Image: Homeless man with commuters walking past, Waterloo Station, London. Credit: Jessica Mulley/Flickr, CC 2.0

The hostile environment is not just about the Windrush generation in the UK, or the harassment of migrants at the Mexican border in the USA, or the unwelcoming treatment of refugees trying to reach Europe. It has become ubiquitous and widespread. We encounter it in many aspects of daily life. In worsening conditions at work such as zero-hour ‘contracts’. In obstacles to accessing social and health services due to cutbacks, making people’s lives more precarious. Online threats and trolling are other signs of this normalisation of hostility.

The normalisation of hostile environments signals a worrying and global shift in values of tolerance, empathy, compassion, hospitality and responsibility for the vulnerable. It’s a normalisation that was criticised recently in the UK by UN Poverty Rapporteur Philip Alston, who described how “punitive, mean-spirited, often callous” government welfare policies were contributing to an “increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society”.

There’s a pattern to hostile environments that harks back to the 1930s and 40s. As we know, at the time, those targeted were considered as the enemy within, to be subject to expulsion, exclusion and indeed, genocide, as happened to Jews and other so-called ‘inferior races’. In more recent time, the iterations of this discourse of the alien other who must be expelled or eliminated to save the ‘pure’ or ‘good race’ or ethnicity and reconstitute the broken community have found traction in Europe, the USA, Rwanda, India, parts of the Middle East. In its wake, refugees have become asylum seekers, migrants are labelled illegal or criminal, cultural differences become alien cultures, non-binary women and men are misgendered, and at the extreme, those targeted for violence become vermin. It marks a shift in political culture that inscribes elements of fascism.

Why has this atmosphere of hostility become the default position in politics? What have been the triggers and what are the stakes in this great moving rightwards shift? One may be tempted to identify the change in mood and attitudes with recent events like the election of Trump in the USA. But the far right has been on the rise in Europe, the UK and the US for some years, as seen in movements like the Tea Party, UKIP, or the National Front in France. They have been given a boost by the flood of refugees generated by wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, as well as by the spread of fundamentalist religious creeds that have an affinity with forms of fascism.

Why? Two related sets of developments that from the 1970s have gradually altered the political terrain. Economically, globalisation emerged as an integral part of a transnational corporate strategy aimed at securing advantageous conditions for the consolidation of global capital at a time of risky structural changes in the global economy. And politically, neoliberalism took hold when the crises of the 1970s started to undermine the postwar consensus in the Keynesian mixed economy and the role of the welfare state.

Globalisation saw the systematic deployment of outsourcing production in countries offering cheap labour, minimised corporate tax burdens and other incentives for transnational corporations, and the invention of the trade in derivatives (financial mechanisms intended to leverage the value of assets and repackaged debts). They contributed to the 2008 crash. The general public were made to bail out the banks through increased taxation and the establishment of policies across social services that produce hostile environments for claimants seeking state support.

As Ha Joon Chang has shown, by the 1990s, financial capitalism had become the dominant power, prioritising the interest of shareholders, and incentivising managers through share ownership and bonuses schemes. The disruptions due to this recomposition of capital have been a global squeeze on income, the creation of a new precariat, and the debt society. People who feel insecure, abandoned to forces outside their control become easy prey to demagogues and prophets of deceit who promise the return of good times, provided enemies and outsiders who wreck things are expelled.

Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success in terms of growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008.

What is important here is the radical shift in values and attitudes that recall utilitarian values in the 19th Century. In particular, it is reflected in the neoliberal hostility towards the poor, the weak, the destitute, the ‘ losers’, expressed in its denial or abnegation of responsibility for their plight or welfare, and its project of dismantling the welfare or providential state.

This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political economy. Not the economy – privatisation, monetisation, deregulation, generalised competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalised capitalism anyway. But neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms, and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programmes of redistribution, enshrined in Beveridge or New Deals, draw from these same principles and values.

Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of winners and ‘losers’. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money. It is not the social democratic compromise of capitalism with a human face that could support the welfare state. Seen in this context, there is an essential affinity between alt-right, neoliberal political economy and neo- fascisms, punctuated by aggressivity, intolerance, exclusion, expulsion and generalised hostility.

There are other important stakes at this point in the history of humanity and the planet. We tend to forget that support for fundamental human rights, like equality, liberty, freedom from oppressive power, has long been motivated by the same kind of concern to defend the vulnerable, the poor, the destitute, the oppressed from the injustices arising from unequal relations of power. We forget too that these rights have been hard won through generations of emancipatory struggles against many forms of oppressions.

Yet, it is sad to see many institutions and organisations tolerate intolerance out of confusion about the principles at stake and for fear of provoking hostile reactions from those who claim rights that in effect disadvantage some already vulnerable groups. Failure to defend the oppressed anywhere and assert our common humanity is the slippery slope towards a Hobbesian state and great suffering for the many.
 

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Interview with Gyan Prakash
Interviewed by Prabir Purkayastha Produced by Newsclick Team,

Commenting on the rise of the rightwing populism across the world, historian Gyan Prakash tells Newsclick that the rise of populist figures like Modi, Trump or Erdogan is not a coincidence. The current crisis of democracy has been in making since late 1970s. According to Prakash, neoliberalism has defanged the opposition in a way, and has made minorities a scapegoat for people’s problems.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

The post Neoliberalism Destroyed Communities, Democracy Hasn’t Delivered: Gyan Prakash appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: Visit Flanders, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

If there is a founding document of social democracy it is Eduard Bernstein’s ‘Evolutionary Socialism’. Written in 1899, it taught the leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that capitalism had permanently stabilised; that socialism would be achieved through parliament – not the industrial class struggle – and that the working class of the 20^th century would be neither culturally homogeneous nor spontaneously socialist.

Social-democrats should stop waiting for a mega-crisis to kill capitalism, stop obsessing about mass strikes and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and make a moral case that, while capitalism had improved the workers’ lot, socialism could do it better. [i]

The stability lasted a mere 15 years, ending on the day Bernstein’s party voted for the war budget of Kaiser Wilhelm II. By 1919 the dictatorship of the proletariat was an actuality – not just in Russia but in Bavaria and Hungary. What was left of the SPD entered the first coalition government of the Weimar Republic where, on Bernstein’s advice, it resisted the attempts of its own left wing to “socialise” the economy and ruthlessly suppressed the communist left.

If there is a re-founding document of social democracy, it is Anthony Giddens’ book ‘Beyond Left and Right’. Published in 1994 it emerged, like Bernstein’s work, from a critique of orthodox Marxism. Like Bernstein, Giddens argued that the structure of capitalism had changed, creating conditions that made the old programme of state-led socialism permanently impossible. Once crystallised into the doctrine of the Third Way, in the 1998 book of the same name, Giddens’ ideas provided the ideological frame for social-democratic governments in Britain, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, and for Bill Clinton’s second term in office.

Unlike Bernstein, Giddens never claimed capitalism had become permanently stable; instead it had become permanently mercurial in a way that was potentially benign, so long as progressive governments could take control. The task of social-democrats was to help working class people survive amid the permanent insecurity and disempowerment that globalisation had unleashed. Instead of a programme to clear the capitalist jungle, social-democracy would become a kind of survival kit.

The general crisis of social democracy is happening because the world Giddens described has vanished. The world of Trump, Putin, Erdogan and Xi Jinping is as different to the world of Blair and Schroeder as the street fights of Weimar were to the peaceful, electoral socialism of the 1890s.

Twice, then, in the space of a century, social democracy has entered crisis because its strategic project came to be based on conditions that ceased to exist. If we survey the remnants of centrist social democracy and social liberalism – Renzi in Italy, Schulz in Germany, Hillary Clinton in the USA and the Progress wing of the British Labour Party – the image that springs to mind is of shipwreck survivors clinging to pieces of wreckage.

Schulz clings to Merkel, Renzi wanted to cling to Berlusconi, but they both lost so many votes it became pointless. Hillary Clinton clings to Wall Street. Labour’s Progress wing clings to the possibility that a new, Macron-style centrist force will emerge to save it from the nightmare of the Corbyn leadership. All of them are clinging to a form of globalisation that has failed; and for the Europeans it has become obligatory to cling to the Europe of the Lisbon Treaty – even as this, too, is failing.

To renew social democracy we have to do what Bernstein and Giddens were trying to do: construct an analysis of the world we live in. Both argued from premises concerning the future dynamics of capitalism, the role of the state in the economy, and the atomisation of class structures, cultures and alliances that had prevailed in the decades before them. Significantly, both were critically engaged with, and borrowed eclectically from, the Marxist method of historical materialism – a method of no concern to the party apparatchiks who used their theories as adornments for the project of managing capitalism.

Starting from a material analysis of the world – rather than a list of policies, tactics and principles – is a tradition that got lost inside European social democracy during the neoliberal era. Neoliberalism’s ideological premise was always anti-theoretical: don’t ask why this kind of economy exists, or how long it can last – just accept it as permanent and get on with making it better.

So amid the panic – as the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) draws level with the German SPD in opinion polls, and as the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) slumps below 20% while populists and xenophobes surge – we must start by analysing the situation, not by issuing frantic demands that the word “go back to normal”.

***

If neoliberalism is broken, what exactly is the central mechanism that has failed? It cannot be that the collapse of a mere banking system has turned large parts of the population of the West against universal rights and cosmopolitan social arrangements.

Goldsmiths University economist William Davies offers two definitions of neoliberalism which explain why the world Giddens described – and fairly accurately – has disappeared.[ii]

The first is “the elevation of marked-based principles and techniques of evaluation to the level of state-endorsed norms”. Davies points out that neoliberalism, over time, became less about the creation of exchange-based relationships and more about the imposition of competitive behaviour in areas where no market could exist.

School league tables and global university rankings are just two examples of this – a third being the fake tendering process which has seen billions in public service contracts handed to firms like Carillion and Interserve. For Davies, it is economic calculation – not markets per se – that is being coercively forced into all aspects of life under the neoliberal system. That leads to his second, pithier, definition of neoliberalism: “the disenchantment of politics by economics”.

Neoliberalism failed because it was not a solution to the problems of the Keynesian system but, in fact, a work-around. What caused the ruin of both models was their inability to sustain both productivity and corporate profitability.

Between 1989 and 2008 growth was driven by unsustainable financial expansion, by fiscal deficits, by the rapid catch-up of Asia and Latin America, and by the expansion of the working population. In 2008 a global system reliant on financial fiction exploded. As a result, we now have a global economy kept afloat by $19 trillion of central bank money creation, by the permanent socialisation of banking risk, and where many of the advanced industrial countries exhibit the following features:
 

1. Rising inequality boosted by the surge in asset values triggered by quantitative easing.
2. Entire sectors dominated by rent-seeking monopolies.
3. A global financial elite clustered around the defence of its strategic privilege – which is to keep its wealth in offshore jurisdictions and unavailable to the tax collectors of nation states, and therefore immune to redistribution.
4. High under-employment and precarious work, as millions of people are employed in what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”; real wages failing to keep up with the rising asset wealth of the 1%; and a historically low wage share.
5. A global market that has begun to fragment along regional and national lines; the stalling of trade liberalisation treaties; the Balkanisation of finance systems and the information economy; and the beginnings of an open trade war.

There are typically three kinds of response to this situation among national political elites. The first is to try to maintain the status quo, resulting in the continued rise of inequality, continued impoverishment of workers and the lower middle class. This is the approach of Macron in France, Merkel in Germany and the liberal-conservative Remain lobby in the UK.

The second is a kind of “nationalist neoliberalism”: the attempt to deepen the coercive introduction of market mechanisms through a partial break with the multilateral global trade system. This is the intention behind the European Research Group (ERG) inside the UK Conservative Party: to scrap environmental and safety regulations, and to scrap – as Liz Truss wants – professional licensing and qualifications that are said to “suppress growth” by insisting that doctors, airline pilots or physiotherapists must be licensed and therefore difficult to replace with the precariat.

It is, in effect, “Thatcherism in One Country” – and it also forms the unacknowledged common ground between the three factions of the German right: the AfD wants deeper free market reforms but no immigration; the Free Democratic Party (FPD) wants Germany to double down on gaming the Eurosystem to let the rest of Europe go hang; so effectively does the right wing faction of the Christian Social Union (CSU) around Alexander Dobrindt who, for good measure, wants a “revolution” to roll society back to a pre-1968 social conservatism.

A third response – best illustrated in Europe by the Law and Justice government in Poland – is to break overtly both with neoliberal economics and “liberal democracy”. Law and Justice has secured a 49% poll rating not only through crass nationalism and dog-whistle antisemitism, but by daily verbal attacks on “liberal democracy” and the elites who profit from it, and by distributing significant universal welfare payments to working class people. Liberal democracy gets in the way of the real democracy – which is the will of the white, Catholic Polish people, untrammelled by such things as an independent media, judiciary and multilateral obligations. That is the message of Law and Justice.

None of these responses can remedy the breakdown of neoliberalism strategically. The problem is, however, two of them could work temporarily and locally, providing that the national elite concerned is prepared to renege on multilateral obligations to its trading partners. In the 1930s such attitudes were described as “beggar thy neighbour”. In modern parlance, it’s about being prepared to say to other countries: fuck you.

Law and Justice has placed itself on a collision course with the European Commission, while the Tory ERG wants Britain to stage a hard, confrontational exit from the EU altogether. Trump, likewise, with tax cuts that will boost America’s debt pile and a trade war over steel, is determined to deliver a revival of prosperity in the USA at the expense of its key trading partners.

Social democracy’s problem is that for 30 years it moulded its project around the priorities of the neoliberal model, and around the certainty that a multilateral global system would (a) always exist, and (b) deepen.

Both conditions have been falsified, while the neoliberal elite’s priorities are rapidly evolving to adapt to the growing power of authoritarian kleptocrats and the Mafiosi who trail behind them.

The basic problem with the Macron strategy – carry on regardless with a globalised free market – is that it cannot be done by standing still: you have to double down on the coercive imposition of competitive behaviours and values onto a population weary of being coerced. You have to renew TTIP; you have to do more privatisations; you have to go expanding the EU to the East, pulling in yet more xenophobic and corrupt national elites. If we return to Davies’ definitions (the elevation of market principles to state endorsed norms, and the disenchantment of politics by economics), we can say with certainty that these are strategies that no longer work. People have had enough of free market coercion and are prepared to “re-enchant” economic decision making with the only things that lie to hand: nationalism and xenophobia on the one hand, radical anti-authoritarianism, feminism, environmentalism and leftism on the other.
To renew social democracy, we need to stop clinging to the wreckage. Even though it was mainly window dressing for Blair and Clinton, the Third Way was a serious and coherent theory. Some of its premises survive even though, as a practical project, it is dying.

***
Giddens’ framework for radical politics in the neoliberal era consisted of six priorities. The first, to “repair damaged solidarities”, involved recognising that even the free-est market makes people interdependent. While the neoliberal right would have us stab each other in the back, people with a stiletto between their shoulder-blades will still need a hospital to go to.

Second, social democracy had to accept that instead of improved economic conditions, people would fight over “life politics” – that is for the individual freedom to behave as they please. Unequal opportunities to do so – as we are today seeing with the #MeToo movement – could, he said, be a much stronger driver of protest and radicalism than pure economic inequality.

Third, in place of solidarity there would have to be “generative politics”: social democracy had to create a space between the state and the market in which people could do things for themselves, which neither the state nor the market were capable of delivering.

Fourth, recognising that globalization would weaken the formal democracy of states, Giddens called for a democracy of self-help groups and social movements. These, it was understood, should forget trying to bend the state to their wishes – it was irrevocably under the control of corporations and destined to shrink – but they could achieve stuff for themselves, empower themselves, and boost their own emotional literacy in the process.

Fifth, the left must be prepared to rip up the welfare state. Instead of a safety net designed to protect people against “what might happen”, it had to be a kind of survival guide. The welfare state, said Giddens, was sexist, bureaucratic, impersonal and never fully eradicated poverty anyway.

Finally and perceptively, Giddens warned that a neoliberal global order would lead to violence, and that the left needed to find ways to mitigate that. When social conflict occurs in a globalised free market, Giddens said, you can’t solve it by coexisting or by separation.

“No culture, state or large group can with much success isolate itself from the global cosmopolitan order,” Giddens wrote.[iii] As a result, conflicts would lead more quickly to open violence and the left would have to be the party of dialogue not conflict.

What strikes me today about this political framework, on which Third Way social democracy was built, is its absolutism. The state would wither, the market would triumph, the welfare state would have to be abandoned, class solidarity would collapse, and individual lifestyle politics would dictate everything. This was the assumption.

But nearly 25 years after its publication all of the things that were considered already gone are still here, even in a society like Britain which became under Major, Blair and Cameron a laboratory of social atomisation. The RMT union is still able to shut down London’s Tube network; the welfare budget still makes up 34% of all state spending in the UK; market experiments in the railway system have gone badly wrong. Even at my local tube station in London, there is a union rep who defies the management instruction to wear a name badge by sporting one with the word “Lenin”.

Though Giddens never subscribed to the “end of history” thesis, the assumption underpinning his project was that markets were efficient and tended towards equilibrium and prosperity. Like Bernstein, he created a formula for coping with capitalist stability that failed to survive the return of instability.

In the hands of Blair, Clinton and Schroeder these assumptions became an excuse for venal collaboration with the interests of corporations against those of the very people who voted for social democracy. But even in their purer, academic form, Giddens’ assumptions have been negated by the political, economic and social realities of the capitalism that emerged after 2008.

The most important fact about the new reality is that, since 2008, states, regions and communities have begun to attempt to exit the system. What was deemed impossible has become the dominant trend: the desire to cancel, reverse or block globalisation. Whether it be the globalisation of workforces through migration, or the privatisation of the public realm in the name of trade liberalisation, or the impoverishment of industrial communities through offshoring.

Interestingly, the very forces Blairism assumed were spent – community, trade unionism, working class identity and of course language and ethnicity – have been factors driving this rush for the exit, both to the left and right.

As Giddens predicted, such projects are met with violence – sometimes literally as the Catalan people found out on 1 October 2017 – and sometimes via the more subtle coercion of closing a nation’s banking system, as the Greeks experienced in June 2015.

But wherever the “exit” strategy is adopted, the key institution is the one Giddens – and Blair – assumed would have diminishing power in a neoliberal universe: the democratically elected national government.

As to what is driving the desire for exit, it is primarily insecurity. All over the world, state welfare provision has been ripped up, but not replaced by any new forms of solidarity as Giddens advocated. As I wrote in the first essay of this series, one of the huge drivers of populist anger and insecurity is the enhanced fear of “what might happen”, whether it’s the possibility of the working class person falling into the under-class because they lose their highly precarious job; or a migrant occupying a place in front of you in the doctor’s waiting room; or a home-grown jihadi terrorist blowing up your children at a pop concert.

“No more change!” was the demand campaigners in Thuringia told me they heard on the doorstep, from voters who had switched to the AfD. Ludicrous as it may sound to the paid-up technocrats who still believe in neoliberalism, it is a rational desire when change brings only stress, impoverishment and anxiety – and in this case perceived competition for a limited welfare and social budget.

Practically, far from empowering those from whom the safety net was removed, neoliberal policy during the crisis became increasingly focused on coercing them, as with the scandalous disability assessments by the DWP in the UK or in the mass incarceration programmes of black people in America which boomed under both Clinton and Obama.

Finally, and ironically, it has been the populist right and radical left, together with some cosmopolitan nationalist parties and environmental NGOs, who have engaged with the task of “repairing damaged solidarities”. Blairite social democracy might have urged people to discover the new solidarities of suburban life, or the professionalised workplace or the private members’ gym,  but these were unavailable to the newly impoverished lower-strata of the workforce neoliberalism created. They clung, instead, to what was left of their old solidarities, which – as I have described in ‘The Great Regression’ – were often stripped of their progressive content.[iv]

***

That the Third Way doctrine suffered the same ultimate fate as Bernstein’s “revisionism” is no accident: both were formulated during the upswing and stabilisation phases of a global economic model. Neither could survive the model’s crisis.

Indeed, understanding that our task today is to construct a “crisis politics” – not a survival guide for the losers within a successful form of capitalism – is the first step towards a solution. In subsequent contributions I will try to spell out the details. Here, however, it important to state the broad conclusions if you accept the idea that neoliberalism is over.

First, the rise of authoritarian nationalist projects among some western elites is both logical and inevitable, given their histories. You only have to listen to the British elite’s continuous dirge of devotion to Winston Churchill to understand how powerfully the myths, narratives and traditions of national bourgeoisies guide their actions, even in the age of Davos and globalised consumer culture.

When I asked Polish progressives at a seminar last month, “why is a section of the Polish elite prepared to break with globalisation and seek nation-centric and xenophobic solutions?”, they simply shrugged and said: “that’s what they did in the 1930s”.

It is not that the globalism of the elites during neoliberalism was fake – only that, in the entire history of industrial capitalism there have been only two modes of regulation: the nation-centric one and the multilateral globalist one. Most elite groups in the world have intellectual traditions that can accommodate both, and some are prepared to reach into the dark basement of those traditions to revive the nationalist ideologies that suited their grandparents. What sections of the elites and intelligentsias of Poland, Hungary, Italy and Austria are doing now is no mystery. It’s a reversion to type.

Second, the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobic narratives among the populations of many western democracies is – as I argued in the first essay – the result of the breakdown of a coherent narrative and of intense perceptions of insecurity. The strategy of keeping the economy on life support does not keep the ideology that underpinned neoliberalism on life support. The reward for all the backstabbing, atomisation and conformity to market individualism was supposed to be prosperity. Once that disappeared, the story became incoherent.

It follows from this that social democracy – and the wider progressive movements it must ally with – needs to construct very quickly a new narrative about how the world gets better for you, your children, your community. People want to know how life becomes less insecure, and how change becomes more predictable and manageable. Unless the left answers that question, the xenophobic right will do so.

Third, logically the new project of social democracy must be framed around a radical break with neoliberalism. What is destroying our movement is that a whole generation of social democratic leaders have tied their personal prestige and identity to an economic model that no longer works.

Schulz wanted to keep Merkel in charge forever; Renzi in Italy would rather see Berlusconi in power than admit the grievances that are driving people towards the Northern League and the Five Star Movement were real. Indeed, when I spoke to Italian social democrats before the election disaster of 4 March, it was always the possibility of being beaten by Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, not the racist FI-Lega Nord alliance, that haunted them. In Britain, the spectacle of Haringey’s Labour leader Claire Kober self-destructing amid mass popular opposition to her housing privatisation project, is a vignette painted from the same colour scheme.

To be clear: a break with neoliberalism  means a limited, reversible and calibrated retreat from some aspects of globalisation.

To salvage what is salvageable from the global system we must prevent its implosion: that means preventing the chaotic breakup of the EU, the collapse of multilateral global trading arrangements and – the ultimate threat – a spate of mutual debt defaults during which everyone heads for the exit in a disorderly manner.

Here the analogy with trench warfare holds good. If the front trench is overrun, the last person standing in it is going to get bayoneted. Better to retreat to the next trench and defend that.

This has informed my approach to Brexit. The substantive issue was always going to be: what form does the semi-detached relationship of Britain to the EU take in future. I voted Remain because the alternative – which has now transpired – was Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg constructing Thatcherism in One Country, with Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ used as a handbook.

Because people were told freedom of movement was non-negotiable inside the EU, they voted to leave it. They did not believe the assurance that “ever closer union” no longer applied to the UK – and the actions of the European Commission during the Brexit negotiations have tended to confirm that suspicion.
Given that, it is neither possible nor desirable to use intrigue and elite chicanery to override the votes of 17 million people. What is possible is to persuade them to accept a limited – and thus reversible – semi-detachment from the EU in the form of a Norway style agreement, a customs union or something in-between.

The question for Europe’s social democrats is far bigger than the one that usually greets me in seminars and one-to-one meetings, which is “how do we emulate Corbyn?”. Nevertheless, it is worth reminding ourselves that UK Labour’s current recovery and dynamism is premised on the fact that, first, Britain was always effectively exempt from the Maastricht rules mandating fiscal austerity.

Corbyn’s ability to draft a post-austerity manifesto, centred on a £250 billion borrowing programme and a £50 billion tax redistribution plan, together with some limited renationalisation and a state investment bank, was an act of imagination unavailable to Renzi, Sanchez and Schulz.

On top of that, Corbyn has – correctly – accepted the result of the Brexit referendum, refusing the invitation from the die-hard Blairite right to destroy his own party by labelling a third of Labour voters deluded xenophobes.

What lesson can the rest of European social democracy draw from Labour’s success? The exact lesson they refuse to draw: which is that “retreating to the second trench” means adopting as an overt goal a revision of the Lisbon Treaty in favour of greater social justice. Europe has to be redesigned to allow state aid, nationalisations, the equalisation of social safety nets and minimum wages – removing the Maastricht criteria on debt and borrowing which mandate austerity.

A Corbyn government in Britain, and a Sanders or similarly left-led Democratic Party government in the USA, would at least have some fiscal freedom. Until they can imagine themselves operating in the same way – either collectively across an alliance of core EU countries or individually – the European social democratic parties will go on destroying themselves for the sake of Lisbon and the Bundesbank. They should stop doing so.

***

Which brings us face to face with a general principle: over the next five years the venue in which authoritarian populism and economic nationalism have to be fought is the nation state itself, and state-level democratic institutions.

Trump will be beaten at the level of Federal elections, the Supreme Court and the FBI, not the WTO or the United Nations. Orban, Kaczinsky and the Blue-Black coalition in Austria will be beaten at the level of the national cultures, parliaments, intelligentsias and the national demos – not through the authority of the European Commission and tongue-lashings by Guy Verhofstadt in the Brussels parliament (welcome though these may be).

Done intelligently, and without conceding to the rhetoric of the right, a limited reassertion of economic sovereignty is going to be key to the revival of left politics both in Europe and the USA. Indeed, if it had been done five years ago then, like a flu jab, it might have prevented the current sickness.

Working out how to reform capitalism to meet the needs of those on stagnating wages and in precarious jobs becomes easier once you accept that the place that is going to be done is national parliaments and regional assemblies. They will still have to be constrained by multilateral agreements, but they will probably look more like the flexible deals that preceded the heyday of neoliberalism, not the inflexible ones that are currently falling apart. Customs unions, free trade areas, bilateral currency pegs, an exchange rate mechanism rather than a single currency for Europe, and a two-speed structure for the EU itself – these might have to be the forms in which globalisation survives.

For social democracy, internationalism – which was rooted into its practice from the formation of the Second International in 1889 – is a strong trench to fall back on as globalism evaporates. The globalism of elites – from Mar-a-Lago to Budapest – is proving depressingly fragile; the internationalism of left parties can, given the right basis, prove much more durable.

And social-democrats will not be the sole occupiers of this second trench: liberalism, radical left, feminism and green movement have all made strong intellectual contributions to the progressive, internationalist ideology that will have to replace free market globalism.

The advantage of forcing social democratic politicians to focus on the dynamics of their own society is that in most countries they face the same demographic challenge: cultural conflict between an educated, younger workforce with liberal values and a less educated, older workforce clinging to social conservatism. It is a split between the city and the small town; between old and young; and, at its worst – as with the alt-right in America and the populist right in Poland – it weaponises gender inequality as well.

From Bernstein to Giddens, the prophets of stability socialism always focused on the atomisation of class and community loyalties, and the decline of solidarity. As early as 1899 Bernstein warned that “the precision tool maker and the coalminer, the skilled decorator and the porter… live very different kinds of life, and have very different kinds of wants”. It would be easier to unite them around race and nation than it would around pure class politics, he wrote. A century later Giddens’ entire project was premised on the idea that most social solidarities – even ethnicity and nationality, let alone class – would be atomised under the impact of marketisation and networked individuality.

It turns out that the current struggle is not between atomization versus old solidarities; it is in fact a death match between two spontaneous solidarities that can no longer coexist.

For now, wherever the authoritarian right is on the march, it is mobilising people around nationalism, racism and sexism. Yet the ideology of an educated, networked, diverse, globally focused and tolerant section of society is equally spontaneous and, in some places, stronger.

In one way, the salariat, the Millennial generation and their natural allies among ethnic minorities, women, the LGBT community have achieved what Giddens had called for: an agency born out of fear. As he wrote: “Values of the sanctity of human life, universal human rights, the preservation of species and care for future as well as present generations of children may perhaps be arrived at defensively, but they are certainly not negative values.”

Instead of a proletariat with a historic, positively-defined mission, we might have to make do with a motley tribal alliance with many missions, some of them conflicting, Giddens said.

I will return to this question of agency in a future essay, but here it is worth acknowledging how closely Giddens’ 1994 position anticipates what came to be known in the anti-globalisation movement as “One No, Many Yesses”.

The difference is, today, we have two “Noes”: no to neoliberalism and no to the xenophobic right. In turn, that limits the number of “Yeses” that are practical in the short term: yes to defending universalism, yes to mitigating climate change and yes to upholding the rule of law. That should be the terrain on which the progressive forces of humanity come together.

But social democrats should not flinch from adding one more “yes” to this list, and that is to the right of electorates to use democracy to regulate and control the market at a national level – even if this means reforming, suspending or defying the institutions through which global corporations have dictated the world’s affairs for 30 years. That is the ground on which social democracy and the radical left should converge.

The journey towards a radical social democracy will be fraught with temptations to ditch what was progressive in the era of free market globalisation alongside what’s been wrecked. In fact, studying centre left thinkers who tried to move the SPD on from Bernstein between 1914 and the early Weimar era – Karl Kautsky, Otto Bauer in Austria and the workers’ control advocate Karl Korsch – I am struck by how unstable the centre ground was between Bernsteinism and Bolshevism. Every attempt by the German centre left to stabilize, humanise and democratize capitalism was outflanked by the venality of the ruling elite and the brutality of the street politics the far right adopted.

If there had been no USSR and no Leninism, could that large and vibrant movement of German workers who vacillated between the communists and the social-democrats in Germany between 1919 and 1929 have succeeded in creating a more sustainable left social-democratic pole of attraction than the one the doomed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did? It’s an interesting ‘what if’. Put another way, in a time of crisis and breakdown, is radical social democracy even possible?

Because today there is no equivalent of the USSR, no Lenin, and a much-weakened industrial working class, we are destined to find out the answer to that question through our own practice.

Today we need a form of social democracy attuned to a period of crisis, not stability. Accepting the need for it is the first step towards achieving it.

[i] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm
[ii]   Davies, William. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Theory, Culture & Society) (p. xiv).
[iii] Giddens, Anthony. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (p. 19). Wiley. Kindle Edition.
[iv] “Overcoming the Fear of Freedom” in Geiselberger H, ed The Great Regression, 2017

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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Newsclick Image by Sumit Kumar

Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel have just written a paper as part of their work for the World Inequality Report discussing the movement of income inequality in India. And their conclusion is that the extent of income inequality in India at present is greater than it has ever been at any time in the last one hundred years.

Their estimates go back to 1922 when the Income Tax Act became operational in India. The share of the top 1 per cent of the population in total income at that date was around 13 per cent. It increased to 21 per cent by the late 1930s and then fell to about 6 per cent by the early 1980s before rising to 22 per cent in 2014, the final year of their study.

What is striking about the paper’s finding is the almost exact synchrony between the break in inequality trends and the transition from dirigisme to neoliberalism. In the period between 1951 and 1980, the bottom 50 per cent of the population captured 28 per cent of the increase in total income while the top 0.1 per cent actually witnessed a decline in their income. In fact the income of the bottom 50 per cent increased faster over this period than the overall average. Between 1980 and 2014 however the top 0.1 per cent captured a higher share of the increase in income (12 per cent) than the entire bottom 50 per cent (11 per cent).

To be sure, data on income inequality can always be questioned. For a start we have no income surveys in the country; all we have are sample surveys relating to consumption expenditure and getting from the distribution of consumption expenditure to the distribution of income is problematical since we do not know how savings, which constitute the difference between the two, are distributed. Secondly, in all sample surveys, the top percentiles are always insufficiently represented, precisely because they are so few in number. Statisticians therefore make all kinds of assumptions about how income is distributed within the top decile to arrive at the share of the top 1 per cent or the top 0.1 per cent of the population. And these assumptions can always be questioned.

It is not surprising therefore that the Piketty-Chancel estimates too have been questioned by some commentators. But no matter how one views their absolute figures, the trends revealed by them can scarcely be questioned, since more or less the same method of estimation is employed across time. And this trend is entirely in conformity with what other researchers have been saying, and also with what one would theoretically expect. Credit Suisse for instance provides wealth distribution data. According to these data the top 1 per cent of households in India currently owns more than half (57 per cent) of the total wealth of all households, and wealth inequality in India has been rising extremely rapidly, indeed more rapidly than even in the United States.

Wealth distribution is invariably more unequal than income distribution, because the working class which has no wealth has nonetheless an income. Hence the Piketty-Chancel figures for the share of the top 1 per cent in income are by no means out of sync with the Credit Suisse figures about their share in total wealth. (By the same logic however they seriously negate estimates that put the share of wealth of the top 1 per cent at only 28 per cent, though even these latter estimates recognize the significant increase in wealth inequality since 1991 when neoliberal reforms began and when the share of wealth of the top 1 per cent was just 17 per cent according to them).

A measure of inequality that is often adopted is the Gini coefficient which captures the distance between the actual distribution and an ideal distribution characterised by absolute equality. The problem with the Gini coefficient however is that by looking at the distribution as a whole it misses out on questions like the shares of the top percentiles. For instance even when the share of the top 1 per cent may be increasing, the Gini coefficient may show a decline in inequality if some redistribution is occurring say from, say, the 4th decile from below to the bottom decile, ie, from the “poor” to the “very poor”. Piketty and Chancel accordingly do not use the Gini coefficient but look at the shares of the top few percentiles, which is a much more useful measure (especially if we are talking of economic power).

The Piketty-Chancel figures show that 1983-84 was the year of the lowest income-share for the top 1 per cent, after which this share started rising. It may be recalled that neoliberalism first made its appearance around that very time and that the budget presented in 1985 by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who was then the finance minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government, contained significant steps in this direction (against which in fact the Left parties had organised a convention in New Delhi at that time). The association between growth in inequality and the pursuit of neoliberalism is thus strikingly close. And not surprisingly, such a growth in inequality has characterised almost every country in the world in the period of “globalisation” which is characterised by the almost universal pursuit of neoliberal policies under the diktat of international finance capital.

The authors, both in the paper itself and also individually in interviews, give a number of reasons why income inequality has increased in India in this period, reasons having to do with the pursuit of neoliberalism. The decline in the highest marginal income tax rate from 98 per cent to 30 per cent, the persisting inequality in land ownership, and the lack of access to education and health by the poor, are some of the points raised by the authors.

All these are very important. But there is an additional factor that needs to be mentioned here, namely the attack on petty production, including peasant agriculture, that neoliberalism has brought in its wake. While an improvement in the conditions of the peasantry does not necessarily benefit the agricultural labourers automatically, a deterioration in their conditions invariably gets “passed on” to the labourers. And what is more, since, in the event of such a deterioration, destitute peasants seek employment in the urban economy, where very few additional jobs are being created, they tend to swell the reserve army of labour which also affects the wages of the urban workers and hence the overall urban income distribution.

In other words, as rural India has on average a lower income than urban India, any widening of the rural-urban difference has the effect, other things being equal, of widening overall income inequality (by the Piketty-Chancel measure). But it also has the additional effect of widening the income inequality within the urban sector itself. It does this via a swelling of the reserve army of labour in the urban economy through the immigration of destitute peasants into it. For both these reasons, the assault on petty production launched by neoliberalism constitutes an important factor behind the growth of income inequality.

The case of China, where, according to these authors, income inequality was rising rapidly earlier but got reversed in the current century is instructive in this context. To be sure, there are basic differences between the Indian and the Chinese economies; but an important proximate factor behind the reversal of the growing inequality in China was the policy adopted by the Chinese Communist Party under the slogan “Towards a Socialist Countryside”. This policy checked and reversed some of the encroachments on peasant agriculture that the attempt to industrialise through a relentless export drive had entailed.

The introduction of a wealth tax (which, amazingly, India does not have), the increase in income tax rates upon the rich, the provision of quality education and health services to all under the aegis of the State, and of course land redistribution, are undoubtedly some of the steps that must be taken to reverse the growing income inequalities; and these entail a jettisoning of neoliberalism. But even while recognising this, we must also recognise, which the authors do not do explicitly, that neoliberalism is not just a policy of choice that can be given up at will. It corresponds to a stage of capitalism where international finance capital has acquired hegemony; overcoming neoliberalism therefore requires a class struggle against this hegemony through a wide mobilisation of workers and peasants.

The authors however rightly take on the apologists of neoliberalism who argue that such a growth in income inequality is essential for achieving the high GDP growth that has actually occurred in countries like India. This is absurd, since the highest rate of income growth that has ever occurred in world capitalism was experienced in the post-war period, during the so-called “Golden Age of Capitalism”, when income inequality actually was declining the world over. This decline in income inequality to be sure was not because of the operation of capitalism but because of the concessions that capitalism had been forced to make in the face of the looming socialist threat; but it shows that the argument that growing income inequality is essential for higher growth is a complete non-sequitur.     

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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It doesn’t happen often but doesn’t it feel wonderful when occasionally your bank account gets credited by the government? Some of us will have enjoyed this sensation with our LPG subsidies (now withdrawn for many), or the occasional income tax refund.
 

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Image: Ashoke Chakrabarty

The formal adoption of the neoliberal reforms programme by the government of India (GOI) in 1991 had a far more pervasive impact on the education system and policy than is usually recognised. The commercialisation and marketisation of education put it outside the grasp of the majority of India’s population, 78% of whom were living on less than twenty rupees per day (Arjun Sengupta Committee report), and altered the concepts of knowledge, education and its curricular content.

The democratic deficit was the most obvious feature of the National Policy of Education (NPE 86-92).It introduced non-formal education (NFE), as a low-cost alternative to be treated as `equivalent to schooling’ for the working poor, the marginalized and children in “difficult circumstances”. When the Supreme Court in its 1993 judgement (Unnikrishnan vs the State of Andhra Pradesh) stated that the constitutional Directive Principle 45 should be read in conjunction with Article 21, it established that the right to education flowed from the fundamental right to life thereby converting “the obligation created by the article (45) into an enforceable right”. This required the 86^th Constitutional amendment in 2002, which was tailor-made to coincide with neoliberal dictates to reduce public spending on education. Two significant limitations to the “enforceable right” restricted it to children between 6 to 14 years of age and provided for education only “as the State may, by law, determine”. The limitations allowed a retreat from the original constitutional responsibility and denied millions of children access to quality education. The RTE Act 2009 legalised the inequity.

A genuine right to education law would have encompassed completely free and compulsory Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and, following the adoption of the 10+2 system, extended up to Class XII thus covering all children from 0 to 18 years.

A genuine right to education law would have encompassed completely free and compulsory Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and, following the adoption of the 10+2 system, extended up to Class XII thus covering all children from 0 to 18 years.

1

It must be emphasised that this is no left-wing revolutionary demand. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in industrialising nations the responsibility for providing education had been taken up by modern states that arose with the rise and consolidation of capitalism to fulfill the productive and `democratic’ needs of Capital for a better educated and `free’ labour force. Engels had upheld the rationale of the demand during a speech delivered at Elberfeld in February 1845: The “general education of all children without exception at the expense of the state – an education which is equal for all and continues until the individual is capable of emerging as an independent member of society. . . would be only an act of justice. . . for clearly, every man has the right to the fullest development of his abilities and society wrongs individuals twice over when it makes ignorance a necessary consequence of poverty.” (Marx–Engels Collected Works Vol. 4. P 253).

Modern states regard education as a legal duty, not merely as a right: “parents are required to send their children to school, children are required to attend school and the state is required to enforce compulsory education.”

Emphasising that no country had successfully ended child labour without first making education compulsory, American political theorist Myron Weiner also noted that Asian states which made education compulsory – Japan in 1872, the two Koreas, Taiwan and China after WWII – were all poor when they undertook the task. Their development was founded on successfully taking up “the legal obligation of the state to provide an adequate number of schools, appropriately situated and to ensure that no child fails to attend school.” Modern states regard education as a legal duty, not merely as a right: “parents are required to send their children to school, children are required to attend school and the state is required to enforce compulsory education.” The state is bound to protect children from the compulsions on impoverished parents and from would-be exploiters. (“India’s Case Against Compulsory Education”, Seminar, 413 (January). P 83-86)

Independent India’s first Education Commission (1964-66), the DS Kothari Commission, examined the failure to achieve the Constitutional goal of education for all up to the age of 14 years by 1960. It recommended far-reaching structural changes for setting up a national system of free and compulsory education through schools of comparable quality. This could not be left to private institutions like the elite schools “transplanted in India by British administrators and we have clung to it so long because it happened to be in tune with the traditional hierarchical structure of our society. Whatever its place in past history maybe, such a system has no valid place in the new democratic and socialistic society we desire to create.” (1.38)
 
The report strongly advocated the establishment of state-funded common neighbourhood schools with a socially, culturally and economically diverse student body as the authentic institution of a pedagogically sound and egalitarian national system of education which would “provide `good’ education to all children because sharing life with the common people is, in our opinion, an essential ingredient of good education.” (10.19). Echoing its logic, The Report of the Committee of Members of Parliament on Education (1967) asserted that “the unhealthy social segregation that now takes place between the schools for the rich and those for the poor should be ended; and the primary schools should be the common schools of the nation by making it obligatory on all children, irrespective of caste, creed, community, religion, economic conditions or social status, to attend the primary school in their neighbourhood. This sharing of life among the children of all social strata will strengthen the sense of being one nation which is an essential ingredient of good education.”(Government of India 1967: p 2).  This principle has recently been reiterated in a landmark judgement of the Allahabad High Court (August 18, 2015).

Achieving universal access to education was recognised as not just a question of reaching a numerical target. It could not be divorced from its democratic content and purpose.
 
Achieving universal access to education was recognised as not just a question of reaching a numerical target. It could not be divorced from its democratic content and purpose. However, Indian capital had aligned with sections of the feudal landowning elite and accommodated with Brahmanical ideology which sanctioned harshly exploitative caste divisions among the toiling masses. This allowed both classes to gain economically and politically but it was at the expense of the ruin of the majority of peasants, artisans, tribals, and working people. Having failed to break out of the vicious cycle of inequality the goal of universalising school education could never be achieved. The education system inevitably sank into deep crisis which was aggravated each time a policy decision further narrowed access with multi-track discriminatory arrangements (alternate schools, multi-grade teaching, education guarantee centres, use of contractual and para-teachers, the RTE Act 2009).

The present regime’s proposed National Policy of Education 2016 (NEP 2016) promises to accelerate this process. Amendments to the already flawed RTE 2009 will allow for `alternate’ schools which do not `require’ the basic infrastructural and pedagogical norms laid down in the Act, limit the no-detention policy to lower primary (class V) and vocationalise the elementary curriculum in targeted areas. Dove-tailed into the Skill Development program and the amended child labour law which now permits under14 year-olds to work in `family enterprises’, this `education’ policy will reinforce caste distinctions and ensure that the majority of India’s children from oppressed and marginalised sections will be condemned to a childhood of labour.

This outcome is not accidental. It follows from the neoliberal policies of marketisation of education as a ‘private good’, and of knowledge as a tradable `commodity’ or `service’, that have been pursued by successive governments for more than two decades. Since the 1970’s `neo-liberalism’ has emerged as the `solution’ favoured by international finance capital to recover from the severity of its recurring economic crises. Public funds are diverted through Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to allow “opening up” of the entire range of human activities to penetration by private capital. This imposes a heavy burden on the most vulnerable sections of society and has a very negative impact on education, health, employment and job security, food security, housing and provision of public utilities. Production and consumption by the masses are kept under tight control through “austerity measures” and the modern `welfare’ state of the 20^th Century is transformed. Peoples control over their own lives shrinks as corporations take-over decision-making in the name of “efficiency” and “professional management”.

However, unlike knowledge, commodities are produced primarily for exchange for profit rather than for any intrinsic value. In highly developed systems of commodity production like capitalism all market exchanges are affected by scarcities, monopolies, manipulated tastes and more or less accidental variations in supply and demand. Thus the `commodification of knowledge’ would appear to be a contradiction in terms unless knowledge is degraded to the `acquisition of skills’ required for `services’ that are available in the market.

The entire terminology of the NEP 2016 is devised within the framework of skill acquisition. “Competencies” and “outcomes” are units to be monitored, measured, graded and readied for the market. The purpose of education is the grooming of ‘human resource’ to create a work-force that will enter the market-place as and when supply and demand movements are favourable. When they are unfavourable, during periods of recession and slow growth as they are now, this work-force will become capital’s essential buffer, the “reserve army of labour” that keeps wages low, jobs contractual, and workers afraid to unionize and fight for their legitimate democratic rights.

2

The failure to universalise elementary and secondary education was used to propagate the idea of higher education as an `elite’ privilege and a `non-merit good’ undeserving of public subsidies. From 1998 institutions of higher education (IHE) were advised to “raise their own resources by raising the fee levels, encouraging private donations and by generating revenues through consultancy and other activities.”The millennium year 2000 was a water-shed year for the higher education sector in India. The Ambani-Birla Report, entitled A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education, was authored by prominent industrialists and produced by then Prime Minister Vajpayee’s council on trade and industry! It explicitly stated that privatisation and commercialisation were the chief instruments for reform in higher education and that the `user-pays’ principle would ensure profits for investors. With its companion Model Act (2003) prepared by UGC, it demanded restructuring of higher education on the model of market-oriented enterprises promoting corporate values. Shelved because of strong opposition from academicians and teachers and students unions, its basic features continue to provide the framework within which higher education policies are conceived and sought to be legislated today.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) made their entry into the arena of higher education. Prof. Nigvekar, then UGC chairperson, articulated GOI’s position that education had become “a tradeable product and knowledge has become commodified”. In countries like India, GATS regulations will negatively impact educational access, impose one model of private, commercial and import-oriented education, weaken national systems due to foreign competition and effect domestic regulation and authority. Yet, despite growing opposition, an offer made in 2005 to put higher education on the WTO-GATS table as a tradable service was not withdrawn at the recent Tenth Ministerial Conference held in December 2015 at Nairobi.

Commercialisation of education provides autonomy to capital by opening up a market for investment as knowledge is now a key component in economic development but its impact on the academic community is decidedly anti-democratic and has grave consequences for the very conception of education as a public good. The privately-borne high cost of education shrinks the range and influence of subjects and courses that are not directly linked to the demands of national and international capital markets which generate the maximum jobs and the biggest salaries. Neoliberalism has altered the focus of syllabi from values of critical-thinking to “skills” such as “teamwork,” “communication” and “leadership”. The language and ethic of the corporate world sends out the wrong message that education must equip individuals with marketable skills, and that the ultimate goal is “productivity”. Unfortunately, influenced by policy makers and the media, even students, parents, and society at large have begun to accept education as a “private good” so that both `providers’ and `consumers’ adopt a market perspective by viewing education as a means to recoup investments made either in providing or in acquiring it.

All over the world disciplines and areas of research that are foundational to innovative systems of knowledge depend significantly on state funding and philanthropic support. Replacing this with profit-oriented enterprise means that these disciplines suffer deterioration and the critical and transformational purpose of educational institutions declines. As they become more financially autonomous but less socially accountable `producers of graduates and research outputs’, the most important objective of these `entrepreneurial institutions’ is to generate profits.

Education serves a broad public purpose as it critically conceptualises values and goals for national development and for strengthening civil society. Both are necessary components of Indian society’s unfinished agenda of democratic transformation.

Education serves a broad public purpose as it critically conceptualises values and goals for national development and for strengthening civil society. Both are necessary components of Indian society’s unfinished agenda of democratic transformation. The impact of neoliberal policy on educational institutions in general, but particularly on IHEs, threatens their very existence as environments fostering the process of “educating oneself”. The `excellence’ of education is measured by exorbitant fees because market logic dictates that those who pay more, get more; those who pay less, should expect less and those who lack resources should simply be brushed aside.

“To limit knowledge to what will actually be put into practice . . . is the deliberate reduction of one’s being to the condition of a cog in the techno-economic machine.” (Michel Henry, Barbarism, 2012. P 121). Market orientation encourages certain qualities in individuals but may be indifferent, or even opposed to the general development and articulation of critical faculties. With today’s `common-sense’ reflecting the neoliberal redefinition of the individual, no longer a productive social being or citizen but an economically autonomous fiction, the `consumer’, this obvious truth can become blurred.

3

On campuses across the country, protests against privatisation, curbing democratic rights of students and faculty, and in support of social justice have been called “anti-national” by the present regime. But here we are confronted with opposing concepts of nation and nationhood. The first, generated through collective struggle, finds expression in the civil liberties and equal rights protected by the Constitution. These liberties and rights are enabling conditions for an on-going politics of democratically negotiated nationalism.

The opposing Hindutva concept is a communal-patriarchal construct, an ideological imposition that seeks to discipline the `other’ by communalization, marginalisation, dispossession. Symbolized as ‘Bharat Mata’, the nation is identified as a woman in need of defense. Her Hindu `sons’ have the `duty’ to defend her. Within this Hindu majoritarian conception, `others’ are second class citizens restricted by the Will of a self-appointed governing class, the `Hindus’. But `Hindus’ themselves are defined as those who exemplify the ideology of the Sangh Parivar! The `nationalism’ of the Sangh Parivar is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional.

Conformism and a slavish mentality bred by indoctrination in a particular ideology is sought to be cultivated through the curriculum with no space for critical reasoning and rigorous examination to arrive at truths or search for alternate avenues of knowledge.

On July 27, 2016 HRD minister Javadekar held a closed-door six-hour long meeting with the RSS and its affiliates including ABVP to discuss how NEP 2016 could “instill nationalism, pride and ancient Indian values in modern education.” Conformism and a slavish mentality bred by indoctrination in a particular ideology is sought to be cultivated through the curriculum with no space for critical reasoning and rigorous examination to arrive at truths or search for alternate avenues of knowledge. This is exactly the conception of knowledge promoted by votaries of the instrumentalist view of commercialised education. The degree holder has to be packaged in a way that conforms to the requirements of the market. The training which is `valued’ makes workers fiercely competitive in relation to fellow workers, but docile in dealings with superiors.

The communalisation of education, like the commercialisation and commodification of education generates an anti-democratic socio-political environment in which neoliberal capitalism flourishes. Strong fascistic tendencies surface in governments that aggressively advocate neoliberal economic policies.

(Madhu Prasad is an activist and founder member of the All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE). This article was written for the Independence Day issue of People's Democracy and is being reproduced with permission from the author)
 
 

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It took an article from the iconic Guardian in Britain dated almost a month ago (May 31) authored by the redoubtable Aditya Chakrabortty, You’re witnessing the death of neoliberalism – from within to give a more honest and realistic appraisal of the fundamental upheavals and damages caused by a policy framework, ruthlessly pushed, undemocratically secured that has reduced, effectively every yardstick as measureable to, or against the market. Even within the world’s democracies.
 

Today, July 1, 2016, Indian newspapers are replete with eulogies to this market driven policy framework that has hollowed out both world and Indian institutions, whereas the UK-based Chakrabortty says, the yardstick of the National health Service and the universities say it all, “classrooms are being transformed into supermarkets”. "In this way, the public sector is replaced by private companies, and democracy is supplanted by mere competition," he adds. Nowhere could a reflection of what is happening within India, or has already happened, so readily be found.

Over the past few years most acutely, and over the past decade more insidiously, this framework has been critiqued widely by some Indian academics, journalists and activists. Nowhere is it more evident than the direct assault on Indian farming—visible in the callous loss of life among our farmers, the education and health sectors. Kanhaiya Kumar now an iconic household name thanks to the peculiar brand of proto-fascist authoritarianism of the Modi regime, flagged the issue emotively and sensitively when he demanded, in true democratic tradition, a common system of education, a common school system for all Indian children.
​
Indian Journalism was the first to fall prey to the market-driven neo-liberal framework. We were all at the middle to senior levels within respected publications when the lure of ‘contract’ jobs, at two or three times the average rates then paid to us who were ‘secure’ lower salaries but savings like provident fund etc. Most succumbed, membership to the journalists unions and federations dwindled, and died.

Those who signed up to the contract got caught up and into a new and glitzy world, where cars and a high executive club life styles, unheard of for the classic Indian journalists, suddenly became open, and possible. This capture of the media by the market – a leading proprietor of one of India’s newspapers famously said, “News and Views are what appears between the advertisement pages”—is today witness to, not just a dumbing down of institutions and content, but has been accompanied by a visible loss of integrity, and independence. [1]

Image: The Gaurdian​​

In both education and health, the state and government’s surrender to the market essentially has meant that only the rich get access because they can pay. Today the source of ferment and dissent in all Central universities –be it the Hyderabad Central University, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Allahabad University, Doon University, Assam University and many others –is the significant budgetary cuts in central government (UGC) scholarships that ensure democratic access to students from rural and marginalised backgrounds (and this includes OBCs, minorities and Dalits). This regime today—in more crude continuance of earlier policies– wants to be the last bastion of a policy worldview that is being seriously questioned yes, even by the Indian Monetary Fund.

The initial resistance to policies like the rural work programme (MGNREGA) by the Modi regime has been followed up with what is happening presently: the direct assault on the statutory rights of tribals and other peoples living on and off forest lands. This is being achieved and ensured through executive overreach initiated by the central environment ministry. These policy moves, including the latest one of disempowering the grasroot Panchayati Raj (village level democratising) framework are evidence that India, at least, has not yet shrugged off a framework that the first/developing world thrust upon us and is today, somewhat, questioning.

The crux of the critical article in The Guardian is that it draws attention to three or four documents emanating from, the heart and soul of neo liberalism –the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—that today, in June 2016 point to its far from many successes. Chakkroborty calls it’s the “remarkable breach of the neoliberal consensus by the IMF.”

Read this paper by Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri

This paper concludes by saying “Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion:
‘However, there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected. Our assessment of the agenda is confined to the effects of two policies: removing restrictions on the movement of capital across a country’s borders (so-called capital account liberalization); and fiscal consolidation, sometimes called “austerity,” which is shorthand for policies to reduce fiscal deficits and debt levels. An assessment of these specific policies (rather than the broad neoliberal agenda) reaches three disquieting conclusions:

• The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries.­
• The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda.­
• Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects.­

What makes the fund’s intervention so remarkable is not what is being said – but who is saying it and just how bluntly. In the IMF’s flagship publication, three of its top economists have written an essay titled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”.

There is more from where this comes. It is not just the IMF but also the Bank of England’s Mark Carney who is sounding the alarm. He speaks, in this speech delivered in February 2016  about “a low-growth, low-inflation, low-interest-rate equilibrium”. Then there is the Bank of International Settlements, the central bank’s central bank, that warns that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

The IMF. World Bankers. Economists from within the Spectrum.  When will we in India, make our own independent and informed assessment that is already showing up in increasing dismepowerment, starvation and poverty all around? 

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The much-debated API (Academic Performance Indicator) system, linking promotions of faculty members in Indian universities/colleges to a quantifiable assessment of their performance, was introduced by the University Grants Commission (UGC) in its 2010 Regulations. Since then, there has been mounting resistance and discontent among massive sections of the teaching community – forcing the UGC to withdraw the said assessment framework for a while in 2013, before reintroducing it across institutions of higher education.

However, over the years, the ire of protesting teachers has translated into a sustained critique of the API system and its failure to account for the infrastructural inadequacies of public institutions as adversely impacting the promotion prospects of thousands of teachers across the country.

It was rightly argued that a point-based appraisal pattern reduces teaching as an adventure of ideas into a standardised set of visible-verifiable outcomes and deliverables, expending in this, the necessary surplus of every academic encounter. The clock-timed hours of classroom-teaching – convertible into digits and decimals – were not only incommensurate to the disaggregation of thought beyond workdays and work-hours, but also insisted on a corporate-model professionalism limiting the exact interface between the teacher[-as-service-provider] and the student[-as-client].

The perils of quantification notwithstanding, the API system practically sought to make teaching a redundant exercise in terms of ‘necessary qualifications’ for faculty promotions. With a lucrative price-tagging of the ‘value’ of research activities conducted by individual teachers outside of teaching-schedules and the consequent structures of waging intellectual productivity through the numbers of projects and publications, the API contributed to a voiding of the classroom in undergraduate colleges in many parts of the country.

Forced to prove her/his levels of productivity as the most essential claim to survival and growth within the field, the teacher needed but little to do by way of engaging students. And yet, on the contrary, the government persisted with its policy of withdrawing research grants and forcing research organisations to look for alternative sources of funding to sustain their work. Consequently, teachers have been infrastructurally forced into producing dubious research in the cause of ‘career advancement’, self-funding their way into business-rackets parading as scholarly platforms.

Conference coteries branched out like neighbourhood pandals with open-to-all subscription-routines, and citational pledges gave birth to kinship-alliances with a crass mechanising of the ‘impact factor’. In all of this, what suffered the most was the state of undergraduate education – thus diminishing the relevance of public institutions in popular perception, and aiding their systematic destruction in the cause of advocating whole-scale privatization.

While demanding research output from teachers as a ‘minimum’ requirement for promotion, the UGC chose to ignore the state of infrastructural collapse and the acute resource-crunch that most state-run colleges in India suffer from – where teachers often lack seating-space in staffrooms, let alone dedicated work-space or research facilities. When, in the cause of promotion prospects, these teachers therefore decided to fight for berths in conference schedules than inside the staffroom, the ‘biometric’ baton of attendance was threateningly brandished.

And then, predictably enough – with the dramatic flourish of bureaucratic finality! – came a Committee.

In July 2015, the Ministry of Human Resource Development constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Prof. Arun Nigavekar to conduct an “evaluation of the Academic Performance Indicator (API) Scheme as regards the entry point and career advancement of teachers by taking into account its criticism and suggest suitable improvements/alternatives”, among other issues.

In all of this, what suffered the most was the state of undergraduate education – thus diminishing the relevance of public institutions in popular perception, and aiding their systematic destruction in the cause of advocating whole-scale privatization.

But, instead of its declared aim of suggesting “improvements/alternatives” to the API, the Committee – which is reported to have submitted its recommendations to the regulatory body earlier this year – proposed a host of aggravations that not only legitimised the existing system of performance-based career advancement, but also made it far more unequal and irrational. The Gazette Notification of the Third Amendment to UGC Regulations 2010 — dated May 10, 2016 — incorporates the Nigavekar Committee recommendations with regard to both direct recruitment of teachers and API-linked promotion policy. A close reading of the Amendment notification, in the light of the original Principal Regulations 2010 as well as subsequent Amendments of 2011 and 2013, serves out an ominous foreboding for the state and status of teaching jobs in the country as also for research.

Subsequently, the DUTA (with support from other teachers’ associations across the country) launched a powerful movement against the Amendment notification and issued a call for a complete evaluation boycott in Delhi University centres. The overwhelming success of the movement and its mobilizations jolted the MHRD into first offering a ‘clarification’ and then a public statement dated May 26, 2016.

In what follows as an attempted reading of the Amendment and the government’s consequent responses, one may hope to find an answer to the question: does the Nigavekar Committee, in avowedly setting out to review the API system, try to remedy the latter’s ill-effects on teaching and research – or, does it rather seek to systemically delegitimize both teaching and research activities within institutional spaces by further entrenching the API?
 

• Clause 15.1 of the UGC Regulations 2010 (under the Section titled “Workload”) categorically maintains that the “direct teaching-learning process hours per week” will be 16 for Assistant Professors and 14 for Associate Professors/Professors, whereas Appendix III Table I of the same document (detailing the distribution of API scores for “Teaching, Learning and Evaluation Related Activities”) explains in ‘Note a’ that “lectures and tutorials allocation [are] to add up to the UGC norm for particular category of teacher”. For all legal and policy purposes hence, this implies that the “UGC norm” is as specified in Clause 15.1, and that both “lectures and tutorials” must be counted as direct teaching-learning contact hours to be included within the specified workload norm. Accordingly, colleges and universities across the country followed the 16/14 hour time-table pattern as inclusive of tutorial periods. It needs mentioning here that owing to student enrolments exceeding maximum intake-limits alongside the infrastructural paucity of space/resource, the tutorial sessions originally envisioned with groups of 4-6 students, now effectively include between 16 to 20 members thus qualifying as full-fledged teaching workload.

The Third Amendment Notification of 2016 performs a curious sleight of calculation here. While keeping the “UGC norm” spelt out in Clause 15.1 of the Principal Regulations unamended, it overhauls Appendix III Table I of the API-based promotion scheme and deviously adds a new tally of “Direct teaching work load…to be given to different levels of teachers”. This new insertion does two things. First, it increases the “Direct Teaching Hours per week” (in obvious contravention of Principal Regulations 15.1) to 18+6 (=24) for Assistant Professors, 16+6 (=22) for Associate Professors and 14+6 (=20) for Professors.

Second, it goes on to explain that tutorials can no longer be deemed as class hours, though they must by default be included in official workload computations as a separate 6-hours-per-week bracket for every teacher. As a result, the recent Amendments effectively propose the upper limit of 24/22/20 hours of “direct teaching workload” to be reflected in official time-tables, thus leading to an average of at least 50 percent increase in computational workload arithmetic. Practical classes have been halved in terms of weightage, as compared to lectures, thus promising an even steeper change in workload within science departments.

The obvious (and clearly intended) fallout of this will be that nearly 50 percent of the existing teaching workforce in all universities will be rendered redundant henceforth, thus drastically curtailing the numbers of sanctioned posts or vacancies. Of course, the worst affected will be the ad-hoc or contractual teachers – a prodigious community of migrant teaching labour, already deprived of professional entitlements and often the basic right to human dignity — who will, in one fell swoop, be eliminated from colleges/universities on account of the unavailability of workload.

The conjecture that the current prescriptions of workload are flexible upper limits which empower colleges to keep lower cut-offs is absolutely futile, since the Amendment also mentions that for Assistant Professors the hourly tally of ‘direct teaching’ holds 100 percent weightage. Any teacher working on an “official timetable” of lower class numbers than 24 will risk an adverse impact on promotions, in terms of API scores for Category I.

The obvious (and clearly intended) fallout of this will be that nearly 50 percent of the existing teaching workforce in all universities will be rendered redundant henceforth, thus drastically curtailing the numbers of sanctioned posts or vacancies.

While ‘Note 4’ under Category I of the same Appendix still continues to maintain that “lectures allocation [mark the deletion of the word ‘tutorials’ here!] to add up to the UGC norm for particular category of teacher”, one wonders how a ‘norm’ mandated by the Principal Regulations can be changed through sly insertions within an Appendix.
 

• The deliberate erasure of the word “tutorials” in the above Note serves an important ideological function. Incidentally, the bi-partitioning of “direct teaching hours” through an additional 6-hours-per-week fixture for every category of teachers needs explanation in this context. ‘Note 2’ under Category I of the Amendment clarifies: “6 hours per week include the hours spent on tutorials, remedial classes, seminars, administrative responsibilities, innovation and updating of course contents”.

This means that even as these 6 hours of fixed workload must be mandatorily computed and reflected in time-tables as ‘tutorials’ or ‘remedial classes’ allotted to every teacher, they can effectively be used up for non-instructional purposes like administrative work and course-updation etc. Such a measure goes on to institutionally delegitimize and informalise the pedagogical purpose of ‘tutorials’, originally designed as a closer interface between teachers and students in order to address the problem of dismal student-teacher ratios in most colleges.

The tutorials are crucial interims facilitating rigorous practice-oriented teaching in groups smaller than a classroom lecture allows — aimed primarily at helping students from socially deprived sections who require focused guidance. The tutorial-system is a mechanism tested over time — one that has helped students struggling with the truncated learning time bequeathed by ill-planned reforms like Semesterization and CBCS. Further, it has served to inscribe an ethic of mutuality through discussions and academic interactions outside of monologic lecture-based curriculum-patterns.

The informalisation of ‘tutorials’ through the UGC Amendment of 2016 ends in a strengthening of the WTO-GATS model of higher education as service-providing exercise, requiring no commitments outside of impersonal spaces of transactional exchange between students and teachers. It further seeks to widen the gap between students coming with differential histories of social privilege, by re-entrenching the logic of merit as a priori inheritance.

Furthermore, technically speaking, while the Amendment encourages a teacher to trade time-tabled tutorial hours for “administrative responsibilities [and] innovation and updating of course contents”, they may be claimed points for in Category I under the head of “Lectures – Classroom Teaching”. The teacher will also be allowed to factor these same hours of ‘administrative’ and ‘course-updation’ routines within Category II b (titled “Contribution to Corporate life and management of the department and institution through participation in academic and administrative committees and responsibilities”) and II c (titled “Professional Development activities”).
 

• If Clause 15.1 remains as the “UGC norm” for workload calculations for teachers, there is an interesting aporia to be noticed in the Second Amendment dated 13 June 2013. Here again, without any reference being made to the original Clause 15, ‘Note 2’ under Category I of API (within Amended Appendix III Table I) explains the manner and method of calculating teaching hours thus:

“For example, if a teacher has been assigned 20 hours of classroom teaching per week in an institution that teaches for 16 weeks per semester, the teacher would write 320 hours….Since this is 2 hours higher than the UGC norm, she would claim additional 2 x 16 hours in row 1A (ii).”

It appears from this portion of the UGC Regulations (Second Amendment) 2013 that “20 hours of classroom teaching per week” is deemed “2 hours higher than the UGC norm”.

When and how is it that 18 hours of classroom teaching per week became the “UGC norm”? Assuming that the teacher referred to in the extract is an Assistant Professor, the UGC norm followed across colleges/universities (since 2010, till 2013 and after) stipulated “16 hours” of classroom teaching, as per Clause 15.1 of the Principal Regulations. Is it true then that the change in direct teaching workload did not come about now, but was already referenced way back in 2013? In such a case, the only modality through which such a change might have been effected could be the First Amendment of 2011 – the Gazette Notification for which, dated April 9-15, 2011, however makes no reference to the Section on ‘Workload’.

Collectively examined, the three Amendments of the UGC Regulations 2010 give out a sense of secret changes being introduced not only without an acknowledgment of the need for larger consultations, but also without due process and public notification. These constitute grave procedural lapses and (intentional) errors within the UGC’s regulatory legislations, aimed at producing confusion and stealthily affirming policy-directions in higher-education.

In fact, the most frequently encountered phrase in these documents — “UGC norm” – functions as an empty shibboleth, deliberately invoked to lend a legalistic finality to bizarre violations and internal contradictions.
 

• Following protests by teachers’ associations like DUTA, FEDCUTA and AIFUCTO, the secretary of the higher education department under MHRD had reportedly observed on May 24, 2016 that the Gazette Notification is merely ‘advisory’ in intent and not binding on teachers. And, yet for as much as an ‘advice’, the ministry issued a public statement on May 26 claiming to have “reviewed the recent amendment…and [given] direction to the UGC, under Section 20(1) of the UGC Act, 1956, to undertake amendments in the Regulation”. One only has to engage with the letter and spirit of the both the ‘clarification’ and the ‘statement’ in order to understand how they actually proceed to justify the Amendment in an oblique fashion, rather than overrule it.

Nowhere within the sham of the MHRD’s statement is there a proposal to withdraw the Gazette Notification. Instead, it vindicates the latter by morally exhorting teachers to move beyond “prescribed hours…, measured either in weeks or months”, and ironically promotes a transcendental horizon of ‘teaching’ as philanthropic voluntarism exceeding the material limits of a wage-for-work economy. Where work itself becomes a means of self-denial in the cause of higher goals of ‘social service’, there can neither be a workload-calculus nor exploitations on the basis of it. As a result, the ministry goes further in re-emphasising the 40-hour working week as the prescribed “overall workload” for all teachers – which, it asserts, is not superseded “even with the amended Regulation”.

Collectively examined, the three Amendments of the UGC Regulations 2010 give out a sense of secret changes being introduced not only without an acknowledgment of the need for larger consultations, but also without due process and public notification.

This is not only tantamount to granting legitimacy to the Amendment, but also empowering the regulatory body to successively step up workload and make teachers be accountable for “not less than 40 hours a week for 180 teaching days”. There’s of course a hidden moral-spiritual clause in the profession that defies arithmetic and demands even more. The 26 May statement also does not retract the ‘top-up’ stipulation of “6 additional hours per week” by falsely and illegally equating it with the research time allowed to a teacher by Clause 15.2 of the Principal Regulations.

This is in line with the immediately preceding ‘clarification’ of the higher education secretary that the erstwhile API norm mandating research activities for all college and university teachers (in Category III) has now been relaxed, giving teachers an option of either undertaking research or conducting tutorial classes. The Amendment is unequivocal, however, in not providing an option between tutorial hours and research activities – because while the former accounts for API scores in Category I, the latter is applicable only for determining scores under Category III. Contrary to such dubious ‘clarifications’ and ‘advisory’ intentions, research requirements have not been waived off for any category of teachers.

The “minimum scores” required in Category III for promotion have been halved for only Stages 1 and 2 (Asst. Prof), while for Stages 3, 4 and 5 (Asst./Assoc./Prof), they have been reduced by a meagre 20 to 30 percent. Correspondingly, the individual “maximum score” attainable for almost every research activity has been slashed by 30 to 67 percent. So, for all practical purposes, one will have to show MORE ‘research output’ than earlier to reach the reduced ‘minimum scores’.
 

• There’s more to the underlying intent within the “evaluation of the API system” that the Nigavekar Committee performs and edifies through the Third Amendment Notification. While on the one hand it seems to bring about an increase in teaching workload by about 50 percent (albeit through incorrect terms of reference and an ill-placed insertion countervailing the Principal Regulations!), the maximum permissible API score that one may claim for “Teaching, Learning and Evaluation Related Activities” under Category I has been visibly reduced from 180 points in the Second Amendment to 100 points in the Third. While the original Regulations of 2010 mandated a maximum score of 125 points in Category I, it was subsequently amended as 180 in 2013 and has now been slashed by nearly 50 percent to a meagre 100 points.

Isn’t it a remarkable irony that the same document which hikes teaching hours by 50 percent slashes its weightage for promotions by 50 percent as well? The real intention of the Nigavekar Committee is clear: far from bolstering teaching-learning activities through an apparent increase in teaching hours, it merely sought to cut down teaching jobs while at the same time delegitimizing the ‘value’ of teaching within the API-based PBAS scheme for promotions.
 

• The devaluation of teaching-learning processes continues well into the number-games structurally incorporated by the Third Amendment within Categories II and III for API quantification. In Category II[a] (described as “Student related co-curricular, extension and field based activities”) – which includes “study visit, student seminar and other events” or “public/popular lectures/talks/seminars etc.” – the maximum annual score obtainable for promotion was originally fixed at 20 points in the 2010 Regulations. It was subsequently made 30 points in 2013, while the current Notification exactly halves it to 15. Institutionally speaking, this would inevitably translate into a lack of administrative will in terms of promoting exchange-platforms between students, while also discouraging teachers from mobilising intellectual spaces/resources for such student-activities.

Interestingly enough, the maximum allocations for the other two bureaucratic sub-heads within Category II (namely, “contribution to corporate life and management” and “professional development”) have been kept the same as originally stipulated in 2010, while it is only student-related activities which have been de-incentivised.
 

• Category III of the API Scheme – entitled “Research and Academic Contributions” – has been integrally overhauled with the corresponding point-weightages for all kinds of publications/projects/conference papers being reduced by as much as 20 points. Not only does this downgrade academic research as of lower relative ‘worth’, but it will also aggravate apparent concerns of ‘quality’ in terms of research output — by forcing teachers to look for more such opportunities to make up for the lower weightage of each. While a singularly authored “text/reference book by [an] international publisher” carried 50 points as per 2010 Regulations and all subsequent amendments, the recent notification brings it down to 30 points. In deliberately diminishing the rigour of thought and labour that goes into authoring a book and pitching it in a publishing-market of speculative investments, this move deems the time taken for serious academic research as rather being inimical to ‘career advancement’.

Insofar as publications are now expected to pass the UGC test of being brokered by ‘commissioned’ publishers (that is, those “notified” or “identified” by the regulatory body), the Amendment conjures and abets the spectre of the mainstream while relegating alternative forms/spaces of work as irrelevant. The UGC’s enlisting of publishers as potential avenues for ‘good’/‘useful’ work will also naturally reinstate networks of monopoly capital within the publishing-market.
 

• The recent Amendment goes as far as discouraging academic or intellectual collaboration between teachers of different universities/spaces by substituting the 60:40 ratio of point-distribution for jointly-authored publications with a 70:30 scale. An asterisked note to Category III maintains that the “API for joint publications” shall be calculated through an apportioning of 70% of the total points to the First Author, while “the remaining 30% would be shared equally by all other authors”.

And thus, in times that claim better days, and a ‘Make in India’ rhetoric which vocabularizes the need for supporting industry while resting on the backs of invisibilised labour, the teacher-worker will always remain beyond the pale of the state’s support and pride.

Collaborative work helps us teachers in testing the force of our convictions with others in the field, as much as they serve to form intellectual-political solidarities often outside of one’s own institution or discipline. The May 2016 Gazette Notification seeks to de-recognise the potential for inter-subjective alliances within communities of scholarship, as well as the very traffic of ideas so crucial to processes of intellectual production. Cultures of exchange and collective practices of work are argued to be less ‘valuable’ on the scale of point-tags, than the solipsistic egoism of ‘authorly’ teachers. By institutionalising a brand of possessive individualism premised on unequal claims of proprietorship, collegiality and its potential for meaningful dialogue are proven as detrimental to API measures of ‘advancement’.
 

• Appendix III Table II (A) of the current Gazette Notification significantly does away with the differential API requirements for college and university teachers, by proposing a single standard of ‘minimum qualifications’ for the promotion of either. While the original UGC Regulations 2010 mandated two different tables for assessment scales of college and university teachers seeking promotion under CAS, the 2016 Amendment fuses them. This is a draconian step, threatening to take away focus from the methodological rigour of teaching demanded by UG colleges – which are traditionally expected to place more emphasis on classroom-learning than research activities. Urging a blanket homogenization of different levels of teaching and their divergent material priorities, the Nigavekar Committee – in the guise of the Third Amendment – ignores the distinct pedagogical requirements of UG teaching as opposed to PG/Ph.D supervision, and will only culminate in a climate of competitive self-aggrandisement at the cost of structural necessities and student needs.

• Even as the UGC institutionalises an enumerative, quantifiable teaching-learning model through the API, its 2016 Amendment further egregiously hands out scorecards to students to rate teachers and determine their eligibility for promotion. The 2010 Regulations, Clause 6.0.11 had only offered by way of suggestion a student feedback medium — “The IQAC may also introduce, wherever feasible, the student feedback system as per the NAAC guidelines” – one that would allow students to respond to the larger institutional, infrastructural opportunities that were being made available to them, “without incorporating the component of students’ assessment of individual teachers”. The next Amendment of 2013 brings in the format of the anonymous questionnaire, even as it maintains its earlier caveat that prevents it from being used against the teacher at the time of hiring and promotion. But now the latest Amendment directly liases student feedback with an API scoring to determine promotions. An absurd score chart is given for assigning points/marks to teachers by students, which will then predicate promotions. This feedback mechanism, in all its offensiveness, can also insidiously warp the existing dynamic of mentoring, so valued by both the teacher and the student. With promotions resting crucially on feedback, the dangerous possibility of a nefarious alliance between marks and points proliferating through coteries remains high. Further, this would also create an unhealthy competitive bidding for promotions between teachers.

Within the UGC’s regulations, renewed and amended, its signing off line remains – ‘with immediate effect’, a dangling fait accompli that holds institutional funding in remand against any kind of defiance or deferral. And yet interestingly, colleges quick in implementing UGC’s farmans and diktats conveniently continue to sidestep the very important clause authorising the promotion to ‘Professorship’ for teachers in UG colleges. In 2010, Clause 6.5.1 of the Regulation read, “Ten percent of the number of sanctioned posts of Associate Professor in an Under Graduate College shall be that of Professors and shall be subject to the same criterion for selection/appointment as that of Professors in Universities”. How is it that non compliance in this case, has escaped the attention of the UGC?

What is obvious with the 2016 Amendment is how the UGC’s bureaucratised understanding rationalises intellectual labour in its deseguing of teaching, both from research as well as from the smaller group mentoring that Tutorials/Practicals make space for. Ill-conceived ‘reforms’ like the Semesterized model, the erstwhile FYUP and now the CBCS, have gone a long way in cementing both the idea and approach towards teaching that sees it as only nebulously and marginally productive in the creation of skilled, vocationalized labour. Within this is cleverly apportioned the larger goal of downsizing, double backing as it does on existing vacancies.

An entire workforce of beleaguered contractual teachers, numbering more than 4,000 in Delhi University alone, will be dismissively (un)accounted as collateral. And thus, in times that claim better days, and a ‘Make in India’ rhetoric which vocabularizes the need for supporting industry while resting on the backs of invisibilised labour, the teacher-worker will always remain beyond the pale of the state’s support and pride.

This article originally appeared on kafila.org

Rina Ramdev and Debaditya Bhattacharya teach literature to undergraduate students at Delhi University and the University of Calcutta, respectively. They have both done their Ph.D from Centre for English Studies, JNU. They are co-editors of Sentiment, Politics, Censorship: The State of Hurt (Sage, New Delhi, 2016).
 

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