The established neo-liberal modes of governance, financing, and evaluation, for all intents and purposes, make higher education an adjunct of corporate values and interests. Under a neo-liberal mode of governance the liberal university is reshaped into a corporate one that competes with other universities in the global knowledge economy.

In Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge-Driven Economy (1998), Charles Leadbeater, a former UK Downing Street adviser, argues that one of the main forces ruling the world economy today:

is “knowledge capitalism”: the drive to generate new ideas and turn them into commercial products and services which consumers want. This process of creating, disseminating and exploiting new knowledge is the dynamo behind rising living standards and economic growth. It reaches deep into our lives and implicates all of us as consumers and workers. If we were to turn our backs on the global economy, we would also leave behind the huge creative power of the knowledge economy.

● A shift is taking place from the production of physical goods to that of immaterial services.
● Partly in consequence, production is becoming more “knowledge-intensive” – in other words, products are likely to sell more, thanks to both the increasingly sophisticated techniques used to make them and the ideas that they represent and that are used to market them, all of which relies on research by highly qualified workers.
● The success of companies and national economies alike is therefore increasingly dependent, not on the physical plant and equipment that they have built up over years, decades, or even longer, but on their “human capital” – that is, on the skills, knowledge and imagination of their workforces. It is through successfully using these skills to supply what the world market wants that individuals, firms and whole countries can prosper.

The present era of global capitalism is one of intense international competition and the logic of competition is felt by entire economies, which are constantly comparing their productivity and competitiveness with those of their rivals. Neoliberalism in higher education means that this logic of competition is internalised deep into how universities work, and so university chancellors are now viewed as C.E.O.s, faculty as entrepreneurs, and students as consumers. Academic leadership is now defined in part through the ability to partner up with corporate donors. In fact, deans are increasingly viewed as the heads of complex businesses, and their job performance is rated according to their fund-raising capacity.

Competition in the global knowledge economy results in universities aspiring to be a “world centre of excellence”. Since only a few universities can be a “world centre of excellence” the losers end up with a smaller share of resources and therefore poorer conditions for staff and students.

Leadbetter states that in a neo-liberal world:

Universities should become not just centres of teaching and research but hubs for innovation networks in local economies, helping to spin off companies for universities, for example. Universities should be the open-cast mines of the knowledge economy.

One trend in the corporate university is the extending student fees, and thus compelling students to finance themselves by going into increasing debt and becoming casual workers in restaurants.

A second trend is the gradual proletarianisation of academic professions. Universities are increasingly reliant on large numbers of staff on short-term contracts.There is a strong trend towards replicating the pattern of top American universities, where a course given by a well-known academic involves him or her giving the lectures and the actual teaching in seminars or tutorials being done by postgraduate teaching assistants or other hourly-paid lecturers. Hourly-paid lecturers and other contract staff are the precarious workers of the neo-liberal university.

As faculty are demoted to contingency forms of labor, they lose their power to influence the conditions of their work; they see their work load increase; they are paid poorly, deprived of office space and supplies, and refused travel money; and, most significantly, they are subject to policies that allow them to be fired at will.

Neo-liberalism is generally associated with free market policies: deregulation, privatisation, competition, small state etc. David Harvey’s contention is that we are witnessing, through this process of neoliberalisation, the deepening penetration of capitalism into political and social institutions as well as cultural consciousness itself. It is the elevation of capitalism, as a mode of production, into an ethic, a set of political imperatives, and a cultural logic. It is also a project: a project to strengthen, restore, or, in some cases, constitute anew the power of economic elites.

Neoliberalism is therefore not a new turn in the history of capitalism. It is more simply its intensification, and its resurgence after decades of resistance from the Keynesian welfare state and from experiments with social democratic and welfare state politics.

individual liberty and freedom are the high point of civilization and then goes on to argue that individual liberty and freedom can best be protected and achieved by an institutional structure, made up of strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade: a world in which individual initiative can flourish. The implication of that is that the state should not be involved in the economy too much, but it should use its power to preserve private property rights and the institutions of the market and promote those on the global stage if necessary.

Harvey argues that from the very beginning in the 1970s (Pinochet in Chile, Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States) neo-liberalism was a project to achieve the restoration of class power. Neo-liberalism has been able to reverse the various political and economic gains made under welfare state policies and institutions. It is Harvey's fear that neoliberal regimes will slowly erode institutions of political democracy since the freedom of the people would be restricted in favour of the freedoms of the few.

Nussbaum describes the capabilities approach as a new theoretical paradigm in the development and policy world, which poses the questions: “What are people actually able to do and to be?” By starting from this question, we will shift the focus of policy and development analysis from resources (incomes at micro-level, and GDP per capita at national level) to people’s capabilities: the substantive freedoms or opportunities that are created by a combination of the abilities residing inside a person (like capacities and skills) with their social, economic and political environment.

Nussbaum uses the capabilities approach in constructing a theory of basic social justice. In her previous work, Nussbaum has developed a theory of universal fundamental political entitlements. Those entitlements are given, in general terms, by a list of ten central capabilities: Life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment (pp. 33-34). These entitlements impose duties on the governments, who must ensure that all people meet minimal thresholds of those capabilities.

Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing

This is a video of the talk by Scott Ludlam:

War on the Internet event #3 - Scott Ludlam from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.

Scott Ludlam is a Greens Senator.

The US Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill. The legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader.

In the Stanford Law Review Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post argue that the bills take aim not at the Internet’s core technical infrastructure:

the bills represent an unprecedented, legally sanctioned assault on the Internet’s critical technical infrastructure. Based upon nothing more than an application by a federal prosecutor alleging that a foreign website is “dedicated to infringing activities,” Protect IP authorizes courts to order all U.S. Internet service providers, domain name registries, domain name registrars, and operators of domain name servers—a category that includes hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and the like—to take steps to prevent the offending site’s domain name from translating to the correct Internet protocol address. These orders can be issued even when the domains in question are located outside of the United States and registered in top-level domains (e.g., .fr, .de, or .jp) whose operators are themselves located outside the United States; indeed, some of the bills’ remedial provisions are directed solely at such domains.

They also argue that the bills also take aim at the internet's economic and commercial infrastructure as well.

Credit card companies, banks, and other financial institutions could be ordered to “prevent, prohibit, or suspend” all dealings with the site associated with the domain name. Online advertisers could be ordered to cease providing advertising services to the site associated with the domain name. Search engine providers could be ordered to “remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name,” and to disable all hypertext links to the site.

Both bills suggest that these remedies can be meted out by courts after nothing more than ex parte proceedings—proceedings at which only one side (the prosecutor or even a private plaintiff) need present evidence and the operator of the allegedly infringing site need not be present nor even made aware that the action was pending against his or her “property.”

Naomi Klein in Capitalism vs. the Climate in The Nation says that climate change highlights an important characteristic of capitalism. This is:

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

In the past the right has systematically used crises—real and trumped up—to push through a ideological agenda designed not to solve the problems that created the crises but rather to enrich elites. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and to profit from disaster is the logic of capitalism.

He adds:

Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times...Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base. They all agree that the country must be “taken back” from the usurpers by any means necessary, and are willing to support any candidate, no matter how unworldly or unqualified or fanatical, who shares their picture of the crisis of our time. [The] apocalyptic mind works [through convincing] people that if they bring everything down around them, a phoenix will inevitably be born.

1. the fact that technological change occurs by clusters of radical innovations forming successive and distinct revolutions that modernize the whole productive structure;
2. the functional separation between financial and production capital, each pursuing profits by different means; and
3. the much greater inertia and resistance to change of the socio-institutional framework in comparison with the techno-economic sphere, which is spurred by competitive pressures.

One of her main ideas is that each of these revolutions is accompanied by a set of ‘best-practice’ principles, in the form of a techno-economic paradigm, which breaks the existing organizational habits in technology, the economy, management and social institutions.

She argues that

The counter reaction right-wing outrage that denigrates the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's underlying message is that the protestors are slovenly unproductive losers and hence have nothing in common with respectable middle class people. They fundamental distinction for the Tea party Movement is not state vs. individual, it is the division of the United States into “workers” vs. “people who don’t work.” The undeserving are “people who don’t work”, the freeloader.

The latter's rhetoric is based on nostalgia for 1800s-style small government and laissez faire economics deification of The Market, v because it gives us gives us freedom, opportunity, prosperity. Cutting into, and privatizing,Social Security and Medicare is a core tenet of faith for the libertarian ideologues, the Republican Party's Wall Street and Corporate America funders, and its elite conservative intellectuals.

What unites both strands of the Americian conservatism--the Tea Party and Waal Street strands together is the conservative worldview: America (or “Washington,” or the “mainstream media,” or some other powerful stratum) is dominated by a liberal-intellectual-academic-bureaucratic-socialist-internationalist (pick two or more) elite that must be overthrown. Ordinary Americans are being trampled on by the liberal-bureaucratic elite, and politics is an attempt to seize power back from them. It is a radical or counter revolutionary movement that thinks in terms of total war against modern radicalism.

Lewis says of the German expectation that the Greeks need to change who they are that:

This is unlikely to happen soon enough to matter. The Greeks not only have massive debts but are still running big deficits. Trapped by an artificially strong currency, they cannot turn these deficits into surpluses, even if they do everything that outsiders ask them to do. Their exports, priced in euros, remain expensive. The German government wants the Greeks to slash the size of their government, but that will also slow economic growth and reduce tax revenues. And so one of two things must happen. Either Germans must agree to a new system in which they would be fiscally integrated with other European countries as Indiana is integrated with Mississippi: the tax dollars of ordinary Germans would go into a common coffer and be used to pay for the lifestyle of ordinary Greeks. Or the Greeks (and probably, eventually, every non-German) must introduce “structural reform,” a euphemism for magically and radically transforming themselves into a people as efficient and productive as the Germans. The first solution is pleasant for Greeks but painful for Germans. The second solution is pleasant for Germans but painful, even suicidal, for Greeks.

At the moment the German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. The reason is that the German banks lent a lot of money to finance dodgy deals:

They lent money to American subprime borrowers, to Irish real-estate barons, to Icelandic banking tycoons to do things that no German would ever do. The German losses are still being toted up, but at last count they stand at $21 billion in the Icelandic banks, $100 billion in Irish banks, $60 billion in various U.S. subprime-backed bonds, and some yet-to-be-determined amount in Greek bonds.

It means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power... Englishmen are ruled by the law, and by the law alone; a man may with us be punished for a breach of law, but he can be punished for nothing else. It means, again, equality before the law or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary law courts; the 'rule of law' in this sense excludes the idea of any exemption of officials or others from the duty of obedience to the law which governs other citizens or from the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.

The law of the constitution, the rules which in foreign countries naturally form part of a constitutional code, are not the source but the consequence of the rights of individuals, as defined and enforced by the courts; that, in short, the principles of private law have with us been by the action of the courts and Parliament so extended as to determine the position of the Crown and its servants; thus the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land.

The essay sketches the changes to the visual or the image and the role of aesthetics in the culture of the postmodern and its celebratory affirmation of some post­ McLuhanite vision of culture transmogrified by computers and cyberspace.

In this world the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the culture of the image.

it only seems appropriate in the present context to recall beauty's subversive role in a society marred by nascent commodification. The fin de siecle, from Morris to Wilde, deployed beauty as a political weapon against a compla­cent materialist Victorian bourgeois society and dramatized its negative power as what rebukes commerce and money, and what generates a longing for personal and social transformation in the heart of an ugly industrial society. Why then can we not allow for similar genuinely proto-political functions today, and at least leave the door open for an equally subversive deploy­ment of the kinds of beauty and art-religions I have been enumerating?

In a previous era, art was a realm beyond commodification, in which a certain freedom was still available; in late modernism, inAdorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry essay, there were still zones of art exempt from the commodifications of commer­ cial culture (for them, essentially Hollywood). Surely what characterizes postmodernity in the cultural area is the superses­ sion of everything outside of commercial culture, its absorption of all forms of art high and low, along with image production itself.

Viewing the flower in such a way as to see it, or any object, as an aesthetic object, is to be in the aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude has figured prominently in aesthetics from the Enlightenment until the present. Its most important formulations are disinterestedness (Kant, Schopenhauer, Stolnitz), Psychical Distance (Bullough), Aldrich's Impressionistic Viewing, Scruton's Empiricistic Account, and (though these latter views are not attitude theories per se) the naturalistic work of John Dewey and Monroe Beardsley.

The aesthetic-attitude theories grew out of eighteenth and nineteenth century faculty of taste and association of ideas theories and the notion of disinterestedness. Any object (with certain reservations about the obscene and the disgusting) can become an object of aesthetic appreciation. The aesthetic attitude is held to be a special kind of perceptual experience, a specific mode of experience, and is usually premised on either some kind of being distance from everyday practical life or attending to the picture in a certain way termed disinterested.

The concept of disinterestedness is central to modern aesthetic theory and it basically means looking at a picture with no ulterior motive--ie., without economic, moral, or political satisfactions. When we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practical aims. Hence our attitude toward the object as disinterested.

Jerome Stolnitz says that the aesthetic attitude is "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone." "Disinterested" means "no concern for any ulterior purpose," "sympathetic" means "accept the object on its own terms to appreciate it," and "contemplation" means "perception directed toward the object in its own right where the spectator is not concerned to analyze it or ask questions about it." Whereas a practical attitude limits and fragments the object of our experience, allowing us to “see only those of its features which are relevant to our purposes,” the aesthetic attitude, by contrast, ‘isolates’ the object and focuses upon it—the ‘look’ of the rocks, the sound of the ocean, the colors in the painting.”

It looks to be part of a formalist aesthetic of modernism, which has fallen on hard times. By this I mean the antiquated notions of the 'autonomy of the work of art' and the 'autonomy of the aesthetic' that persisted through the modernist period, or better still, that served as its philosophical cornerstone. We now live with the end of artistic autonomy, of the work of art and of its frame. Thus is our world and the the only kind with which we can work.

George Dickie in his essay “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude” (Dickie 1964) argued that all the purported examples of interested or distanced attention are really just examples of inattention. So consider the case of the spectator at a performance of Othello who becomes increasingly suspicious of his wife as the action proceeds, or the case of the impresario who sits gauging the size of the audience, or the case of the father who sits taking pride in his daughter's performance, or the case of the moralist who sits gauging the moral effects the play is apt to produce in its audience. These and all such cases will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested or distanced attention to the performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention to the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play. But if none of them is attending to the performance, then none of them is attending to it disinterestedly or with distance

Secondly, we would like to draw knowledge from looking at a picture but this seems to be in conflict with the aesthetic attitude. An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it.

So the current return to the aesthetic that argues for an existence of aesthetic experience outside historical time is a conservative project of restoration of the old disinterested aesthetic clothes of the high modernist tradition that seeks to eradicate everything extra-aesthetic in the works they celebrate. It is the properties of sensory Beauty that are a central concern to traditional aesthetics and traditional artistic produc­tion. Sensory beauty is the heart of the matter for this tradition.

Wacquant, who is the author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, goes on to argue that under a neo-liberal mode of governance we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. He says:

we must re-link shifts in penal and social policy, instead of isolating them from one another. The downsizing of public aid, complemented by the shift from the right to welfare to obligation of workfare (that is, forced participation in sub par employment as a condition of support), and the upsizing of the prison are the two sides of the same coin. Together, workfare and prisonfare effect the double regulation of poverty in the age of deepening economic inequality and diffusing social insecurity.

The argument is that "neoliberal mode of governance abandons the Keynesian-Fordist legacy of state safety nets and stable wage structures in favour of sweeping deregulation and the precarious, piecemeal work that comes with it. It shrinks its social state, leaving people to fend for themselves. But in order to do so without ruinous social rupture, it multiplies its control functions. Hence the aggrandisement of the penal state: those many misfits exposed in the gap between deregulated labour and the reined-in social state must neither get uppity nor go under completely. Instead, they must go down.

This criminalising of poverty has the objective of frightening people into submissive acceptance of the replacement of reliable wage-work with precarious labour, semi-wages and fractured hours. The increasing dependence on our penal state and the accelerating erosion of our social state are two sides of the same coin.

Harvey says that the saga and history of capitalism is full of paradoxes, even as most forms of social theory –economic theory in particular – abstract entirely from consideration of them. He adds:

On the negative side we have not only the periodic and often localised economic crises that have punctuated capitalism’s evolution, including inter-capitalist and inter- imperialist world wars, problems of environmental degradation, loss of biodiverse habitats, spiralling poverty among burgeoning populations, neocolonialism, serious crises in public health, alienations and social exclusions galore and the anxieties of insecurity, violence and unfulfilled desires.

some of us live in a world where standards of material living and well-being have never been higher, where travel and communications have been revolutionised and physical (though not social) spatial barriers to human interactions have been much reduced, where medical and biomedical understandings offer for many a longer life, where huge, sprawling and in many respects spectacular cities have been built, where knowledge proliferates, hope springs eternal and everything seems possible (from self-cloning to space travel).