It is official: we are getting ready for another round of industrial action in the UK higher education sector. For those who may be wondering what the current is all about, a short recap may help. Higher education UCU members are striking because of planned pensions cuts that risk pushing academic staff into 鈥榬etirement poverty鈥�; to fight against ever-growing labour casualisation in universities; and because of the growing inequalities of gender, race and class the UK higher education sector has nurtured in the last five decades. Colleagues at Goldsmith 鈥� to whom we shall extend all our support – are also fighting .

We 鈥� higher education workers and students – were on this picket before, so many times, fighting other policies deepening the process of commodification of education. We were on this picket fighting 鈥� which education workers are still experiencing. We were on this picket to fight against the . At SOAS, where I work, we were on this picket to , , against the on campus ground – an event which remains the darkest chapter of SOAS industrial relations and for which the university has not yet apologised in recognition of the harm caused to the and to all our community. We hope the school will acknowledge the need to do so, so that we can move forward, together.

We were at other demonstrations and on other picket  lines, protesting against austerity, in the , , against racism and in support of against . The picket really is a sort of archive, which can be consulted backward to reconstruct a history of attacks to our rights – at work, at home, or both.

And if we consult this archive, we can clearly see a pattern emerging in the last decades, a pattern which in fact connects neoliberal Britain with many other places in the world economy, which have also experienced processes of neoliberalisation. All the pickets and demonstrations, become a sort of tracing route; we can reconnect the dots spread across a broader canvas. These dots design a specific pattern; that of a systematic attack to life and life-making sectors, realms and spaces.

, starting from the 1980s, has promoted a process of systematic de-concentration of resources in public sectors, and particularly in so-called 鈥�socially reproductive sectors鈥�, that is those that regenerate us as people and as workers. This attack has been massively felt in the home, which has become a major battleground for processes of . The withdrawal of the state from welfare provisions, the rise and rise of co-production in services (i.e. the incorporation of citizens鈥� unpaid labour in public service delivery;聽 a practice further cheapening welfare) – 聽and processes of partial or full privatisation of service delivery in healthcare and education have . These gaps have been filled through to others. 黑料社区s have become net users of market-based domestic and care services. The in-sourcing of nannies, au-pairs, and elders carers, from a vast number of countries in the Global south and transition economies have remade the home as a site of production and employment generation, at extremely low costs.

On the other hand, , albeit of wageless labouring services, as women have shouldered life-making at zero costs for a very long time. Yet, their entry into paid labour markets have not been gender liberating, as it has reproduced the gendered division of labour by embedding it in a number of other divides, like the one between the Global North and the Global South. Middle class women have not learnt how to withdraw from unpaid reproductive labour. They have learnt how to outsource the reproductive question towards other women, often racialised and migrant women, and/or members of subaltern groups in the society in question. These transformations have been systematic in Britain and across the world economy.

If this sort of transformations has seen a process of privatisation of reproductive work such as domestic and care activities which has centred households as producers and consumers of housework services, a similar trend has hit , if on a larger scale. These sectors, such as health and education, have endured privatisation in ways that have also generated the massive . The NHS is a case in point here. Despite remaining technically publicly provided, the NHS has seen many of its services going through , and the massive entry of public private partnerships (PPPs). , and recruitment agencies have targeted nursing markets in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This has produced a process of reproductive brain drain from these regions, which has resulted in weakening their healthcare systems. At the same time, it has ensured a downward pressure on wages in nursing sectors in the UK. So this work, celebrated as essential 鈥� 鈥� has been regenerated as precarious, , and in fact it has helped dragging down wages for all nurses. To be clear, it is not migrant care labour which is dragging down wages. It is the processes of privatised outsourcing which turns this work into a cheap devalued service.  

Now, we know that . In fact, as COVID-19 hit, areas characterised by private health systems or privatised services have experienced astonishingly high death rates. . Privatised services come with a reordering of main objectives, away from areas considered less marketable. We learnt that with the paucity of ICU bed, didn鈥檛 we? Again, these trends can also be spotted ; a high growth rate economy, healthcare system characterised by PPPs have not been able to cope and eventually this turned into a high death toll. In Italy too, the rich north has experienced far more deaths than the under-developed south for similar reasons. Northern regions, despite their healthcare poles of excellence has been , as its semi-privatised model has shifted priorities away from emergency medicine.

Now let鈥檚 continue our analysis from our homes, onto our classrooms. The commodification of social reproduction mounted in the 1980s has been ferocious against our education systems. It has hit our nurseries, our schools, our universities. In fact, the same processes of privatisation of social reproduction have gained pace across the schooling and educational system. Today, these key spaces of socialisation have increasingly become attuned to the logics of profit-making. First, . In some segments of the educational system, then, private provision has taken centrestage. In nurseries and early years provisions, colleagues from the University of East London and UCL have highlighted the . These providers are often linked to transnational capital. So the nursery, of all places has become a (Penn and Mezzadri, 2022). Indeed, the financial grammar of mergers and acquisitions is the new (Simon et al, forthcoming). According to a forthcoming report, most formal childcare in the UK – over 80% of all places – is provided by the private sector, ranging from small private operators to multi-million-pound international businesses. 53% of all childcare places are provided by big companies. The for-profit childcare market in the UK is worth an estimated 拢5.5 billion pounds, of which 拢3.6 billion goes to big companies. The largest three chains, between them providing over 60,000 places, are owned by foreign investors, with financial head offices located in Singapore, France and the USA. Further changes in the sector seem likely, most notably increased penetration by large chains, and increased foreign investment (Simon et al, forthcoming). Similar trends take place in the .

These processes take place in a context of , and huge turnover of labour. As I left my child in his private nursery for almost two years, not knowing if he will find his usual keyworker, I soon realised the nursery was owned by the private insurance company down the road. I have no idea which broader financial circuit that agency is linked to. In these privatised spaces, children are , standardised as their care needs. Already from a very young age, ideas of developmental targets and compliance are mainstreamed as ideal value for parents (and these tiny little children) to internalise.

The move to the public schooling system 鈥� to public provision 鈥� once children turn three, provide some respite, but up to a point. In the context of the exercised by the UK government in these last decades, primary schools struggle to remain anchored to a caring narrative. The curriculum is based on an obsession with targets and categorisation. Kids as young as 5 are placed into different areas of achievement, from low to high, and if they are lucky this system may change daily. In some schools it is structural, and small children must struggle their way out of low achievement grouping 鈥� a sort of school-based version of the Hunger Games. A few weeks ago The Guardian featured an article titled . The study shows that primary school children who are placed in the bottom ability group in their class go on to show increased levels of hyperactivity and emotional problems throughout childhood and early adolescence. This is supposedly ground-breaking new research, but all parents know this. Now: these new findings, published in the journal, have prompted researchers to call for children in lower ability groups to be monitored closely by their teachers to ensure their wellbeing is not being compromised. So, the recommendation of the study is actually NOT to abolish this form of social segregation, which is often classed and racialised. It is instead for these kids to be 鈥榦thered鈥� further and 鈥榤onitored closely鈥�.

On the other hand, the abusive practices that monitoring and surveillance systems involve have also been widely discussed with reference to secondary education. Here, the massive use of detention as a tool to enforce discipline has also come under fire, pre-pandemic. An article appearing in The Guardian compared schools to prisons, and highlighted how the massive abuse of was perpetuating gaps in terms of race, class, and neurodiversity. Have you watched last year the series of short movies directed by Steve McQueen 鈥� Small Axe? You should, it is brilliant. One of the episodes, titled dwells on the racist and neurophobe shortcomings of the British schooling system. Although the characters in Education are fictional, the film is based on real-life events of the 1970s, when some London councils followed an unofficial policy of transferring disproportionate numbers of black children from mainstream education to schools for the so-called 鈥榚ducationally subnormal鈥�. The practice was exposed by educationalist  in his 1971 pamphlet where he explained how West Indian children were manufactured into unschoolable subjects by the so-called 鈥榥ormal鈥� schooling system. Thankfully, those practices are gone, yet patterns of exclusion from school remain highly racialised, gendered, and based on disabilities. This is particularly the case in , whereas richer neighbourhood can benefit from the hidden processes of privatisation of education, as they have access to better public schools, often located in streets with very expensive housing, whose value is maintained by access to this type of schooling, which in turn keeps real estate prices high, and so on and so forth.

The obsessions with targets and testing, in contexts of profoundly unequal social provisions, is a system that can be spotted also in many other countries. It dominates in the US, in South Korea, in China, and in India. In the US, as highlighted by the work of Cindi Katz, this system produced a characterisation of , depending on how the kids in question perform 鈥揳nd arguably 鈥榩roduce and consume鈥� (see Ferguson, 2017) – their childhood and youth, if along the lines deemed as successful by the monitoring and testing system or not. Of course, processes of childhood as accumulation return to the home, in ways in which parents foster their children as little investment projects for the future 鈥� as epitomised by practices chillingly summarised, Katz (2021) recently explained, by memoirs like 鈥楤attle Hymns of a Tiger Mother鈥�, by Amy Chua.

So, after coming for our homes, our hospitals and clinics, and our nurseries and primary and secondary classrooms, the commodification of social reproduction lands in our university settings. Here, it continues its work of divide and rule, in processes of . However, mostly, it manifests in the deepening of and in shaping the entry of young adults into relations of , against a background of for teaching staff. In fact, in many ways, universities represent a microcosm speaking to all the distinct processes of commodification of social reproduction unveiled so far. They are sites of global care chains, as cleaning and caring services are decentralised and outsourced to agencies, a process that the campaign fought across UK campuses, inspiring us all. It is a site of financial capital and privatised housing. One of the most haunting images of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on university life last year has been that of students at the University of hired by universities to keep them inside halls of residence. They should have not been there in the first place, but Universities, which have become landlords, lied to house hundreds of thousands of students and capture rent money. These rents and skyrocketing fees are the reasons why student debt has ballooned since the onset of neoliberalism.

Ultimately, exhausted by testing and surveillance as children, young adults finally arrive in the neoliberal university as expert consumers of largely privatised or at the very least individualised educational 鈥榩roducts鈥�, overexposed to what Paulo Freire criticised as the . There they are ready to become financial subject 鈥� subjects of debt and processes of indebtedness. In their book NiUnaMenos theorists and activists Veronica Gago and Luci Caballero spell out the linkages between debt, social reproduction, and deeply rooted social and economic inequalities running across households and communities.

As students mount this debt, staff salaries and working conditions have been at the same time systematically eroded by the neoliberal universities. A massive producer of what – whose primary scope is often in fact management and control – the asphyxiating walls of the neoliberal universities are fabricated by processes of , and declining income share even for the so-called labour aristocracy of permanent academic workers, like myself. Or indeed .

As you can see, we are circling back to the reasons we are striking this academic year, which is where my reflections started. We have connected all dots, through the archive of the picket line, and we have rehearsed all the processes that have placed and will place us here, on the picket, today and tomorrow. In December, I felt extremely honoured and privileged to stand on this picket line, with so many comrades, colleagues and students 鈥� in fact delivering an early version of these same reflections as a teach-out. Across London, teach-outs have been marvellous, and hundreds of students attended. We do not strike to avoid teaching. We strike to demand social change, and to teach solidarity through collective struggles. The picket line becomes our classroom, so that it can be, in the words of the late , 鈥榯he most radical space of possibility in the academy鈥�. In this space we can teach that all struggles are connected, set against the processes of commodification of social reproduction and life we have endured. On our picket, on this archive of knowledge of past and present fights we wage and must continue waging, from the home to the classroom, against neoliberal attacks to our common , united we will always stand. Solidarity to us all, for the days that are coming.

 is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS.

References

Katz C. (2021) 鈥楢spiration Management: gender, Race, Class, and the Child as Waste鈥�. In Why Gender? Edited by Jude Browne. Cambridge University Press (pp. 170-193).

Simon A, Penn H, Shah A, Owen C, Lloyd E, Hollingworth K, Quy K (2022) Acquisitions, Mergers and Debt: the new language of childcare 鈥� Main Report. London: UCL Social Research Institute, University College London.

Ferguson S. (2017) 鈥楥hildren, Childhood and Capitalism: A Social Reproduction Perspective鈥�. In T. Bhattacharya (ed) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press (pp. 112鈥�130).

Penn H.聽and聽Mezzadri A. (2022) 鈥楴urture versus Capitalism: Why the child went missing from for-profit childcare鈥�. In 鈥楥OVID Reconfigurations鈥�: The Sociological Review Magazine.

Photo:

COVID-19 exposes the deadly dominance of neoclassical economics in Africa.

On February 24, 2021 Ghana received a vaccine shipment (600,000 doses), the first to sub-Saharan Africa under the COVAX facility. It amounted to a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions needed on a continent increasingly ravaged by the pandemic. Contrast this to the tens of millions already vaccinated in the UK and US. The optimism that Africa would be spared by 鈥渆arly lockdown鈥�, 鈥渓ess dense population, 鈥渢he effect of ultraviolet鈥�, 鈥渁 climate that meant people spent more time outside鈥� and 鈥淎frica鈥檚 youthful population鈥� has rapidly faded. Officially there are now more than 100,000 deaths on the continent, but the real numbers are much higher due to the paucity of testing and the lack of capacity to accurately track and evaluate causes of mortality.

The shortage of tests and vaccines are exacerbated by the West鈥檚 hyper-nationalism restricting the import of these two vital tools to combat the pandemic. The same forces have also generated a scarcity of personal protective equipment (PPE), the lack of monoclonal antibody and other treatments, and terrible shortages of medical oxygen so vital to keeping people alive. How is it possible, 60 years after independence, for African countries to be so highly dependent on the goodwill of the outside world for basic health goods? A good deal of the answer lies in the pathology of economics and related policies, which have spread like a pandemic globally and have come to dominate both the West and the continent of Africa. How did this come about? How does it relate to the strategies that have undermined African capacities to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on the health and welfare of its people? And what should be done?

Following independence, higher education was a key part of the national development project and was aimed at training Africans to take on vital new roles as doctors, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, and economists. Economic curriculum in universities theorized about the nature of Africa鈥檚 integration into the global economy and the domestic policies needed to enhance development. Debates on the government strategies drew on diverse theoretical traditions such as institutional and structural economics. There was a general consensus on the need for African countries to use government tools to build an industrial base.

Beginning in the early 1980s, donors shifted from supporting state planning and import-substitution industrialization toward imposing structural adjustment. They were resisted by local economists not inclined toward the neo-classical model that provided the theoretical basis of neoliberal policies. Donors even ghost wrote reports, pretended they were written locally and then praised them for their thoughtful insights. The World Bank and other donors realized that opposition could be demobilized, and 鈥渙wnership鈥� generated by incorporating the economics profession into the Western economic model.

The crisis of African universities, including the extreme decline of academic wages partly generated by the structural adjustment project of the World Bank in the 1980s, created the opportunity. Donors provided stipends to retrain old faculty, provided the demand for these local 鈥渟kills鈥� in aid packages and supported a new generation of students in neoclassical economics through organizations like the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), formed in 1988 with the support of the World Bank and other agencies. The AERC set out to revamp higher education by training graduate students and by providing financial support to economics departments in African countries to organize graduate coursework and research along Western lines. The AERC flow of tens of millions of dollars from donors to African universities was a huge inducement for African economics departments to participate in the programs. Today, economics departments throughout Africa look no different than their Western counterparts. By the AERCs own count there are thousands of their graduates in African ministries and central banks, think tanks, NGOs, and academic institutions. Empowering this 鈥渆pistemic community鈥� of local economists created trusted purveyors of the international agenda and helped facilitate the institutionalization of neoliberal policies on the continent.

At the heart of adjustment were neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, macro-stabilization, and user fees in health and education, which were supposed to lead to static efficiency gains. Unfortunately, the results were very different. Public expenditure cuts and the privatization of social services in health care and education put African countries in worse health and on the wrong trajectory to combat any pandemic.

Neoliberalism loosened restrictions on capital flows, privatized state enterprises, and liberalized trade undermining local manufacturing capacity leading to more reliance on imports of manufacturing goods including pharmaceuticals and other health commodities. Increasingly African countries became more dependent on exporting unprocessed raw materials for foreign exchange. Hence, adjustment led to the deindustrialization of the continent and returned Africa to its colonial style extraction economy with its problematic boom and bust commodity cycles. Manufacturing fell from 18% of GDP in 1980 to only 7%-9% after 2000.

The tools of mainstream economics are limited in their ability to conceptualize the structural and institutional exigencies of development, which have become even more challenging with African countries at the lower end of the of global supply chain. Recent studies have indicated that Africa鈥檚 exports after 2000 have increased without a comparable rise in domestic value added. Yet, orthodox economists see liberalized Africa as naturally following its comparative advantage. Hence, we have prima facie evidence of a discipline that accepts a pathological condition as normal with all of the problematic incapacities to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

African policy makers need to draw on the wealth of accumulated knowledge in multiple theoretical paradigms to design strategies to diversify and structurally transform economies in a value chain world. None of this is easily conceptualized in the neoclassical paradigm that currently dominates the discipline in Africa; one that narrowly focuses on a world of marginal changes, retracted states, and trade between countries based on static comparative advantage.

Howard Stein is Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

A more detailed elaboration of some of the arguments here can be found in H. Stein, 鈥溾��&苍产蝉辫;Economy and Society Volume 50, No.1, Feb. 2021.

This blog post was originally published on . Photo by .

A decade has passed since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) which seems an apt time to begin talking about the event that has pushed the concept of financial education to the core of global policymaking debates. Despite its growing popularity today, financial education has existed in the premise of global policymaking for the past few decades. The benefits of financial education seem endless; poor national financial literacy levels have been blamed for adverse socioeconomic effects such as high national household debt and/or a general irrational exuberance in financial consumption behaviour (see e.g.

As in 2002:

鈥淔inancial education can equip consumers with the fundamental knowledge required to choose among the myriad of products and providers in the financial services industry. It can also help to inculcate individuals with the financial knowledge necessary to create household budgets, initiate savings plans, and make strategic investment decisions. Such financial planning can help families meet near-term obligations and maximize their longer-term well-being and is especially valuable for populations that have traditionally been under-served by our financial system.鈥�

Although the benefits of financial education have been celebrated, there are plenty of individuals who have not been so convinced by its rhetoric. Toni Williams () and Lauren Willis () for example, argued that financial education advocates tend to idealistically envision that having financially-literate citizens is the answer to every socio-economic issue that governments face. Financially literate citizens are assumed to be more knowledgeable in accessing finance, which can simultaneously resolve social issues such as poverty, high household debt, financial instability, and even the growth of nations! The question to be asked here is does it all work? Can providing financial education really assist in financial inclusion efforts and create the financial stability that governments so badly want?

The Case of Malaysia: Financial Education as Nation-building?

In my recent presentation at the (IGDC) at the University of York, I demonstrated empirical evidence that shed some light on these questions. Using a case study of Malaysia, I observed financial education efforts as an extension of what could be viewed as neoliberal inclusion, in which access to financial markets and activities are encouraged in an effort to make citizens more responsible, autonomous, and individualised over their own financial and personal security. In my research, I spoke to 13 high-ranking officials from Malaysia who are directly involved with financial education policymaking, to explore the issues surrounding the development and implementation of Malaysia鈥檚 national financial education strategy (including finance ministers and officials at the national central bank).

In Malaysia鈥檚 case, financial education policymaking has been shaped by explicit influences from transnational policymaking institutions. This includes the OECD鈥檚 International Network on Financial Education (INFE) through their development of practical tools and strategies for financial education and the Alliance of Financial Inclusion, in which Malaysia is a key member and a case study for best practice in using financial education for financial inclusion. It raises the question of whether developing countries are implementing certain types of policies in the pressure to legitimise their membership and diplomacy with transnational institutions; rather than with a meaningful consideration of what their society really needs. Additionally, in Malaysia鈥檚 case, financial education is seen as valuable in the achievement of nation-building goals. This has been identified in the Financial Sector Blueprint (2011-2020), a ten-year strategic document that outlines the means to expand the financial system in line with the goal of turning Malaysia into a developed economy by the year 2020. Through this document, financial education is seen as an important tool that would allow more citizens to become involved in the financial system in a way that would ensure its growth and stability. Furthermore, being financially educated is seen as an important drive for Malaysian citizens to have more economic and employment opportunities as well as to better-manage their money in a way that would ensure their financial security. This is supported by the message given by the former Governor of Malaysia鈥檚 central bank during the launch of Malaysia鈥檚 national financial education strategy:

鈥淔inancial education has never been more important than in today’s environment. Participating effectively in the financial system can improve the economic wellbeing of individuals and businesses. Financial education is therefore key so that members of our society will benefit from the financial system and from the new technologies that are transforming our financial landscape.鈥� (Aziz, 2015b)

The above quote demonstrates the manner in which financially educated citizens are seen as important to the transformation and development of the country鈥檚 financial system. However, the success of the Malaysian case of financial education can be problematized by the absence of evidence聽to support聽any correlation between citizens鈥� participation in the financial system with both households鈥� financial stability and national economic growth. The usage of financial education for financial inclusion to resolve multiple issues (financial market growth and financial stability for nation-building objectives and financial security of citizens) results in a lack of meaningful understanding of what financial education and financial inclusion mean to Malaysia. Critics argue, for example, that the government鈥檚 efforts are a misrecognition of what citizens need, as they do not address the issue that poor financial planning could be due to dynamic changes in the lives of the poor, conditioned by the government鈥檚 decisions such as pension reforms, subsidy reforms, and the introduction of new Goods-and-Services Taxes, and inflation.

Financial Education: Deepening Inequality in Malaysia?

My work in Malaysia sheds light on the disconnect and contradiction between the Malaysian government鈥檚 aims to disseminate financial education and the Malaysian society鈥檚 needs . The idea that providing knowledge alone might empower citizens financially, despite their differences in income levels, is an idealistic optimism that has yet to be supported by evidence. Even a former finance minister of Malaysia noted in an interview with me that democratic access to financial skills without a systematic and equitable income distribution strategy might further deepen the income inequality that is prevalent in a country, along class lines or urban-rural divisions. My interview with Muhammed Abdul Khalid, who wrote the best-selling , further sheds light on the issues faced by developing countries when legitimising policy recommendations by transnational policymaking institutions, some of which are listed above. When financial policies are implemented without localising and addressing a country鈥檚 entrenched socioeconomic issues, the benefits might serve financial markets more than citizens themselves.

References

Abdul Khalid, M. (2015). MPH Publications.

Greenspan, A. (2002). ‘,’ The Futurist聽36(4), 37鈥�41.

Williams, T. (2007). ‘,’听Law & Policy 29(2), 226鈥�256.

Willis, L. E. (2008). ‘,’ Iowa Law Review, 94, 197鈥�285.

Syahirah Abdul Rahman is a PhD student at the Alliance Manchester Business School.聽聽Photo: by Naim Fadil.

This blog post is a part of the blog series聽Inclusive or Exclusive Global Development? Scrutinizing Financial Inclusion,听in which a new perspective on financial inclusion is published every聽聽of February, March and April 2019.