Glenn Rikowski
NOTES ON COMMODITY FORMS AND THE BUSINESS TAKEOVER OF
SCHOOLS
These notes are for
a seminar with second year Education Studies students at the University of East
London, Stratford Campus, on 20th November 2019.
Introduction
Commodification, marketisation, monetisation (the increasing scourge of
money), and competition, commercialisation (advertising and selling-centred
image manipulation) in education: how do we challenge and terminate these
developments, if we wish to? Do we rely on the state to protect us from these
insurgencies by capitalist interests and motivations in contemporary education?
Will pressure from below, from us, urge the state to curb and end the role of
business in education? Do we hope for a victory of Corbyn’s Labour Party in the
forthcoming General Election to end the business takeover of education?
These notes indicate a way forward regarding posting answers to these
questions. It is argued that we need to attack the business takeover of
education at the micro level: at the level of the commodity, first and
foremost.
The first Part of these notes focuses on this micro-level: commodity
forms, the basic, elemental phenomena of capitalist society. Part Two explores
one of these commodity forms, the general class of commodities, in terms of its
development in contemporary schools. The focus is on how the general class of
commodities, through the business takeover of schools, grows and spreads. The
examples explored in Part Two come from schools in England, though, as Verger,
Fontdevilla and Zancajo (2016) demonstrate, what they call the ‘global
education industry’ (which is roughly equivalent to what I take as the business
takeover of education) is a world-wide phenomenon, not confined to the UK, the
US or Europe.
The perspective of these notes rests on Marxism; the ideas of Karl Marx
and those who embrace his critique of capitalist society and its social
scientific armoury. There are many forms of Marxism, and I stand within what
has been called ‘Open Marxism’ – based on the work of people such as John
Holloway and Werner Bonefeld. For 40 years, I have studied and organised around
what has become known as Marxist educational theory.
The rest of these Notes can be found at Academia, in my ‘Teaching
Documents’ section: https://www.academia.edu/40918435/Notes_on_Commodity_Forms_and_the_Business_Takeover_of_Schools
Glenn
Rikowski
14 November 2019
More of Glenn Rikowski’s
publication and papers can be found at:
ResearchGate:
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski
