
notion of political economy as such (Bonefeld, Gunn, and Psychopedis 1992, xiii; Pitts 2017, 105).
Therefore, the task of a critique of political economy is not only to go against the notions used by
classical political economists, but its real aim is to demystify the social forms imposed by capital.
When we take into account the fact that abstract economic forces, although objective, are socially
constituted, the critique of political economy can be conceived as the critical theory of society
(Bonefeld 2014). In this regard, Open Marxism differs from those contemporary Marxists that
develop alternative economics to those of capitalism. For example, of expression the ‘political
economy of the working class’ used by Michael A. Lebowitz (2003) is antithetical to Open Marxism.
Accordingly, authors who advance the field of radical political economy cannot be deemed Open
Marxist either. This would include David Harvey, who traces the circuits and movements of
industrial capital in his works and argues that commercial and financial capital shift to the leading
position when it comes to domination over labour and global chains of surplus value (Harvey
2018).
By referring to Open Marxism, we can finally put the relation between critique and crisis in its
proper place. Instead of contributing to the closure, the nexus of critique and crisis points us
towards the undetermined and open horizon of the future. However, it leaves us with a particular
notion of the critique of political economy conceived as a critical theory of social relations, which
stems from the approach of negative dialectics. Instead of following the direction indicated by
Adorno, in what follows we are referring to the Marxian double perspective on the capitalist mode
of production (Lebowitz 2003).2 The first perspective comes to the fore when Marx views the
capitalist mode of production from the standpoint of capital itself and attempts to uncover its
general laws of motion. As capital is dialectical in nature, a Marxian method of inquiry must be
analogical. This can be seen in the syllogism framework3 which dialectically binds the organic
whole of the capitalist mode of production (Marx 1973). In other words, it compels us to view
capital not only through the prism of the hidden abode of production, but also to treat it as
a starting point and follow capital through the totality it constitutes.
We introduce this perspective to not lose track of the particular forms in which capital
subordinates the reality of science and higher education to its ends. As we will show in the next
few sections, this is essential from the standpoint of the integrity of critique. After all, the whole
endeavour stems from this first step, which triggers a chain reaction and forms the conditions of
subsequent moments of critique. Thus, by no means is it merely an academic endeavour, but has
profound implications for political practice as it unravels the dialectical ties that have to be severed
in struggle (Rikowski 2015; Cleaver 2017). It does so by providing us with insight on how to bring
capital into crisis and open up the future. However, as we indicated, the strength of dialectics and,
by extension, capital, lies in an ability to repair and reinvent itself and as a result, we face an
endless possibility of creating merely a temporal rupture, which will quickly be healed (Micocci
2010).
Therefore, we now refer to the second perspective on the capitalist mode of production which
comes to the fore, when Marx shifts his focus and views the capitalist mode of production from the
point of view of producers and breaks with dialectical resolution. After all, the very relation
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 5

between capital and living labour is purely conflictual. It continuously pushes against the present
state of affairs and rejects the imposed closure. This perspective can be seen especially in the
chapters of Capital on technological change as a capitalist response to workers’ struggles (Marx
1976). In that sense, there are no dialectical laws that drive the capitalist endeavour forward, but
only struggle with no possibility of reconciliation. This, in turn, broadens our understanding of the
crisis, to which we now turn.

The Source of Crisis

As the starting point for uncovering the source of crisis in higher education, we can certainly
consider as crucial the existence of a surplus that cannot be contained (Dinerstein 2015), the
immanent pursuit of the oppressed subjects seeking to throw off the yoke of domination. But what
is more important, despite all the ambivalence involved in the relationship between Marx and
modernity, is that through this prism we can see in Marx a thinker who stands against the modern
tradition of critique as a means of preserving the current state of affairs. Thus, the purpose of
Marx’s intervention is of course not to preserve the status quo, but to reinvigorate the conflict so it
can break the framework in which it was contained. Such a function of critique also transforms our
understanding of crisis, which must be seen in relational terms. In this approach, the crisis would
mean nothing other than the crisis of the capitalist relation itself (Holloway 1987). Therefore, such
an economic understanding of crisis as overproduction must, in fact, be seen through the prism of
material antagonism – that is, through class struggle (Bell and Cleaver 1982).
Holloway (2016) sheds light on this particular way of understanding this perspective, by
reference to the slogan ‘We are the crisis!’, which has repeatedly been used during the student
protests of the past ten years (from Germany and Austria to Croatia, from Italy and the UK to
California) – protests against the university in crisis, as well as against capital’s domination over the
university and the economy at large. Thus, living labour, students, and academics are the elements
that cannot be entirely placed under the homogenising abstraction of capital; instead, they
constitute an element that continually leads capital to crisis. The crises of capital are born out of
the coming together of these two forces. Autonomous labour, educational labour, an autonomous
organisation of science, autonomous circuits of knowledge production and academic labour, on
the one hand; and heteronomous capital, which requires a constant supply of living labor for its
own self-valorization, on the other. Putting an end to this crisis can only be achieved through the
liberation of the world from labour, including from academic labour (Winn 2015b).

‘In-Against-Beyond’, and the Critical Approach

This approach to crises - understood as a crisis of the capitalist relationship itself and living labour
as surpassing capitalist rule – inspired Marxist attempts to go beyond the current crisis of the
university and struggle for its future free of capitalist domination. It was quickly introduced into
critical research on the transformation of the higher education sector and equipped academics and
students alike with a language capable of describing the experience of participation in new forms
of struggle, such as Occupy (Neary and Amsler 2012). This experience also paved the way for the
figure of ‘In-Against-Beyond’ to become a framework for conceptualising resistance to the dom-
ination of capital in the higher education sector (Hall and Winn 2017).
However, its origins can be traced to the experience of the London Edinburgh Weekend Return
Group (1980), in which we can find John Holloway, and their attempt to rethink the conditions for
the inclusion of public sector employees in the United Kingdom in the broader class struggle for
socialism and against the capitalist state. It conceived the method of critique as a worker’s inquiry
that allows the contradictions occurring in the public sector to be mapped. As such, critique
formed a direct response to the crisis of both the public sector being subjected to neoliberal
cuts, as well as traditional leftist forms of political organisation, such as unions and parties.
6 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

Similarly, in the context of higher education it was also applied as the means of developing
a dialectical understanding of the contradictory and antagonistic position of those academic
workers who initiated their struggle against academic capitalism from within the university sector
(Halvorsen 2015; Pusey 2017).
However, instead of proceeding directly to Holloway’s understanding of the ‘In-Against-Beyond’
figure, we propose approaching it through the double perspective on the capitalist mode of
production. We argue that while the creation of the space of autonomy and new forms of
subjectivity (which the circle of researchers associated with Open Marxism are interested in) is
crucial to overcoming the status quo, it would be merely sterile to pose questions about the
contradictions of academic capitalism. Of course, particular worker and student struggles may
protect one or the other common space from enclosure and commercialisation, which in itself has
to be perceived as a victory. But as we have argued, capital’s ability to heal the wounds calls for
a more systemic approach. If capital is understood as something relational, as a relationship that
can occur between us, in order to stop its reproduction, it is necessary to understand its modus
operandi. We can remove the capitalist from our workplace, but if we do not understand the logic
by which capital operates, we risk reproducing the very relation we were trying to defy in the first
place. In other words, by not understanding how capital establishes itself in a given sector, at some
point we can realise that we have become capitalists ourselves, unconsciously reproducing the
relation of exploitation inside or outside of our self-governed space.
Thus, we come to a particular weakness in Holloway’s approach, associated with the notion of
critique. When the presence of capital is dangerously reduced to the violence of abstraction, we
risk a particular form of this relation escaping our attention. To mitigate this risk, we propose re-
reading the ‘In-Against-Beyond’ figure through the Marxian concept of critique, as outlined in The
German Ideology. As we will show in the next section, the figure of ‘In-Against-Beyond’ is useful for
the Marxist task of critique since it restores its integrity, by initiating a chain reaction capable not
only of dissecting the status quo but, first and foremost, also going beyond it. However, if one of
the stages is neglected, the success of the whole effort would be in jeopardy.

Marx and the Three Moments of Critique

When Marx and Engels (1968, 60) were defining their critical project, they called it ‘the real
movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result
from the premises now in existence’. This peculiar movement includes three important, distinct
moments: a) its basic point of reference is ‘the present state of things’, the movement is located
within it, so it assumes the necessity of inquiring about it and understanding it on its own terms; b)
the main task of the critique is to ‘abolish’ this state of things, to acquire an antagonistic stance, to
go against the status quo; c) ‘The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in
existence’ – the possibility of this movement coming into existence is already given, the very
prospect of going beyond a capitalistically organized economy or its particular sectors inheres
within the capitalist mode of production itself. These three moments can help in the explication of
the approach to critique that we propose.
First, it is necessary to diagnose the phenomenon of crisis and to indicate the mechanisms
operating on the ‘inside’ of the university; to expose their base, to reveal the internal ties, to
disassemble them, and to identify their source. To this end, then, a proper critique of critical
university studies examines works and documents, theories and discourses that structure and
influence the contemporary global higher education terrain and thus shape the university. It
could be done through a method similar to a Marxian critique of works by classical political
economists, this time tracing the contradictory paths of liberal thought within mainstream higher
education research.
Second, the critique has to situate itself on the side of the subject acting ‘against’ the university
in crisis, at the same time resisting the dominance, hierarchy, expropriation, and exploitation that
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 7

characterise the contemporary university. The critique must follow the struggles that take place
within and against the university, to co-research their composition (Roggero 2011), desires and
aims, the contradictions they exposed, as well as the future horizons they established.
A negative method is insufficient. Thus the critique must assume a positive project. For this
reason, its third aspect demands that the critique has to look ‘beyond’ the limited horizon imposed
by the crisis and map immanent forms of social relations that are perceptible today in their
incipient appearances but that might create a basis for the university of the future. This type of
critique does not draft a utopian prospect but reveals the elements of what has to come within the
empty shell of the old university. As Hardt and Negri put it elegantly, the task of such critique is ‘to
clarify affirmative, productive figures that continually emerge from the struggles between the two
classes, between domination and the desire for liberation’ (1994, 6). In what follows, we will
establish the grounds for the Marxist critique of higher education in crisis, and refer it to the
reality of the sector.

IN, or the Method of the Critique of Political Economy

Critical analysis of the contemporary global reality of higher education unravels the conditions for
the subsumption of this sector under capital (Szadkowski 2016b). Like any empirical study, it must
master the material in detail, detect the ‘developmental forms’ and ‘internal bonds’ of the
phenomena studied, focusing on the structure and its changes over time. For this purpose, it
uses a Marxian version of the weak syllogism of the classical political economy, which helps to
understand the dialectically bounded economic reality of the sector within a single relation that
encompasses the generality of production, the particularity of exchange and distribution, and the
singularity of consumption (Marx 1973; Harvey 2012). This kind of inquiry, however, cannot be
simply a redeployment of the conclusions from the analysis of the agrarian or industrial mode of
capitalist production to the reality of the higher education sector. Analysing the antagonistic
relations between academic labour and capital, it must take into account the specificity of the
sector that shapes the relationship itself (Münch 2014; Marginson 2013).

Academic Labour
The starting point is always the experience of academic labour. To this end, Marxist critique not
only uses the results of mainstream higher education research that deals with the development of
academic labour conditions but also leads to a systematic grasp of the problem (Winn 2015a). It
focuses on the conditions of: acceleration (Vostal 2016), caused by management based on ever
more strict and individualizing competition (Naidoo 2018); precarization (Courtois and O’Keefe
2015) and the development of metrics that allow for further control, as well as being themselves
a condition for measuring and estimating values in the global academic field (Szadkowski 2016b;
Woodcock 2018); the unbundling of academic work (McCowan 2017); the experience of uncertainty
and anxiety, which undermines the mental health of individuals in the sector, and last but not least,
it focuses on the increasing alienation of academics (Hall 2018). All this provides a framework for
further analysis, which goes from the abstract to concrete, and then back to the abstract. The rarely
addressed problem in the analysis of the transformations and the crisis of the university they
contribute to, is the question about their actual origin, which brings us to capital in higher
education and the relations it forms.

Capital
Marxist critique focuses not on the phenomenon of the market or market-generated competition,
but on the relation between capital and academic labour (Roggero 2011; Winn 2015a; Szadkowski
2016a). In this way, starting from manifestations such as acceleration or metricisation, it seeks out
8 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

the sources of these processes, identifying the various mechanisms used by capital in the course of
the subsumption of labour. All this comes with the caution that capital (especially in its functioning
within higher education) is not a homogeneous phenomenon. As Marginson (2013) has rightly
pointed out, the purely capitalist institutions of higher education operate at the margins. As seen in
the two examples that we gave in the opening of this article, we can rather locate the capital that
directly or indirectly impacts academic labour in the spheres of finances or academic publishing.
Therefore, the critique of political economy of higher education focuses on the relations to
academic labour forged by these forms of capital. Each of them establishes such a relationship
in a different way, either dependency on financial markets in the context of academic pensions, or
mediation through a system of metrics established and developed by firms involved in knowledge
circulation like Elsevier. However, it should be noted that focusing on key aspects of capitalist
subsumption is not just a self-referential exercise. It permits the identification of moments within
value flows that can be effectively interrupted, thus affecting the movement of capital in the higher
education sector (Bell and Cleaver 1982). The starting point for such considerations is the question
of where, how and under which conditions academic labour generates value for capital.

Prestige
Prestige distribution mechanisms are not a typical concern for Marxist analysis. However, like Marx
(1981), we assume that when capital subsumes labour in a given area, it is forced to adapt to the
existing conditions (formal subsumption), and only then is it able to transform them (real sub-
sumption). This does not mean, however, that the specificity of the sector is blurred during the
process of real subsumption. This Marxian insight is of crucial importance for understanding the
specificity of capital’s intervention within the academic field, which uses the complex mechanisms
of prestige distribution for value signalling (Blackmore 2016). In this context, one of the crucial
aspects for building a map of the higher education sector is the issue of the global, national and
local distribution of academic prestige, as purely economic competition is of secondary importance
in science and public higher education (Marginson 2013; Münch 2014). The task of a critique of
higher education is to reveal the way in which the mechanisms of prestige distribution not only
relate to the mechanisms of extraction of surplus value from academic labour but also condition
them. A good example here is the spread of all kinds of metrics (Woodcock 2018) that the national
and institutional evaluation procedures rely on, and thus contribute to the funnelling of academic
labour input to specific indexed journals (De Angelis and Harvie 2009; Szadkowski 2016b).
Moreover, the role of prestige is becoming increasingly important in maintaining and increasing
the oligopoly of academic publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015), but also in the
growing importance of data providers for global, national and institutional benchmarking. Here,
the example of Elsevier comes back into the picture. With its broad portfolio of academic journals
and ownership of the Scopus database, which is the source of data and different types of metrics
used for evaluation purposes, Elsevier is the biggest capitalist entity globally that benefits from the
ongoing race for prestige among universities worldwide (prestige that the publications in its
journals are said to be generating) (Tennant 2018a). The intensification of the global struggle for
academic status goes hand in hand with an increase in the volume of capital, as well as with the
tightening of the leash of acceleration and competition on the neck of academic labour. These
processes, however, do not escape a response from the side of students and academics.

AGAINST, or Following the University Struggles

Nancy Fraser has rightly observed that no one has managed to improve the Marxian definition of
critical theory as a ‘self-explanation of the struggles and dreams of the epoch’ (1995, 97). The
criticality of this type of theory is not based on an epistemological level, but on a political one.
Critique – in this case, critique in critical university studies – shapes its research program by taking
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 9

into account the objectives and actions of the movements occurring within and against the
capitalist university. By no means does it do this, however, through full identification, through
the transformation of itself into a simple ideological tool of these movements. It serves them far
better when it uses its categories and models to expose the contradictions of unseen and invisible
relations of domination, hierarchy, expropriation and exploitation within the system. Thus, the
struggles taking place in this sector are not only able to complement and develop critique, but also
to go beyond its internal limitations. Attentive Marxist critics join the university struggles to
exacerbate the contradictions uncovered in their course. However, there is no automatic transition
between the work of the analysis and the intensity of political praxis.
At the beginning of this text, we presented two examples of the crisis resulting from the
involvement of capital in its various forms, in the area of science and higher education. At this
point, we would like to briefly refer to the practices of resistance that they generate, and how the
method of critique we propose is able to contribute to exacerbating the contradictions exposed by
them.
One of the contradictions worth pursuing with the use of Marxist critique is revealed by recent
struggles around open access within academic publishing. On the one hand, there is a growing
oligopoly of capitalist publishers that accumulates profits based on the unpaid labour performed
by academics around the world (Peekhaus 2012; Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015), while on
the other hand there is a popular movement that struggles for shifting the publishing industry
towards more openness (Suber 2012). In effect, we can observe a gradual move towards
a commercially-oriented open access model (for example, the growth in the popularity of ‘article
processing charges’ introduced in the most ‘prestigious journals’) (Mirowski 2018; Eve 2015).
Elsevier, discussed at the beginning of this paper, is one of the publishers that is trying to keep
its profit margins at a steady, excessively high level, while adapting to this changing landscape with
the use of a dual strategy. On the one hand, it shifts towards being a provider of data and analytics,
thereby strengthening the crucial position of the journals it publishes and indexes, and on the
other, it lobbies for beneficial transnational solutions for open access in science (Tennant 2018b).
As a result, while the private property form of the article gets abolished, the constant flow of
submissions is maintained, as well as the stability of publishers’ profits, such as Elsevier, is
maintained at the growing expense of the public purse. The task of critique in this instance is to
expose and explain the role of academic prestige distribution mechanisms in preserving the
capitalist model of academic publishing (Szadkowski 2016b).
The pension strike that we discussed above exposed a few contradictions. First of all, the
contradiction between the declared target of the strike (UUK and the university management)
and the real material forces responsible for driving the process of the financialisation of pensions
on a social scale (financial capital) can be witnessed. Shifting the attention of the participants of the
strike from the university authorities to the absorption of the sector into financial capital operations
could lead to strikes breaking out in the already-subordinate sectors and the construction of
political alliances crossing boundaries between the university and its outside. Second, we can
observe the tension between the private and the public in the British higher education sector.
Subsumed under the imperative of accumulation, British universities operate today in a hybrid
sphere. Resistance to this phenomenon can only be led through the bottom-up self-organising of
students and academic staff, and through the organisation of practices around cooperative values
(Neary and Winn 2017). The long-lasting strike made it possible to imagine the potential of non-
hierarchical education, based on solidarity and mutual help, as well as for research that is socially
transferred and put into the direct pursuit of important political aims. However, this leads us
beyond the rule of capital in higher education.
10 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

BEYOND, or Constructing the Futures

For many researchers who developed their critiques of the university from within the recent series
of struggles (Roggero 2011; Kamola and Meyerhoff 2009; Pusey 2017), the need to conceptualize
an alternative to the university trapped in a vicious circle of the order of public scrutiny and
marketization, also forms a basis for thinking an alternative to capitalism and its global rule. To
understand these kinds of alternatives we need to refer back again to the topological relationship
between labour and capital, that is, labour always being within and against capital, which opens
the possibility of going beyond it (Hall and Winn 2017). As a consequence of such a conviction
being shared within recent academic struggles, the image of a higher education reality emerges
that points beyond the current status quo of the university in crisis and embraces the self-ruled,
democratically organised global, national and local networks of cooperation in science. It thus
encourages the move beyond academic stratification based on prestige and the rule of competi-
tion it enables and stimulates.
The route beyond the rule of capital and the relations it establishes in higher education has
been currently designed by the cooperative university movement. As pointed out by Neary and
Winn (2017), cooperatives do not presume the direct abolition of capital relations, rather they
contribute to the development and advancement of new cooperative forms of social wealth that
would go beyond the capitalist form of property and labour. Seen through this prism, as rightly
noted by Joss Winn (2015a), the cooperative university is an institution in potentia, and currently in
its infancy. We can already point to contemporary projects, such as the long-term experiment of
the cooperative University of Mondragon (Wright, Greenwood, and Boden 2011), the recent
establishment of the Co-operative University hoping to obtain degree-awarding powers during
the academic year 2019–20204 or the functioning of a smaller-scale Social Science Centre based in
Lincoln,5 in the UK (Neary and Winn 2017). However, as long as such projects are isolated cases,
they will be deprived of the bargaining power to negotiate the terms on which they are connected
to knowledge production circuits (De Angelis 2017) and will, therefore, be unwillingly driven
forward by the coercive laws of capitalist competition. One way to avert this risk would be to
start the re-orientation of higher education towards the realisation of cooperative values from
within the public sector. Looking for the most promising pathway for the transformation of public
universities into co-operatives, Winn distinguished the three most frequently identified paths:

the formal conversion of existing universities into co-operatives through legal and constitutional means; the
dissolution of our institutions into de facto co-operatives by constituting research centres as co-operatives,
embedding co-operative values and principles into institutional strategies, establishing taught programmes of
study along co-operative values and principles, etc.; and third, the creation of new co-operative forms of
higher education alongside the existing system of universities (Winn 2015c).

The first pathway is thus ‘conversion’, the second, ‘dissolution’, and the third, the ‘creation’ route
(Winn 2015a, 41). All three, in parallel, could be contributing to the development and consolidation
of the conditions for the social and fully democratic management of the commonwealth of
knowledge and learning processes in the university of the future.
For the last time, we would like to refer to the examples presented at the beginning of this text,
in order to show how the university and, more broadly, the systems of science and higher
education based on cooperative values, could offer a solution to the problems outlined there,
and move us beyond the tight embrace of capital. Following the three paths suggested by Joss
Winn, we can reimagine and then transform the relationship between academic labour and capital
exposed by the struggles discussed above. In terms of the pension system, the cooperative answer
could recommend the withdrawal of the funds contributed to USS annually by academics
(£2,1 billion) from the fund and financial markets, and after paying out the actual pensioners’
share (£1,8 billion) allocate the remaining amount (£300 million) to the newly created cooperative
social investment fund. In this way, the academic labour movement would both resolve the
 SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY 11

pension problem and then form the financial basis for the further expansion of the cooperative
movement. It would entail following the three paths at the same time.
In the case of the crisis generated by Elsevier, the problem is more complex. Existing alternative
forms to capitalist academic publishing, that is, open access initiatives and community-controlled
journals or journal platforms, all failed to undermine the position of Elsevier and similar oligopo-
listic publishers. As long as the individualizing and competition-stimulating system of metrics
remain in place, this capitalist publisher and metrics provider will maintain its dominant position
over academic labour, even if the product it offers ceases to be subscriptions to pay-walled
journals.

Conclusion, the Critique and Its Agenda

The purpose of this article has been to outline an alternative epistemological framework for critical
university studies – one which does not share the limitations of the current narratives on the
‘university in crisis’ and can thus move the university beyond the current political and economic
stalemate. Critique is an intervention carried out in the very context of the crisis of the university. In
framing the precise contours of the crisis, in providing an overview of the situation, and in
identifying potentially productive contradictions, in the sense that they could be solved through
struggle, critique creates the conditions and provides hope for the achievement of a future horizon
that exceeds present-day limitations.
Our critique in critical university studies is guided by the conviction that the university we are
fighting for will not emerge as a result of an automatic and dialectical movement propelled by the
inevitable and relentless laws of historical development. This transformed university will not appear
by default when the frame of the old capitalist university collapses spontaneously through its own
contradictions. Instead, as argued, the Marxist approach relies on the integrity of the three
identified moments of critique. Our struggle must, therefore, be grounded in an inquiry into the
experience of being within the university subsumed under capital. Only going against the
capitalist rule may interrupt the processes of accumulation and self-valorisation and render visible
a horizon that would lie beyond the current form of the university in crisis. Thus, each of these
moments of critique generates a condition of possibility for the others, producing in effect a chain
reaction that could, in principle, dissolve the dichotomy between theory and practice.

Notes
1. ‘STM is the leading global trade association for academic and professional publishers. It has over 150 members
in 21 countries who each year collectively publish nearly 66% of all journal articles and tens of thousands of
monographs and reference works.’ See https://www.stm-assoc.org.
2. The matter of this dispute and divergence of the perspectives that follow was made clear by Lebowitz (2005)
in his critical review of Changing the World without Taking Power, where he indicated that Holloway’s proposal
stands in complete contrast to Marx, as it assumes a unifing concept of ‘community of negative struggle’, thus
rejecting the very idea of the development of subjects through their common struggle (2005, 230–231). This
discrepancy can also be seen critically from Holloway’s (2009) perspective contained in his text on the negative
and positive autonomisms.
3. Syllogism refers us directly to Hegel’s Logic, which, as has been shown, had a profound impact on Marx’s
magnum opus and the method he employed (Smith 1988). In Hegelian terms, it is the syllogism which
connects universality, particularity and individuality by establishing a set of mediations. Thus, different
moments cannot be studied in isolation, but require a systemic approach. When applied to the logic of
capital, the syllogistic framework forces us to think of capital not only in relational terms but also as
forming a totality.
4. See. https://www.co-op.ac.uk/pages/category/co-operative-university.
5. See. https://socialsciencecentre.org.uk/.
12 K. SZADKOWSKI AND J. KRZESKI

Acknowledgments
First and foremost, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for all their criticism and excellent
feedback. Moreover, the paper has benefitted immensely from comments by Aline Courtois, Angela
Dimitrakaki, Richard Hall, Piotr Juskowiak, Łukasz Moll, Anna Piekarska and Michał Pospiszyl. All the standard
caveats apply.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Krystian Szadkowski is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Researcher at the Centre for Public Policy
Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.
Jakub Krzeski is PhD candidate at the Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.

ORCID
Krystian Szadkowski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7260-0457
Jakub Krzeski http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7288-371X

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