PGCert Introduction

Must we accept the things we cannot change?

Lee Mackinnon: PG Cert Blog

• As a term, neoliberalism is most generally used to refer to the global deregulation of markets that capitalise upon ideas of individual freedom and utility. Neoliberal economy is often described using language associated with gambling, personal irresponsibility, and structural inequality. According to David Harvey (2007), neoliberalism has led to, (…) much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers(…) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart (…) it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. This requires technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyse, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace (…) (Harvey 2007, 3). In short, the neoliberal economy facilitates conversion of all human activity into marketable commodities. We can think about the ways in which digital systems utilise the ‘massive databases’ (known as ‘big data’), following our bodies through digital and real space, in order carve all of life into increasingly profitable parcels of data that can be traded by data brokers. Arguably, we are no longer persons or bodies in the neoliberal era, even as students, we are asked to consider education rather as ‘customers.’ According to Koa Beck (2021), ‘If customers are paying to be there, then they are exuding all the entitlement, demand, and expectations that paying for a service, a product, and an experience encompasses. Becoming customers also silently and implicitly protects their single experience above all else. Anything that could compromise that customer experience, whether it be discomfort, confrontation, or a challenge to ideals, is incongruous with that relationship’ (ibid 110). Beck claims that such relationships help to consolidate what she calls ‘white feminism’- a popular, neoliberal form of feminism characterised by corporate CEO’s such as Sheryl Sandberg in her book, ‘Lean In.’ Indeed, a reliance upon capitalism as the way out of systemic oppression is deemed to be entirely wrong headed. Not least because it simply reproduces white, patriarchal, capitalist values in which women aspire to be ‘equivalent’ with the very male oriented systems that they criticise. It also exempts us from doing the structural work of dismantling complex intersections of race, class, ability, gender and sexuality.
• Neoliberal space can be understood as the latest iteration of corporate space.The term corporation is derived from the Latin meaning to form into a body. For the contemporary University, the bodies of students (corpus) are conduits of human capital whose value is extracted and redeemed as revenue by the university administration. Bodies subsumed into another body that advocates ‘self-realisation’ as the passage out of subsumption. At a graduation ceremony I attended in 2016, the VC celebrated students as “our human capital” as though this were a positive and desirable effect of university education. As though we should continue to aspire to the inequities of global capitalism and all of the violence that follows in its wake: extractive, ecological, gendered, racialised, ableist, sexualised…If this is deemed our success, what will be our failure? Our ‘bodies’ are plugged in extraction machines, they are batteries that power a few digital super corporations for free. Our meat provides the raw material that gives rise to latest commodity of automated ‘intelligence.’ If our bodies are the batteries, student debt is a corrosive battery acid of labour markets, even as students are assured of equal access to job markets as recompense for their debt. Debt is now the basis of global economies: personal debt; privatised institutions; financialization; resource extraction; neo-colonial exploitation… these underpin the brittle structure of our institutions even as they proclaim ‘equal access’ for all.