Re: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website

["Matthew Hale" <husunzi@hotmail.com>]

Andrew,

Thanks for your comment, and I agree that many academics overestimate the 
importance of their research and writing, which usually gets read by only a 
small handful of other academics. But I disagree that universities are 
unimportant in the class struggle. This is not at all because universities 
are "great repositories of truth, social justice, and higher knowledge," but 
precisely because of "the historical and present connectedness of academia 
to the corporate and political bodies that really run the show," as you 
mention. And this is part of the point that I think Wang Hui is missing in 
his interview - he talks about "Chinese universities" as if they consisted 
only of humanities professors and grad students at Qinghua, Beida, and 
Fudan, many of whom really do consider their work to be about creating and 
propagating truth, social justice, and higher knowledge, but in reality, 
most universities and colleges in China (including these three two some 
extent, outside of these narrow circles) are primarily means for training 
future workers, just like most colleges and universities all over the world. 
The university is becoming more important in capitalist reproduction, and 
therefore in the class struggle, because jobs require more and more 
training, and it is increasingly difficult to find many jobs, even 
relatively low-income and high-stress jobs, without some kind of college 
degree. In China, for instance, only a few years ago the government assigned 
many medical jobs to all graduates of vocational high schools, but now such 
jobs generally require at least a college degree, so it is much more 
difficult and expensive to get jobs in the medical profession, even while 
many poor people would be grateful to have even the basic-level health care 
they had in the past.

All this is to say that universities and colleges in China, and most other 
places in the world that I know of, seem to be becoming an increasingly 
central site in the reproduction of labor-power and capitalist relations. 
The fact that most people cannot access this education does not mean that 
they live in the real world and that universities are cut off from reality; 
because it is increasingly difficult to find a formal job without a college 
degree, this may in fact mean that more and more people are becoming 
excluded from formal capitalist relations and falling into something like a 
sub-proletarian state on the fringes of capitalism. If so, then their 
struggle for access to education becomes a struggle to be included within 
formal capitalist relations, and students' struggles in the university, such 
as struggles against overwork, discipline, etc., become a struggle against 
job-training, and so part of the proletarian struggle against capital.

This are just my immature reflections inspired by your comments and recent 
experiences among college students in China, so I'm sure there are a lot of 
theoretical problems with them. I look forward to people's responses 
(qingjiao, qingjiao).

Matthew Hale
Anthropology
University of Washington
currently in Chengdu

> From: Andrew Field <andrew.field@unsw.edu.au>
> To: Matthew Hale <husunzi@hotmail.com>
> CC: vukovich@hkucc.hku.hk, zhongguo@openflows.org
> Subject: Re: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website
> Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 10:10:24 +1000
>
> "As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory  was 
> a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists,  so now 
> the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership  of 
> knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation  of 
> social and cultural stratifications are all at stake."
>
> This strikes me as the sort of bombastic rhetoric that we are used to  
> hearing about the role of universities in the world.  Are  universities 
> really that important?  Or is our understanding of  universities simply the 
> product of our own exaggerated sense of self- importance as academics, as 
> well as the narrow-mindedness of our own  world view?  In the 
> English-speaking world we use the term "ivory  tower" to suggest this 
> narrowness.  I prefer Zhuangzi's metaphor of  the "frog in the well."
>
> We operate under the flawed assumption that universities are the  great 
> repositories of truth, social justice, and higher knowledge.   Was it ever 
> so?  Over the years I have come to increasingly doubt  this assumption.  To 
> suggest that the university is a "key space of  conflict" in the world 
> today is to both over- and under- estimate the  historical and present 
> connectedness of academia to the corporate and  political bodies that 
> really run the show.
>
> Andrew Field
> Lecturer, School of History
> 363 Morven Brown Building
> University of New South Wales
> Kensington, NSW 2052
> phone:  +61-2-9385-2287
> fax:  +61-2-9385-1251
> andrew.field@unsw.edu.au
> http://history.arts.unsw.edu.au/afield/
> http://shanghaijournal.squarespace.com
>
>
>
> On 23/05/2007, at 11:49 AM, Matthew Hale wrote:
>
> Thanks for forwarding this, Dan. I've been following the Edu-factory  
> project on an and off, and I'm interested in how changes in the  education 
> system in China, student activism, etc., relate to  situations in other 
> countries and in capitalism as a whole. Please  let me know if you run 
> across any other material on these topics. I  wrote some comments on Wang 
> Hui's interview on the CSG blog here:
>
> http://www.chinastudygroup.org/index.php?action=blog2&type=view&id=29
>
> content:
>
> The new Edu-factory website has posted a video (MP4) of an interview  with 
> Wang Hui about the marketist restructuring of China's university  system. 
> Glad to know someone from China is taking part in these  discussions, 
> although I'm not sure what I think about their general  direction (theories 
> of "cognitive capitalism" etc.), on the one hand,  and it seems that 
> China's experience could be related to global  trends in more helpful ways, 
> on the other. But this is a valiant  first effort.
>
> WH says that the percentage of college entrants from rural families  has 
> dropped dramatically in recent years, both because it’s more  difficult for 
> rural students to prepare for the college entrance  exams, and because 
> rural parents increasingly regard education as a  waste of time since 
> degrees are worth less on the labor market. Has  anyone seen any statistics 
> to support this? He mentions the media  stir last year about college 
> graduates’ difficulty in finding jobs –  I had seen the figure “3 out of 5” 
> college graduates failed to find  jobs in the fields they trained for, but 
> when I’ve mentioned this to  faculty at the school where I work, they say 
> that’s impossible –  almost all graduates can find jobs, it’s just that 
> they’re unwilling  to take them in remote locations. I’d be interested to 
> see any other  statistics people know of about this.
>
> I was surprised that when the interviewer asked about student  responses to 
> this situation, WH only said that “everyone’s talking  about it, but 
> there’s no easy solution” – what about all the student  riots last year 
> about the value of degrees on the labor market? (See,  for example, this, 
> this, and this.) This would be a great topic to  research in more depth, 
> and to relate to the general Edu-factory  discussions.
>
> His account seems to describe the situation of grad students at some  of 
> the top few universities, but not most universities and colleges.  For 
> instance, he talks about how open and connected universities are  to global 
> events and knowledge via the internet, but in fact most  students, 
> including grad students, at Sichuan University, ranked the  tenth best 
> school in China, cannot access many off-campus and most  overseas-based 
> websites (the school provides access to its own campus  network, and very 
> few students splurge for installing their own  connections), only Ph.D. 
> students have access to more than a few  domestic periodicals, and the 
> libraries are so difficult to use and  understocked that many students 
> don’t even bother, preferring to  squat on the floors of bookstores and 
> skim books, or, more often,  just to skip reading altogether and cheat on 
> their papers and tests.  Several of my master's-level students last 
> semester didn’t have email  addresses, since they used the internet only to 
> chat with people on  QQ and read entertainment news, and students often 
> have trouble  accessing even domestic email accounts from the campus 
> network. Most  of the students at the small, private college (affiliated as 
> a  “branch” of another major university) where I teach now, on the other  
> hand, use the internet only at off-campus netbars on the weekends  (the 
> school doesn’t have computer lab, and most students don’t own  computers), 
> and some have never even used a computer.
>
> Glad he mentioned students’ growing involvement in rural activism,  but 
> here I think he’s also neglecting the majority of students. His  point in 
> mentioning this activism is to indicate a recent trend  toward overcoming 
> the gap between students and the laboring masses,  but actually many 
> students still come from peasant and working-class  families, and, as he 
> himself indicates, most see themselves as  training for white-collar jobs 
> they may not even get, not as elite  academics in some kind of ivory tower. 
> In fact, most student  volunteers I’ve met (“activists” doesn’t seem 
> appropriate in most  cases) see their volunteering as a way to help them 
> get some kind of  government job in the future, not as a way to ally 
> themselves as  organic intellectuals with subaltern struggles. So, on the 
> one hand,  it seems to me that most students are not so cut off from the 
> masses  in the first place, and on the other, the recent rise of student  
> volunteering is not necessarily a move toward overcoming whatever gap  may 
> exist.
>
> Please let us know if you run across any other publications, in  English or 
> Chinese, dealing critically with China's  "industrialization of education" 
> in relation to situations in other  countries and any possible changes in 
> capitalism and the class struggle.
>
> By the way: the English translation of the report on the Yangzhou  workers' 
> struggle by WH and Cui Zhiyuan has not yet been finished  after many months 
> - please help out with that if you have a few minutes.
>
> Matt
>
> > From: "Daniel F. Vukovich" <vukovich@hkucc.hku.hk>
> > To: <zhongguo@openflows.org>
> > Subject: FW: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website
> > Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 11:17:18 +0800
> >
> >  Link below contains an interview with Wang Hui, fyi...
> >
> > Dan
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: mlg-ics-bounces@lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> > [mailto:mlg-ics-bounces@lists.andrew.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Imre Szeman
> > Sent: May 21, 2007 1:16 AM
> > To: cacs@mailman.srv.ualberta.ca; cultstud-l@comm.umn.edu;
> > mlg-ics@andrew.cmu.edu; g-csacont@mcmaster.ca
> > Subject: [mlg-ics] Edu-Factory Project and Website
> >
> > fyi, i
> >
> > ----------------------------
> > Dear friends,
> >
> > We are very happy to announce that the edu-factory website is up and
> > working.
> >
> > http://www.edu-factory.org
> >
> > On the site there are three video interviews on conflicts in knowledge
> > production and transformations of the university available for  download. 
> > The
> > interviews, which were recorded at the Global Meeting in Venice,  Italy in
> > late March 2007 are with:
> >
> > Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Group Stanley Aronowitz, City  
> > University
> > of New York Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing
> >
> > We are very happy to be able to present these interviews about  changes to
> > the university in three key sites: India, the USA and China.
> >
> > As we hope to build the edu-factory website into a resource for edu- 
> > factory
> > and other linked projects we would be very happy if list members  could 
> > send
> > suggestions for links, bibliography, multimedia materials etc.  Please 
> > send
> > all suggestions to this address.
> >
> > Also we ask you to spread news of the site through your networks.
> >
> > edu-factory collective
> > _______________________________________________
> > MLG-ICS mailing list
> > MLG-ICS@lists.andrew.cmu.edu
> > https://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/mailman/listinfo/mlg-ics
>
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