Bruno Gulli: Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic

Bruno Gulli: Knowledge Production and the Superexploitation of Contingent Academic
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2009 16, 1-30.

In the corporate university, a capitalist enterprise, the fact of contingent academic labor should not be seen as an aberration, a scandalous (but perhaps temporary) anomaly that could be solved within and by the very system that produces it. Rather, the everincreasing number of contingent academic workers, and the consequent reduction in the number and power of full-timers, is the norm. Not only is it the norm, but it is the coherent, logical consequence of the corporatization process. That is, there could be no corporatization without the logic of sovereignty and domination whereby contingent labor in the first place, and all other labor in the second, must be, as is, superexploited.

The originary idea of the university as a place for learning (perhaps even disinterested learning) is gone. (1) To have faith in that idea at this point in time would be having faith in a romantic past, it would be a useless, if not politically dangerous, nostalgia. Yet, if the past is barred, the future is not. Hence, the work for the transformation of the corporate university can be a concrete utopia, that is, one already present in the political, radical imagination, as well as in the structure of the real (when this latter is understood as inclusive of the potential). What must be made clear, however, is that the transformation of the university is not possible if society itself is not transformed. If the university has become a capitalist enterprise, if the relationship between the university as such (its administrators) and its workforce (including the often reluctant full-timers) is the relationship between capital and labor, then the antagonism within the university is the antagonism present in capitalist society as a whole. Of course, where this labor is exploited most, which is the case with contingent labor, there the antagonism becomes irreducible. To say that it is irreducible means to say that the only true solution lies in the elimination of such exploitation, which is equal to the elimination of the university as a capitalist enterprise.

In a time of economic crisis such as this, the situation becomes worse. Classes are canceled, and the classes offered (especially in community colleges) are more crowded than ever; the position of contingent academic workers becomes more precarious. The failure of the neoliberal economy, which has also brought about the corporate university, does not eliminate the problems it has created. Instead, these problems acquire now full force and visibility.

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