Education in the Age of Financialization

Michael A. Peters

University of Waikato

University of Illinois

2013

Neoliberalism and finance capitalism

The shadow economy

Neoliberalism and finance capitalism

• The rise of neoliberalism is explained by the growing role and power of finance in the political economy of capitalism

• "...neoliberalism is the expression of the desire of a class of capitalist owners and the institutions in which their power is concentrated, which we collectively call 'finance,' to restore ... the class's revenues and power...” -- Dumenil and Levy (2004, 1-2)

• Financialization is result of neoliberal restructuring but has deeper roots -- David M. Kotz (2008)

Finance Capitalism• Not just quantitative expansion but change in

nature of financial institutions that jettisoned its traditional loan-making functions to pursue the creation and sale of its own financial instruments

• Neoliberalism, beginning 1980 in US, encourage a shift from state-regulated capitalism to deregulated neoliberal capitalism

Financialisation is a systematic transformation of capitalism

1. the massive expansion of the financial sector where finance companies have taken over from banks as major financial institutions and banks have moved away from old commercial banking practices to operate directly in capital markets as investment bankers;

2. large previously non-financial multinational corporations have acquired new financial capacities to operate and gain leverage as investors in financial markets;

3. domestic households have become players in financial markets (the ascendancy of shareholder capitalism) taking on debt and managing assets;

4. in general, this change represents the dominance of financial markets and institutions over a relative declining production of the traditional industrial, productive or real economy

5. Financialisation is a cultural change in ideology about unregulated markets that infuses all policies

New Forms of CapitalismCultural, algorithmic, symbolic, bioinformational, educational

New forms of Capitalism‘Cybernetic capitalism’ is a term we use in order to distinguish a group of theories, or, better, positions, on the Left that attempt to theorize the nature of the new capitalism under neoliberalism. These are "models" that can be characterized by associated literatures.

1.Informational capitalism

2.Cultural capitalism

3.Cognitive capitalism

4.Finance capitalism

5.Biocapitalism

6.Educational capitalism

1. Informational capitalism The nature of information/knowledge ‘Informational’, ‘Digital’, ‘Virtual’, ‘Cyber’,

‘Fast’, ‘High-tech’ Castells, Shiller, Morris-Suzuki, Schmiede, Fuchs

• Informational capitalism: Castells sees informationalism as a new technological mode of development characterized by “information generation, processing, and transmission” that have become “the fundamental sources of productivity and power” (Castells 2000: 21). Morris-Suzuki (1997) and Schmiede (2006a, b) have used this term and Christian Fuchs (2007) also writes of an informational capitalism of self-regulation.

• Digital capitalism: Dan Schiller and Robert McChesney employ a traditional Marxist political economy applied out of communication theory to questions of ownership of global communications: “networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy as never before” (Schiller 2000: xiv). See also Peter Glotz, (1999).

• Cyber-Capitalism: Dyer Witheford, N. Cyber-Marx. Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in high Technology Capitalism (1999)

1. Informational capitalism• Knowledge Capitalism: Michael A. Peters & Tina Besley, Building

Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (2006); Sheila Slaughter & Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (2004). Fast capitalism: Ben Agger (1989; 2004) – Also see the journal website of the same title.

• Virtual capitalism: the “combination of marketing and the new information technology will enable certain firms to obtain higher profit margins and larger market shares, and will thereby promote greater concentration and centralization of capital” (Dawson & Foster, 1998, p. 63).

• High-tech capitalism (Haug 2003), or informatic capitalism (Fitzpatrick 2002) – to focus on the computer as a guiding technology that transformed the productive forces of capitalism and has enabled a globalized economy.

2. Cultural capitalism

The change of culture ‘new culture’, ‘knowing capitalism’, ‘new spirit’, ‘cultural economy’

• New culture of capitalism: This strand emerges from work in the ‘new geography’ and sociology and is epitomized by Richard Sennett’s (2007) The Culture of New Capitalism.

• Knowing Capitalism – Epitomized by Nigel Thrift’s (2006) Knowing Capitalism.

• The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello (2005)

• Cultural economy, Michael Pryke and Paul du Gay (2002)

3. Cognitive Capitalism Immaterial Labor , ‘Cognitive capitalism’, ‘affective capitalism’’

• Cognitive Capitalism – ‘Affective Labour is a key feature of the new mode of cognitive capitalism based on immaterial labour. It is a key aspect of a strategy based on autonomous peer production.

- Yann Moulier Boutang Le capitalisme cognitif : La Nouvelle Grande Transformation, (2007);

- Vercellone C. (ed), Capitalismo cognitivo, (2006);

- De Angelis, M. and D. Harvie (2006) ‘Cognitive Capitalism and the Rat Race: How capital measures ideas and affects in UK higher education’

3. Cognitive capitalism

• Immaterial Labor: Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism (1999); Negri & Hardt (2000: 290) argue that contemporary society is an Empire that is characterized by a singular global logic of capitalist domination that is based on immaterial labour.

• With the concept of immaterial labour Negri and Hardt introduce ideas of information society discourse into their Marxist account of contemporary capitalism. Immaterial labour would be labour “that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response” (Hardt/Negri 2005: 108; cf. also 2000: 280-303), or services, cultural products, knowledge (Hardt/Negri 2000: 290).

• Affective Capitalism - Massumi, B. (n.d.) ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact’; Immaterial and affective labor, Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott (Ephemera, 2007); Juan Martín Prada, ‘Economies of affectivity’ and Michael Hardt ‘Affective Labor’ Semio-capitalism - Precarious Rhapsody. Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation, Franco Bernadi (forthcoming)

4. Finance Capitalism ‘Financialization’

• Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. Ed. Tom Bottomore (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981)

• Hilferding's Finance Capital (Das Finanzkapital, Vienna: 1910) was "the seminal Marxist analysis of the transformation of competitive and pluralistic 'liberal capitalism' into monopolistic 'finance capital'"

Rudolf Hilferding

Rudolph Hilferding Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development

Chapter 25, The proletariat and imperialism. http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/ch25.htm

• "The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for society, through its conscious executive organ – the state conquered by the working class – to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate control of these branches of production.”

“Contradictions of Finance Capitalism”Richard Peet, Monthly Review, 63, 2011

• “Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include ‘everything.’ We now live in the era of global finance capitalism.”

• “Financialization has involved increasingly exotic forms of financial instruments and the growth of a shadow-banking system, off the balance sheets of the banks. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 symbolized the almost complete deregulation of a financial sector that has become complex, opaque, and ungovernable.”

5. Biocapitalism & Biopolitics

"bioinformationalism"

• Biocapitalism: Based lososely on Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopower, and Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism (1999);

• Rajan, K.S. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006);

• Eric Cohen (2006) “Biotechnology and the Spirit of Capitalism”

• http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/biotechnology-and-the-spirit-of-capitalism

“Bio-informational capitalism”June 2012 vol. 110 no. 1 98-111

• This essay builds on the literatures on ‘biocapitalism’ and ‘informationalism’ (or ‘informational capitalism’) to develop the concept of ‘bio-informational capitalism’ in order to articulate an emergent form of capitalism that is self-renewing in the sense that it can change and renew the material basis for life and capital as well as program itself.

• Bio-informational capitalism applies and develops aspects of the new biology to informatics to create new organic forms of computing and self-reproducing memory that in turn has become the basis of bioinformatics.

• The paper begins with a review of the successes of the ‘new biology’, focusing on Craig Venter’s digitizing of biology and, as he remarks, the creation of new life from the digital universe. The paper then provides a brief account of bioinformatics before brokering and discussing the term ‘bioinformational capitalism’.

Algorithmic Capitalismhttp://truth-out.org/news/item/8887-algorithmic-capitalism-and-educational-futures-informationalism-and-the-googlization-of-knowledge• “Algorithmic capitalism and its dominance of the market increasingly

across all asset classes has truly arrived.

• It is an aspect of informationalism (informational capitalism) or "cybernetic capitalism," a term that recognizes more precisely the cybernetic systems similarities among various sectors of the post-industrial capitalist economy in its third phase of development - from mercantilism, industrialism to cybernetics - linking the growth of the multinational info-utilities (e.g., Goggle, Microsoft, Amazon) and their spectacular growth in the last twenty years, with developments in biocapitalism and the informatization of biology, and fundamental changes taking place with algorithmic trading and the development of so-called financialization.”

• "Algorithmic Capitalism and Educational Futures: Informationalism and the Googlization of Knowledge"

Algorithmic Trading and Cloud Capitalism - May 6, 2010• "At 2:32 p.m., against this backdrop of unusually high volatility and

thinning liquidity, a large fundamental5 trader (a mutual fund complex) initiated a sell program to sell a total of 75,000 E- Mini contracts (valued at approximately $4.1 billion) as a hedge to an existing equity position (p. 2). The report indicates that liquidity crises ensued because a large trader used an automated execution algorithm ('Sell Algorithm') that was programmed to trade large volume (E-Mini contracts) with regard only to volume rather than price or time and the Sell Algorithm was executed rapidly in the period of twenty minutes resulting in one the three largest single-day price movements in the history of the stock market. Under the heading 'Lesson Learned' the Report suggests that 'under stressed market conditions, the automated execution of a large sell order can trigger extreme price movements, especially if the automated execution algorithm does not take prices into account. Moreover, the interaction between automated execution programs and algorithmic trading strategies can quickly erode liquidity and result in disorderly markets.'"

6. New Forms of Educational Capitalism

• Privatization, corporatization and commericalization of education with emulation of private sector management and global education as tradeable services (WTO; TRIPPS).

• Informatization & the postmodernization of education, the cultural archive & production/consumption of knowledge.

• Investment in human capital, key competencies and generic skills (since the 1960s, after Gary Becker's (1964) Human Capital.

• Emergence of the entrepreneurial self with investments at critical points in the education career cycle - "responsibilization"

• Distributed knowledge systems lessen costs of sharing of intellectual capital (research), academic publishing (dissemination), courseware (instruction).

• Emergence of global online ‘borderless education’, rise of corporate virtual education providers, and online courses for public universities.

New Forms of Educational Capitalism (2)

• Growth of charter schools, UK academies, home-schooling, informal and 24/7 professional education.

• Emergence of the paradigm of social production (Benkler, 2006) where co-production & co-creation characterizes ‘active learner-consumers’ and ‘citizen-consumers.’

• Design principle best illustrated through maxim that ‘architecture is politics’ and communication systems are a complex three tiers of content, code and infrastructure where each level might be controlled and owned or free.

• Convergence of open source, open access and open education.

• Radical interpenetration of public and private educational spaces and increasing dependency on technological fix.

Some Further Explorations of these themes (1)

• Peters, M.A. & Reveley, J. "Retrofitting Drucker: Knowledge Work Under Cognitive Capitalism", Culture & Organization, 2012: iFirst, 1-17

• Peters, M.A. "Manifesto for Education in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism: Freedom, Creativity and Culture", Economics, Management, and Financial Markets, 6(1), 2011, pp. 63–92.

• Peters, M.A. "Bioinformational capitalism", Thesis Eleven, 110, 2012: 98-111.

• Peters, M.A. "Three Forms of the Knowledge Economy: Learning, creativity and openness", Economics, Management and Financial Markets, 5(4), 2011: 63-92.

• Peters, M.A. & Venkatesan, P. "Biocapitalism and the Politics of Life", Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 2011, 2(2).

Some Further Explorations of these themes (2)

• Peters, M.A. & Venkatesan, P. "Bioeconomy and the Third Industrial Revolution in the Age of Synthetic Life," Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice, 2011, 2(2).

• Peters, M.A. and Bulut, E. (Eds.) Cognitive Capitalism, Education and the Question of Digital Labor. New York, Peter Lang, 2011.

• Peters, M.A. Neoliberalism and After? Education, Social Policy and the Crisis of Capitalism. New York, Peter Lang, 2011.

• Peters, M.A., Britez, R. & Bulut, E. Cybernetic Capitalism, Informationalism, and Cognitive Labor, Geopolitics, History and International Relations, 1 (2), 2010: 11-40.

• Peters,M.A. Educational, Science and Knowledge Capitalism. New York, Peter Lang, 2013

Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital LaborEdited Michael A. Peters & Ergin Bulut (2011)

• “Algorithmic Capitalism and Educational Futures: Informationalism and the Googlization of Knowledge”

• “Educational futures require a global transnational public investment in infrastructures that stand against both the monopolization and privatization of knowledge and education.”

TruthOutTruthout works to spark action by revealing systemic injustice and providing a platform for

transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis.

• Speed, Power and the Physics of Finance Capitalism

• Will Global Financialization and the Eurozone Debt Crisis Defeat European Cosmopolitan Democracy?

• In a Risk Society, Is Consumption Our Only Tool to Influence Our World?

• Breaking Open the Digital Commons to Fight Corporate Capitalism

• Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism

• Knowledge Capitalism and the "Academic Spring"

• Freedom, Openness and Creativity in the Digital Economy

• Knowledge Work Under Cognitive Capitalism

• Why Equality Matters

Dimensions of Finance Capitalism

Securitization and Derivatives

Financial and real wealthMcKinsey Global Institute

http://regulation.revues.org/docannexe/image/7729/img-1.jpg

McKinsey Global Institute

$1.2 Quadrillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP (2010)

• One of the biggest risks to the world's financial health is the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market. It's complex, it's unregulated, and it ought to be of concern to world leaders that its notional value is 20 times the size of the world economy.

• But traders rule the roost -- and as much as risk managers and regulators might want to limit that risk, they lack the power or knowledge to do so.

• A quadrillion is a big number: 1,000 times a trillion.

• Yet according to one of the world's leading derivatives experts, Paul Wilmott, who holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from Oxford University, $1.2 quadrillion is the so-called notional value of the worldwide derivatives market.

• To put that in perspective, the world's annual gross domestic product is between $50 trillion and $60 trillion.

Videos• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4b_Dt1Mq-k

Real News - $1,200 Trillion Derivatives Market Dwarfs World GDP

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq-FSI9x6fo

LIFE HIDDEN TRUTH 2013 GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LWm6_6tA

The Crisis of Credit Visualized - HD

WALL STREET AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, April 13, 2011

“In the fall of 2008, America suffered a devastating economic collapse. Once valuable securities lost most or all of their value, debt markets froze, stock markets plunged, and storied financial firms went under. Millions of Americans lost their jobs; millions of families lost their homes; and good businesses shut down. These events cast the United States into an economic recession so deep that the country has yet to fully recover.”

•High Risk Lending

•Regulatory Failure

•Inflated Credit Ratings

• Investment Bank Abuses

US Senate

Housing BubbleHousing Bubble

Globalisation of finance• Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and

globalization are themselves expressions of finance, closely tied to the development of derivatives markets and the evolution of an international financial system where the international rentiers have managed to significantly increase their share of national income often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption and widespread criminalisation of financial practices.   The current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire capitalistic system based on interconnected global financial markets.

Global interconnectedness of finance

• There is a clear sense that the new technologies and the financial instruments and techniques they have made possible, have strengthened interdependencies between markets and market participants, both within and across national boundaries. As a result, a disturbance in one market segment or one country is likely to be transmitted more rapidly throughout the world economy than was evident in previous eras (Greenspan, 1998, p. 244).

Financialization of public sphere

• This is a fundamental shift that represents the financialization of the reproductive sphere of life itself. Under this regime the monopolization and privatization of knowledge and education has proceeded rapidly. One of the effects of financialisation and the economic crisis has been to popularize a debate on budget cuts and "austerity politics" across the board for public services provided at the state level with massive cuts to education in all aspects, attacks on collective bargaining, and the sacking of thousands of teachers.

Charlie Rose Interviews Charles Ferguson on his documentary 'Inside Job’

Origins of “Credit Crunch” (RBNZ)

• In 2007-08 the United States, followed by the rest of the world, experienced a ‘credit crunch’ that, by late 2008, had developed into the worst worldwide economic crisis since the Second World War. Although New Zealand was in a relatively good position, with a healthy banking system and sound economic fundamentals, the country still entered a prolonged recession

• Financial markets – places where loans and investments could be traded as a commodity – became highly sophisticated and expanded in depth during the last decades of the twentieth century. By this time they were computerised and linked world-wide, meaning that any incident or event could be swiftly transmitted internationally.

(2)• By mid-2007 it had become clear that the full value of many of

these loans was not recoverable. Loss of confidence in sub-prime mortgages in the United States triggered a wave of doubt regarding many of the loans, creating dysfunction through the whole financial system. Terms like ‘toxic debt’ became commonplace, and countries such as Iceland experienced very severe difficulties

• From mid-2008 the Bank also initiated sharp reductions in the Official Cash Rate (OCR), the rate that anchors interest rates for New Zealand. This had been sitting at slightly over 8 percent, but by early 2009 had dropped to around 2.5 percent, a very rapid rate of easing of interest rates compared to normal standards

Marazzi, C. (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism trans. K. Lebedeva. New York: Semiotext(e).

• This global crisis is a new type of crisis, “it is the capitalist way of transferring to the economic order the social and potentially political dimension, the dimension of the resistances ripened during the phase leading up to the cycle” (85). It is the first systemic and global crisis of neo-liberal financial capitalism that began with the crisis of the Fordist model of accumulation and the consequent deregulation of the banking system during the 1970s.

Financialization of EducationStudent debt, charter schools, investment university

The Chain of Charter SchoolsCharter schools

UK "Freedom" Academies• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMl2q-lfzvE

• Michael Gove invites all schools to apply to become academies

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8wNCMTisc0

• Sponsored Academies in the UK - A Form of Education Public Private Partnership

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E145YmDDJec&list=PL0EA60F5417D47E52

• Academies Funding part 1, from 2013

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2uiGwaRojE

• Michael Gove on UK education policy (12May13)

Michael Gove unveils sweeping school reforms

•• http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/24/michael-gove-sweeping

-school-reforms • The education secretary, Michael Gove, has outlined plans to transform

teacher training and recruitment, shake up school league tables to focus more on children's performance in academic subjects, and make it easier for headteachers to remove poor teachers and exclude disruptive children.

• In a schools white paper published today ministers said government funding would cease for graduates who did not have at least a 2:2 degree from September 2012, while the government would explore paying off the student loans of graduates in shortage subjects who wished to enter teaching.

Education white paper will shake up league tables, transform teacher training and recruitment and 'shorten and simplify' rules for removing incompetent teachers

For Michael Gove, the Pol Pot of education, every year is Year Zero

• Matthew Norman, http://www.independent.co.uk • http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/matthew-norman-for-

michael-gove-the-pol-pot-of-education-every-year-is-year-zero-8683331.html

• All intensive research unearths, in fact, is a pair of trifling putative tweaks to the system. One is lengthening the school day and shortening the holidays, to bring education into line with working life. The other, revealed by this newspaper yesterday, is to outsource the running of schools to profit-making businesses.

• In the utopian future that is Goveworld, the two might dovetail exquisitely. The nation’s 11-year-olds would reach their desks at 6.30am and put in two hours of Call Centre Studies, handling complaints about faulty satellite dishes from angry account holders in Mumbai, before conventional lessons begin. This has obvious appeal. Apart from the financial benefits to the venture capitalists who have superceded the board of governors, this would prepare children for the shifting balance of economic power in the world they will inherit.

Everything you need to know about the student borrowing bubble in 17 charts. By Matt

Phillipshttp://qz.com/78889/student-borrowing-bubble-in-17-charts/ $1 trillion in students loans outsanding

, mortgagaes are the only form of debt Americans have more of

Student loans

College Cost Inflation in US

Unemployment of BAs

The Market for Student LoansFig 1

Private Student Loan in Billions

Student Loans

Danny Weil on student debthttp://www.dailycensored.com/student-loans-the-financialized-economy-of-indentured-servitude/

• “The financialization of the student loan debt occurs when student loan debt is transformed into asset-backed securities (ABS).  The value and income payments from the ABS’s are ‘collateralized’ (“backed”) by a specified pool of underlying assets.  None of the ABS can be sold individually.  This is why they are sold to large institutional investors.  By ‘pooling’ the assets into ABS, this allows them to be sold to general institutional investors.  This process is called securitization.”

• “Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS) are a major sector of the ABS market. There are more than $400 billion in assets backing various student loan deals that are issued in the market.  SLABS, like the sub-prime loans, are traditionally a favorite for fixed income investors”. 

(2)• Now that student loan debt has reached a milestone —

$1 trillion on April 25, 2012, many investors realize there are many other variables, which affect the timing and realization of cash flows of student loan securities.  One such factor that was not accounted for when investors originally invested in SLABS is the massive student default rates that are sweeping the country.  This coupled with bleak employment opportunities have forecasters already talking about the next financial bubble to burst.

“The new prudentialism in education: Actuarial rationality and the entrepreneurial self”

Peters (2005) Educational Theory

In this essay I examine the ways in which enterprise culture has been promoted as a style of governance through the market. I argue that a ‘‘new prudentialism’’ in education rests on the concept of the entrepreneurial self that ‘‘responsibilizes’’ the self to make welfare choices based on an actuarial rationality as a form of social security that insures the individual against risk. This represents a new welfare regime — one that is no longer focused on the rights of the citizen, but that is based on the model of the citizen-consumer who makes investments in the self at critical points in the life cycle. I begin by providing a brief analysis of the risk society and outlining a theoretical approach drawn from Michel Foucault. Then in the latter part of the essay I develop the notion of actuarial rationality in relation to an ethics of self-constitution and the new prudentialism in education.

The Literature on "Responsibilization"

Pat O'Malley, 2009

• ‘Responsibilization’ is a term developed in the governmentality literature to refer to the process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another – usually a state agency – or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all. The process is strongly associated with neo-liberal political discourses, where it takes on the implication that the subject being responsibilized has avoided this duty or the responsibility has been taken away from them in the welfare state era and managed by an expert or government agency. The term ‘responsibilization’ first appears in the governmentality literature in the mid-1990s where it refers to a neo-liberal strategy associated with the assumption that under the governance of the welfare state, liberal subjects had sloughed off or been divested of the responsibility for governing themselves or assisting others reliant on them.

• http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/the-sage-dictionary-of-policing/n111.xml

"The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality"

Ronen Shamir, Economy & Society 2008

• This article explores emerging discursive formations concerning the relationship of business and morality. It suggests that contemporary tendencies to economize public domains and methods of government also dialectically produce tendencies to moralize markets in general and business enterprises in particular. The article invokes the concept of ‘responsibilization’ as means of accounting for the epistemological and practical consequences of such processes. Looking at the underlying ‘market rationality’ of governance, and critically examining the notion of ‘corporate social responsibility’, it concludes that the moralization of markets further sustains, rather than undermining, neo-liberal governmentalities and neo-liberal visions of civil society, citizenship and responsible social action

• http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03085140701760833#.UeXNdo4rTfA

Financialisation & subject-formation

• Financialisation is understood as emerging out of conditions which force people to weigh up the market performance of their financial assets when making everyday decisions between saving and consuming (Boyer 2000a, Froud et al. 2002). Financialisation should therefore also be understood in terms of subject-formation. It is, indeed, very much about how financial investment becomes a ‘life-strategy’ (Martin 2002).

• Towards ‘universal financialisation’ in Sweden?, Claes Belfrage (2009), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569770802396337#.UeXQho4rTfA

The financialization of the university

Notes from Danny Weil, http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/the-financialization-of-education-and-sonoma-state-university-part-ii/

The university must be understood as turned over to private capital markets and thus is a “borrower”, “lender” and “investor”

Debt plays a prominent if not central role in the life of the university education, like all institutions, cannot be understood divorced from the economic system that underlies it and which it reflects.

Financialization of educationWhen we speak specifically about the ‘financialization of education’, we are addressing how financial motives, markets, specific powerful individuals, corporations and financial institutions impact all of public education.  In grades K-12 we can see the financialization of education through the power of private textbook companies, publicly traded companies like K12 Inc., Educational Management Corporations that manage charter schools and that trade on the NY Stock Exchange, testing corporations that also trade on Wall Street, charter schools, charter school construction fueled by venture capital, for-profit services for such thing as school lunch programs and the corporate financial management of public pension funds, to name just a few financial activities.

John Bellamy Foster• “Changes in capitalism over the last three decades have

been commonly characterized using a trio of terms: neo-liberalism, globalization, and financialization. Although a lot has been written on the first two of these, much less attention has been given to the third. Yet, financialization is now increasingly seen as the dominant force in this triad. The financialization of capitalism—the shift in gravity of economic activity from production (and even from much of the growing service sector) to finance—is thus one of the key issues of our time. More than any other phenomenon it raises the question: has capitalism entered a new stage?” http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-financialization-of-capitalism

GlobalHigherEd• “…universities are proving to be appealing investments for

government stimulus efforts due to the sector’s stabilizing, countercyclical nature in the short term as well as its potential to stimulate long term economic growth” (http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/moodys-special-comment-report-on-the-global-recession/).

• Moody’s …states in their 2009 report, Global Recession and Universities: Funding Strains to Keep Up with Rising Demand  that:

• “the global public university’s’ ‘credit quality’ is “steadier” than that of private universities” (ibid).

At the Campaign for the Public University

• At the Campaign for the Public University, we have argued strongly against the financialization of the public university. We have argued that this is not the same as the commodification of higher education (which we can confront as individuals in our pedagogic practices), but represents a series of measures designed to open universities to for-profit income streams. This includes creating a means by which tuition fees can be raised and the income diverted towards other academic activities.

The Global Financial Crisis and the Restructuring of EducationMichael A. Peters, Joao

Paraskeva and Tina BesleyPeter Lang 2014

"Financialization" is a term that describes an economic system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible, intangible, future or present promises, etc.) either into a financial instrument or a derivative of a financial instrument. The original intent of financialization is to be able to reduce any work product or service to an exchangeable financial instrument. It is an aspect of increased symbolization, mathematization and computerization of financial markets that are trends within knowledge capitalism. Neoliberalism is an expression of the power of finance that has gathered pace with the internationalization of capital and the globalization of markets.

(2)

Some scholars suggest that neoliberalism and globalization are themselves expressions of finance, closely tied to the development of derivatives markets and the evolution of an international financial system where the international rentiers have managed to significantly increase their share of national income often on the basis of systematic fraud, corruption and widespread criminalisation of financial practices.   The current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire capitalistic system based on interconnected global financial markets. This is a fundamental shift that represents the financialization of the reproductive sphere of life itself. Under this regime the monopolization and privatization of knowledge and education has proceeded rapidly. One of the effects of financialisation and the economic crisis has been to popularize a debate on budget cuts and "austerity politics" across the board for public services provided at the state level with massive cuts to education in all aspects, attacks on collective bargaining, and the sacking of thousands of teachers. This collection provides a an introduction and analysis of "financialisation" and the fate of public education under "austerity politics”.

References on Neoliberalism• Dumenil, G. & Levy, D. (2004) Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal

Revolution. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

• Foucault, M. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the college de France 1978-79, http://asounder.org/resources/foucault_biopolitics.pdf

• American Neoliberalism: Michel Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, http://vimeo.com/43984248

• Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/rsw/research_centres/theory/conf/rg/harvey_a_brief_history_of_neoliberalism.pdf

• Peters, M. (2011) Neoliberalism and After? http://www.amazon.com/dp/1433112051

Some references on Finance Capitalism

• Hilferding, R.(1981) Finance Capital: A study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1910/finkap/

• Kotz, D. M. (2008) Neoliberalism and Financialization, http://people.umass.edu/dmkotz/Neolib_and_Fin_08_03.pdf

• Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira: The Global Financial Crisis and a New Capitalism? Levy Economics Institute Working Paper No. 592. Mai 2010.