Articles in Workplace have repeatedly called for increased collective organisation in opposition to a disturbing trajectory: individual autonomy is decreasing, contractual conditions are worsening, individual mental health issues are rising, and academic work is being intensified. Despite our theoretical advances and concerted practical efforts to resist these conditions, the gains of the 20th century labor movement are diminishing and the history of the university appears to be on a determinate course. To date, this course is often spoken of in the language of “crisis.” While crisis may indeed point us toward the contemporary social experience of work and study within the university, we suggest that there is one response to the transformation of the university that has yet to be adequately explored: A thoroughgoing and reflexive critique of academic labor. By this, we mean a negative critique of academic labor and its role in the political economy of capitalism; one which focuses on understanding the basic character of ‘labor’ in capitalism as a historically specific social form. Beyond the framework of crisis, what productive, definite social relations are actively resituating the university and its labor within the demands, proliferations, and contradictions of capital? With the production of this special issue of Workplace, we hope to contribute to a negative critique of academic labor that not only helps make these social relations more transparent, but situates academic labor as an object of critique within the discourse of recent developments in Marxist praxis.

Critical approaches to the political landscape of higher education are often divided between suggesting either that the university is in such a ruins that it must be abandoned, or that it exists as one of the only vestiges of a public good that needs to be restored and defended. Here, we take an alternative approach to analyzing the crisis-ridden landscape of higher education: class composition, a term we inherit from militant co-research projects. As defined by Marta Malo de Molina, class composition is the “subjective structure of needs, behaviours and antagonist practices, sedimented through a long history of different struggles.” This use of composition seeks to understand how worker and student subjectivities are forged through antagonism and difference to capitalist exploitation and its investments in technology, development, and “progress.”

Despite the constant attacks on the millennial generation it turns out that they demonstrate extraordinary political promise: they vote at a higher percentage of their demographic than any of the preceding generations, and they do more community service. What’s more, as a cohort, they have absolutely no patience for the conservative, fundamentalist attacks on the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, and the LGBT community. Even more salient is that this is the generation that returned to the streets in protest in a revised version of traditional forms of activism, as evidenced by Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

Hoo-ee, this is one fistful of revolution you are holding in your hand right now. This is a live transmission from the wrecking crew. They are dynamiting the campus accumulation machine and sharing the video. They’re publishing inflammatory infographics and launching manifestos from the occupation. This is the full cookbook. Don’t read it. Unless you can handle the truth.

A Conversation with Historian Marcus Rediker on resistance.

My intention in this paper is to interrogate the “origins” of Freire’s methodology by focusing on the works of Jose Carlos Mariategui and Georg Lukacs, both of whom wrote extensively on the question of Marxist dialectics and the dynamism of revolutionary engagement. My intention here is twofold: (1) to examine Lukacs and Mariategui as a framework for grasping in concrete terms the complexities of Freire’s radical pedagogical methodology and (2) to probe further what Lukacs argues is the “necessary bond between consciousness and action” that underlies the essence of what this essay terms “edu-activism,” or the consequential outcome of Freire’s conscientization paradigm.

Currently, 800,000 faculty work off the tenure track with poor working conditions that have remained unaddressed for over 20 years (Kezar & Sam, 2014). Even though some leaders and policymakers recognize that poor working conditions affect performance, there have been few intentional changes on individual campuses to foster positive working conditions for contingent faculty (Kezar & Sam, 2014). The purpose of this study is to determine the current faculty climate and the relationship between faculty and administration? Moreover, what encompasses a healthy collegial academic environment? A qualitative case study method was employed to interview five faculty within one college within a university in the Northwest region of the United States. Results of this study are beneficial to both university faculty and administrators.

This paper discusses the organisation of academic labour as an expression of contemporary capitalism in Chile. The focus of our analysis is on so called ‘taxi professors’, hourly paid academics that carry out the majority of teaching at Chilean universities. Drawing on 23 qualitative interviews, we discuss the daily work routines of taxi professors, focussing on travel to work, gender, the labour process, academic freedom, self-management and the organisation of collective struggle among hourly paid workers. In contrast to the mainstream literature on academic identity, the discourses of hourly paid academics are not shaped merely by their sense of ‘precarity’, their belonging to a disciplinary subject or professional expertise, but fundamentally by the alienating and exploitative conditions of work to which they are exposed. This understanding of hourly paid academic labour in terms of an alienated form of capitalist work will be linked to academic writing that suggests a critical-practical activity that seeks to counteract the sense of ‘helplessness’ reflected in the discourses about academic identity. The practical aspect of this activity is presented as the possibilities of platform co-operativism, expressed in this context as co-operative forms of higher education, grounded in a critical reading of Karl Marx’s labour theory of value where value rather than labour is the focus of critical analysis.

On the evening of January 12, 2012 the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) school board voted 4-1 to eliminate the highly successful and quantitatively proven Mexican American Studies Program (Cabrera, Milem, Jaquette, & Marx, 2014). Sitting in the school board meeting that evening with my then thirteen year old son, we watched in disbelief as board members stated their reasons for banning a program that had improved graduation rates, increased matriculation to higher education and even improved standardized test scores. The following week TUSD representatives entered the Mexican American Studies (MAS) classrooms and boxed up the supposed “subversive” and “anti-American” literature that included works by Sandra Cisneros, Rudy Acuna, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ana Castillo and other highly acclaimed Latin@ and Native authors.