On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality
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Abstract
As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their la-bour-power. Incrementally the labour of those academics and students is subsumed and re-engineered for value production, and is prey to the twin processes of financialisation and marketisation. At the core of understanding the impact of these processes and their relation-ships to the reproduction of higher education is the alienated labour of the academic. The arti-cle examines the role of alienated labour in academic work in its relationship to the proletari-anisation of the University, and relates this to feelings of hopelessness, in order to ask what might be done differently. The argument centres on the role of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge and knowing, as a potential moment for overcoming alienated labour.