Abstract
Since the late 20th century, the Solidarity breakthrough of the Polish social movement has been a huge political success. Solidarity, as a specific idea, has become not only a social and political power, but also a more profound category of ethical discourse. Therefore, especially in terms of Polish public awareness, solidarity is one of the most popular theoretical notions, which is used in many different social contexts. Divergent political ideologies develop and use the language of solidarity as a tool to create divisions in society. The language of solidarity seems to create additional difficulties because it is used by conservative, neo-liberal and leftist parties. This language does not have its own identity or meaning. Considering the problems involved in the category of solidarity, the authors want to move the debate around this concept onto grounds for discussion about the university and the concept of the commons. Their research is located in the field of the philosophy of education, but they refer their reflections also to some empirical works.
Introduction
In this article, we intend to examine the meaning of academic solidarity. We put forward the following questions: What can one understand by this term, when is it used and what practices are connected with it? We think that academic solidarity is a form of solidarity that is corrupted. From the leftist perspective, and in reference to the concept of the commons, academic solidarity is something that has to be overcome. Instead of solidarity, we propose ‘the commons’ as a better term to show emancipatory practice and develop education which is immune to dark solidarity. 1
The structure of our article is as follows: we start with hope – the hope which we put in solidarity – in reference to the concept of the pedagogy of radical solidarity (Chutorański and Szwabowski, 2016). Next, in a few words, we consider some general problems connected with the concept of solidarity and try to show how we understand this term. We then reconstruct the meaning of the commons related to solidarity and, finally, we discuss such notions with reference to higher education, considering the significance of solidarity in higher education and the possibility of the commons in that field. We use the Polish case for four reasons. First, Poland, at the time of real socialism, was a place where solidarity was powerful; it was a weapon against the state. Solidarity as a practice and value created an alternative society. It was a unique event when something new could be born. Unfortunately – and this is the second reason – Polish solidarity disappeared or transformed into a dark form. The new elites and the new state heralded radical neo-liberal reforms. Poland has become a place where the most extreme neo-liberal ideas are tested (Dunn, 2004; Kowalik, 2009). This restructuring has a negative impact on the alternative society and society in general (Hardy, 2009; Tittenbrun, 2007). The move from solidarity to a neo-liberal regime and dark solidarity is very interesting, and can show a hidden connection between notions of solidarity and dark solidarity. The third reason why we are writing about the Polish example is that Polish universities are unique in the European area and different from American universities (Kwiek, 2010, 2015). Polish universities are similar to the Polish society: they have been transformed from real socialism into an extreme neo-liberal model (Szwabowski, 2014a). Moreover, we can find an analogy between the discourse used during the transformation of the Polish working class and the contemporary discourse used to legitimize the reform of higher education. This reform shows new tensions in academia and the increasing divisions and conflicts in the university. What is more, in the Polish university, we define differently what is ‘normal behaviour’ within academia, and what kind of resistance can be taken against the neo-liberal regime (Szwabowski, 2016a). Our final reason is that we are from Poland. We can see all the time how neo-liberalism is winning and dark solidarity is rising. For us, as critical educators, this is a very serious problem. Normally, we carry out theoretical practice in our own backyard, but sometimes we send letters to the global community to invite discussion.
Solidarity and dark solidarity
Together with Maksymilian Chutorański, we have tried to develop the concept of pedagogy with reference to radical solidarity (Chutorański and Szwabowski, 2016). What encouraged us to do this work was, on the one hand, the problems with Marxist language in Poland and, on the other, some of the reactions to the 2015 International Conference on Critical Education (15–18 June, Wroclaw, Poland), especially from the conservative and liberal sides of the debate (see the comments below the blog post of Śliwerski (2015)). We mean here the old, well-known quasi-critique of Marxism and leftism in general (e.g. communism is evil, against freedom, humanity, nature, etc.). The problem is not only developing or using leftist language or theoretical conceptions, but also the question of the possibility of resistance against the neo-liberal regime and neoconservative politics. From the leftist perspective, people in Poland are in a strange trap – as if someone has deprived us of the possibility of emancipatory speaking. In fact, since the election in 2015, in the Polish Parliament you cannot find any leftist, social-democratic or even social-liberal parties that would have any purchase or impact on democracy, thus making the political system only formally democratic (Cervinkova, 2016). Leftist language is banned in two ways: ideologically, meaning that every leftist theory or term is treated as totalitarian language (Walicki, 2013), and politically, meaning that the law is used to criminalize the left. In Poland, popularizing communism is outlawed (Article 256 KK Criminal Code). In this context, the language of solidarity was supposed to be a medium for leftist thought without raising any negative emotions. These emotions have their roots in historical experiences: the Communist Party’s appropriation of the language of Marxism and use of said language to dominate the working class. The workers’ aversion to the quasi-Marxist language that was used by the Communist Party, to its jargon and discrediting leftist concepts, was manifested in the Solidarity movement by, for example, using religious rhetoric. The workers’ use of this type of rhetoric was not connected with any religious ideology, but it was treated by them as the language of the opposition. Class war was specified in the linguistic register of Christianity (Ash, 1990; Backer and Backer, 2001; Magala, 2012; Sowa, 2015). For example, Stefan Kozicki and Mariusz Ziomecki (1982: 81), describing a scene of singing and praying women, stated that: ‘they do not pray to the cross located behind them … They are praying to the strike’. It may seem that the language of solidarity itself can be a tool for communist pedagogy and its politics. We shared the hope that we saw in solidarity with other left-wing thinkers, who appealed for solidarity to renew socialist politics and stop neo-liberal reforms (Radice and Radice, 1986). However, the matter is not that simple.
First of all, we cannot say that the Solidarity movement made all people equal and abolished all differences. Undoubtedly, it was a valuable experience and a great manifestation of people power, but differences were simply disguised or dismissed. For example, women in the Solidarity movement were officially excluded or pushed off the scene. The Solidarity movement cultivated sexist stereotypes and the national construct of gender (Penn, 2005). In fact, the language of solidarity was based not only on class interest, but also on national interest. The Solidarity movement quickly started to develop traditional, nationalistic language. Simply speaking, solidarity language and practice expressed two tendencies: one which tried to make communism real (e.g. Kuroń and Modzelewski and their famous ‘Open Letter to the Party’ (1966)) and one which treated communism as a hostile ideology directed against the Polish people and Polish tradition (Korkuć, 2011). Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński (2011) shows that, in the Solidarity movement, we can find two different myths that played an important role: the myth of ‘the West’ (the change of communism into capitalism) and the myth of ‘national tradition’ (the renewal of the nation and return to the premodern past). It just shows that there is not only one solidarity language, but many. And they fight to gain hegemony over the massive social movement. As Krzysztof Jasiewicz (1992: 56) commented, the election in Poland after 1989 showed numerous differences, which were hidden ‘under Solidarity’s protective umbrella’. Moreover, not only were those differences sometimes pushed aside, but they also blocked solidarity – for example, the decision made by Lech Wałesa, in agreement with the Catholic Church, after 19 March in 1981 in Bydgoszcz; having been brutally beaten by militia, workers called for a general strike, but Wałesa stopped them (Rainnie and Hardy, 1995: 269).
Observing contemporary Polish social reality, it can be said that the right did not only capture the Solidarity trade union movement (Ost, 2005), but also solidarity as a specific language. In a perverse way, the right-wing parties are doing the same thing with the language of solidarity that the Polish United Workers’ Party did with Marxism. The pertinent question is how conservatives use the language of solidarity. Conservative thought is subject to divisions and unions that are typical to solidarity. It is manifested both in the practices of right-wing parties and in the theoretical concepts. For instance, the right-wing Law and Justice Party uses solidarity language to divide the political scene and the social body in two: the real successors of the Solidarity movement and the post-communists – the children of the former establishment or simply the sympathizers of Stalin. 2
The association Solidarni 2010, whose manifesto makes direct references to the first Solidarity movement, is another example of the trend we are examining. Its founding text calls for the unification of the nation and the rejection of the current political establishment by using the register of morality. The unity is based on Christian morality (or, more precisely, Catholic and patriotic morality). The creators postulate the emergence of a mass movement, uniting people ‘regardless of age, education and economic status’ (Solidarni 2010, n.d.). However, they do create divisions on an ideological basis. In the manifesto, the bad guys are seen as corrupt post-communist elites, but it is also suggested that the bad guys are all those who do not take John Paul II as their patron and are not faithful to the universal values of the national Catholic Church.
The appropriation of solidarity by the right-wing narrative becomes more subtle when we analyse the scientific register. Marcin Król (2014), in the introduction to the book published after the conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, attempts to define the concept of solidarity as follows: firstly, he states that solidarity is not based on any specific interest, but on trust; secondly, he shows solidarity within the national community as a natural force, a unified tradition created from common experiences. Solidarity in this narrative does not play an emancipatory role. It is something that unites the existing structure. It unites a nation in a hierarchical structure based on power and the economy, and diverse and antagonistic classes.
It seems that Król’s concept of having solidarity without any parties of interest, and of having it pure and undisturbed, is unsustainable. Firstly, this concept naturalizes relations – it suggests that the relationship is natural and existed before the political or economic agenda. Secondly, it masks interests associated with the desire to maintain the integrity of a particular social structure. Thirdly, this narration suffers from the atrophy of imagination. In fact, Król is not able to imagine a community other than one that is national. We can say that the conservative concept of solidarity is some kind of mechanical solidarity (Durkheim, 1902).
This repressive and exclusive concept of solidarity is supported by the state and connected with the rise of the national movement in Poland. Solidarity based on traditional national identity not only divides people across borders (e.g. the attitude to refugees), 3 but it also divides the national body itself (e.g. true Poles and not-true Poles). Hana Cervinkova (2016) has commented that, in Poland, we have something like ‘producing homogeneity’. As we have already mentioned, such ‘production of homogeneity’, excluding gender, sexuality, class position and so on as less important issues, was present in the Solidarity movement. This insignificant difference gradually vanished and was replaced by another. Maybe the religious rhetoric was not only religious rhetoric, but more a strategy to create a national body. Maybe solidarity was not a tool for emancipation, but a tool to control social movement.
We know that solidarity is an important value for leftists. We also know that left-wing activists and theoreticians consider solidarity to be a very powerful weapon. However, we assume that, contrary to expectation, solidarity does not open the possibility for agreement across party lines; solidarity is not a place where different ideologies can exist next to each other, to look after and develop the commons. First of all, solidarity is not an independent term or value, but is always connected with something; it is part of a wider concept and, what is more important, solidarity is based on the same interest. Solidarity can be used for different goals. In fact, solidarity can be the language of power – replacing differences, creating dark unity, disciplining and corrupting social movement, blocking emancipatory practice, and so on.
We can say that solidarity is not an autonomous term; solidarity is not good or wrong in itself, but depends on social functions – for example, what community is produced by this term and for what purpose. This creates two problems: first, it makes solidarity too flexible, so it can mean everything to everyone; second, it makes the analogical practice of power in different kinds of solidarity invisible. Solidarity as an empty term, with very emotional investment, can make us blind to the injustice it creates. We think that no one should call for solidarity but nonetheless we should be suspicious of it. We assume that it is not enough to show, for example, the difference between national solidarity and workers’ solidarity. We need to emphasize that workers’ solidarity is not just a better version of solidarity than national solidarity. In fact, we can see a lot of problems with the workers’ concept of solidarity. Workers’ unity also creates divisions related to race, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. Moreover, we should stress one important matter: the negative character of solidarity. Solidarity simultaneously divides and brings the social body together. We stand in solidarity not only with someone, but also against someone and something. The language of solidarity is a language of war, not a language of peace.
In this case, solidarity can be treated as an ideological language. The power of the register – a language of solidarity and its quasi-religious aura – can make us blind. It makes us blind to the real function of the concept of solidarity: solidarity is a tool for unification and nothing more. Maybe all kinds of solidarity can be reduced to the notion of ‘parasitical solidarity’ (Scholz, 2008). Sally J Scholz (2008: 47) defines ‘parasitical solidarity’ as a non-solidarity because people who use it ‘often lack one or more of the key elements or because they are meant to appear as a form of solidarity only for rhetorical purposes’. We have reinterpreted parasitical solidarity here into two moves. First, we do not agree that it is not solidarity because of a ‘lack’, but we stress that the ‘key elements’ are accidental, not necessary and, what is more, modified by context. Second, we agree that parasitical solidarity is used ‘only for rhetorical purposes’, but we do not agree that this rhetoric does not make real social commitment. Following on from these two moves, we can see that solidarity is just a unification, a bond(age) of people.
We also agree with Scholz (2008) that solidarity depends on a wider context and should be analysed that way. If we do this, we can see that the meaning of solidarity depends on the moral values of a particular community which we should be solidary with. For example, the Nazis’ solidarity is different from socialist solidarity because these two kinds of ideology have different goals and values. All of the ‘key elements’ are changed and adjusted to a particular community and their political, social or cultural ends. Returning to our example from Poland, we can see that right-wing parties and national social movements use the rhetoric of being a victim (liberal The European Union, non-Polish capital, feminist and leftist ideologies); they have their own morality and want to change the social and political system. They are very solidary and there is no ‘lack’. That is why we cannot say solidarity is something good per se and we need context. Moreover, this is why we think that solidarity is only a rhetorical tool.
According to what we have stated, we assume that solidarity is not an emancipatory language. It is not a language per se against the neo-liberal regime. Maybe we should forget solidarity and develop another language. Maybe the language of the commons is more productive and avoids the aforementioned problems. As Roggero (2010: 371) stated: ‘In order to build up a new theory and practice of communism, we must learn the new language of the common’.
The commons
In this text, the concept of the commons refers to post-autonomous Marxism. According to Obeng-Odoom (2016), who analysed the historical debate about the commons, we are located in the conventional school, but we use a wider concept of the commons than Obeng-Odoom, who reduced the commons to resources. In our theoretical approach, the commons does not only constitute natural resources like oil, or artificial goods such as ‘parks, gardens, squares, local streets, and public spaces’ (Łapniewska, 2015: 2), but is also involved with language, relationships, knowledge, emotions, and so on (Bollier, 2014; Hardt and Negri, 2009). The commons ‘is not a natural good’ (Roggero, 2010: 361) or an abstract idea of humanity, but rather something that is produced. From our perspective, the commons is developed and cared for by an autonomous, direct-democracy community. It is not what can be governed by the state and the market (Łapniewska, 2015; Means, 2013; Sowa, 2015; Szwabowski, 2014b).
We think that the distinction made by Anton Pannekoek between public ownership and common ownership is crucial: Public ownership is the ownership, i.e. the right of disposal, by a public body representing society, by the government, state power or some other political body. The persons forming this body, the politicians, officials, leaders, secretaries, managers, are the direct masters of the production apparatus; they direct and regulate the process of production; they command the workers. Common ownership is the right of disposal by the workers themselves; the working class itself – taken in the widest sense of all that partake in really productive work, including employees, farmers, scientists – is direct master of the production apparatus, managing, directing, and regulating the process of production which is, indeed, their common work. (Pannekoek, 1947)
Certainly, the distinction between state/market management and common management is not only a question of who commands whom, but, more significantly, a question of relation. In our theoretical field, we assume that the production of the commons is production based on cooperation, horizontal structures, and independence from the state and the market. The market and the state are hierarchical organizations which create enclosures in collaboration, transforming ‘common goods’ into ‘public goods’, and criminalizing some relations and practices (Linebaugh, 2014). A hierarchical organization also means control; the commons grows only in creative freedom. The most productive machine for the commons is just relations within a horizontal structure based on voluntary participation. As a space outside the market and the state, a counter-reality, the commons should be analysed in connection with enclosure and the struggle against it (Bollier and Helfrich, 2012; De Angelis, 2007; Haiven, 2014).
On the basis of our short introduction, we can show the difference between solidarity and the commons. First, Scholz (2008: 18) stresses that ‘solidarity mediates between the community and the individual’. The community is defined as other people. It is a very anthropocentric concept. Solidarity is a commitment made only within the human species. The commons, as a ‘transversal common’, does not privilege humanity but broadens the community: animals and other non-human actors also participate in the production of the commons (Lewis, 2010). Moreover, solidarity as an anthropocentric concept defines the individual as a citizen. The commons is the place where monsters dwell (Lewis, 2010; Lewis and Kahn, 2010). Therefore, solidarity is a necessary connection with the state and the law; the individual of the commons rises in no man’s land, in the space beyond the state and the market and their disciplinary/controlling apparatus.
Another important issue is that solidarity is built on the pre-existing individual and community. It is a transcendent tool to govern relations. The commons, as a horizontal, immanent organization, does not have any pre-existing individual behind it. The production of the commons is the production of the individual and the community at the same time. Therefore, the practice of solidarity is connected with the state and the law. Political change is connected with reformist or revolutionary practice (Scholz, 2008), whereas the commons developed the practice of exodus. Those differences show one more crucial distinction: if the language of solidarity is the language of war, the language of the commons is the language of love. The practice of exodus and the production of the commons are not against the state and the market, but, more precisely, are the practice of creating a space free from the state or the market. The commons is not a negation, but a smoothing positive.
Solidarity in the university
Max Weber (1949) once said that solidarity among professors can be ensured by recognizing the neutrality of science, which should be free from politics, personal ideologies, and so forth. Pure science would be a field of bonding everybody within the framework of rational discussion, where special interests are suspended and the most important thing is getting to the truth, to the solution of the problem (Mucha, 1986). The truth as a value and something that is desired connects the individual with the community and creates the dynamics, the relations in that community. We could say that academic solidarity is free from any repressive nature, and thus truly makes differences unimportant. Gender, sexuality, race and class do not determine being in the university and having a place in the community. If we can find any hierarchy or notion of exclusion, it results from ‘pure science’ and any personal issues do not play a role in it.
Obviously, this vision of science, as well as of the associated teaching, is naive. True knowledge can be treated as a tool of violence (Moroz, 2015). ‘Pure science’ is, in fact, biased; it is reasoning based on the white man’s rationality. According to some post-structuralist theory and critical pedagogy, we can say that science itself is a battlefield. This means that professors are divided not only by ideology and political sympathies, but also by visions of science itself and the criteria of being in the university (Bourdieu, 2001; Foucault, 1981; Melosik, 2009).
‘Pure science’ can be seen as a myth which sustains the hegemony of a particular reason. The institution of the university can be seen as one structured by power. The power works on different levels: from ideology, race, class and gender to microprocesses that work in everyday practice. ‘Pure science’ does not create solidarity in the aforementioned sense of the meaning; in fact, the community is reshaped and bonded by personal interest, and being or not being on the right side of power. Academic injustice works on the interpersonal level: Most academics can recount experiences of being on the wrong end of power. Marginalisation within departments or research teams, unfair allocation of teaching hours and administrative duties, undue pressure to raise external funds and publish in the ‘right’ journals and pilfering of ideas or work are staple academic gripes. But these and many other perceived injustices operate at a complex interpersonal level … exclusion, bullying, exploitation and racial and sexual discrimination are widespread in university departments. (Gillies and Lucey, 2007: 4)
In this context, solidarity is very narrow and exclusive: the solidarity of different cliques. It is hard to find any argument to prove that solidarity has functions other than bringing together some workers against others, constraining disobedient workers and silencing the critique of pathological relations. Kwiek (2015, 2017) commented that young academic workers are more pro-reform than older workers because they hope that reform will make the university a better place. What is more, they see reform as a tool to change power relations in academia. They believe that neo-liberal reform will put an end to the feudal regime in higher education. Unfortunately, neo-liberal reforms do not bring liberation.
Reforms do not dehierarchize the academic community, nor do they bring all academic staff together – they increase the existing differences and create new ones. Furthermore, neo-liberal restructuring transforms solidarity into its darker version. For example, Colleen Kawalilak shows how old professors are evicted from universities. They are treated like someone who is ‘simply too expensive and out-of-date’ (Kawalilak, 2012: 7). The university starts to be an alien place where the academy gets rid of old professors who do not fit in with the new times. These professors feel homeless. A similar narrative appears in Polish higher education. For example, Maria Groenwald (2012) shows that the neo-liberal university is a place where we can no longer dwell. We are excluded, divided and subsumed under administrative duties. What is interesting is that Groenwald is only a PhD holder.
The new reform and the proposals of other reforms made by three research teams promote increasing divisions within the university (Izdebski et al., 2017; Kwiek et al., 2015; Radwan et al., 2017). They opt for ruthless competition and a very distinctive hierarchization of the academic workforce. The market and the state will create relations in the community. In the new regime, competing for prestige begins to resemble competing for survival. As Caffentzis (2010: 30) stresses, within the neo-liberal regime, every group in academia is in conflict. In fact, the neo-liberal regime is destructive with regard to human relations and life more generally (Kruszelnicki, 2012).
The precarization of academic work and the remnants of the feudal regime intensify competition. The meritocratic regime that is – theoretically – renewed by neo-liberal reform in Polish higher education does not bring justice or objectivity into academic life. Kwiek (2015) shows that when competition becomes universal, objective criteria no longer play a crucial role in deciding who belongs to the academic community and who does not. Personal relations once again become the key to being or not being promoted. Solidarity with the authorities starts to be more important for survival in the university than normal, academic work (Kruszelnicki, 2012). In other words: ‘Becoming a successful academic requires one hell of a lot of ass-kissing and up-sucking’ (Nair, 2017).
We can suppose that neo-liberal reforms and power relations in academia provoke resistance and, in this way, a new form of academic solidarity will emerge. The academic community is defined as a community of professors, based on an elitist vision of academic work and a strict division between the academic world and the social world (Szwabowski, 2016a). Solidarity in Polish higher education is limited. Polish academics do not take any mass action against the neo-liberal reform of social life. In fact, some of them have justified the Polish transformation as a necessary return to normality. When academics started writing articles and letters objecting to neo-liberal reform, the former Minister of Science and Higher Education, Barbara Kudrycka, commented: When over the past twenty years the state system has been reformed, free market introduced, the relics of socialism in state companies eliminated, reducing the privileges of steelworkers and railwaymen, academics understood the need for such changes really well. And now they should understand that in academic research similar changes are indispensable. (Kudrycka, 2013)
The university and the commons
First of all, we should say a few words about how we see the university. The concept of the commons shows that private and public spaces are two sides of the same sociopolitical structure. The state, for example, helps the market to increase profits by building infrastructure, passing laws and deploying ideology as a repressive apparatus. Education, as a part of the public sphere, is subsumed under capital. Higher education is also subsumed under capital, and not only within a neo-liberal imaginary. Undoubtedly, neo-liberalism changes the style of production, brings in new management, redefines the goals of institutions and education, and reinvents relations between education and society, the state and the market. Educational reforms are global in the same way as neo-liberalism is global, but neither of them is identical everywhere (on the geographical diversity of the neo-liberal regime, see Federici and Caffentzis (2007) and Harvey (2005)).
This global tendency is shown in the sentence formation of the manifesto of the Edu-factory Collective (2009): “What was once the factory is now the university”. It means, firstly, that universities and higher education in general are beginning to be a productive force; secondly, the structure and organization of work in the production of knowledge is similar to that found in a factory. This transformation changes academic life and work, as well as relations in the university. We think that this similarity is problematic. Marx points out that a factory is not only a place of subordination, but also one of fight. On the one hand, a factory creates an obedient productive body; on the other, a factory provides a community of potential resistance. Factory production develops cooperation, forming the basis of communist cooperation (Marx, 1976, 1993). If we treat the university as a factory, we can assume that similar mechanisms will occur in academia. However, this is problematic. Machines in a factory-university do not produce the same corporate body as a machine factory does (at least in the field of humanities). Academic work is still, rather, a craft: it is individualized work. Conflicts and solidarity in the university seem to take on different dynamics than those associated with machine operation. In other words, academic cooperation is something different from cooperation in a factory.
From the perspective of the commons, the academic community and their production, and the relation to a wider social context, play a similar role in Fordist and post-Fordist regimes. For example, the technological didactics that dominated Fordism achieved the same goals as the humanistic didactics of post-Fordism but in a different way: it made people obedient to power and the existing social structure (Malewski, 2010). Both didactics are hired by the state and the market, and, for this reason, there is no place for the production and care of the commons.
From the perspective of the commons, the university should be treated as a corruption machine. As Negri and Hardt (2009) stated, the corruption of the commons means that someone or something is limiting it – for example, love is corrupted when its power is put into marriage. The university works in the same way: by corrupting the production of knowledge and teaching. Also, as ‘pure science’, the university, with human reason (if it is not the white man’s mind), is immune and it rejects the ‘swarm intelligence’ working within the commons (Lewis, 2010). Some might say that this was typical for the university only in the disciplinary society, and does not occur in the post-disciplinary society. We, however, are doubtful of this.
What happens when production starts to be biopolitical? Analysis shows that the university works as an accumulative machine (Szwabowski, 2014a; Roggero, 2011). It is one of the institutions that encloses the commons (Haiven, 2014). Firstly, in relation to the outside world, the university steals the commons, rural knowledge and ideas (Caffentzis, 2010). Secondly, within academia, the university intensifies the exploitation of academic workers and students (Bousquet, 2008). Alexander Means (2013), analysing the problems of creativity in higher education, shows that, from the commons point of view, the university does not develop or support creativity, but captures and reduces it. In fact, the university is the place where creativity is fitted to capitalism, not to the commons. Educational institutions are used to control knowledge production, limitations and distribution. The work of educational institutions such as the university shows that the commons is corrupted.
In this context, we can ask what we mean when we talk about academic solidarity. We certainly do not mean privileges or solidarity with the authorities – the state, capital or local academic prince. If the commons is based on autonomies, on democratic governance outside the market and the state, and if the commons is something that developed as a result of an exodus from capitalism and a hierarchical society, it makes us the enemy of the existing university. What is more, as Lewis shows, the commons needs a different kind of institution: the pirate learning web (Lewis, 2012) or, more precisely, ‘The Occupy University’ (Lewis, 2013). The educational institution of the commons should be considered as a process of withdrawal from the state and the market, as well as the logic of biocapitalism. Such processes require also the withdrawal from the university and cutting-off of the bonds of academic solidarity. Moreover, the institutions of the commons emerge during an exodus and are created when the world of the commons is developing (De Angelis, 2007).
Conclusions
We have tried to show that solidarity is only a rhetorical tool for unification. We have also argued that solidarity is not an autonomous value, but depends on a wider context and the ethics of a particular community. As a tool, solidarity can be used to different social and political ends. What is more, the emptiness of the concept of solidarity makes it open to darkness. We have shown how solidarity in the university is modified and how it takes on a very dark character. In our opinion, the concept of the commons is more useful and impervious to darkness.
The commons requires not only a change in the rhetoric, but, significantly, also a change in language and practice. For example, universities as private/public institutions do not develop the commons, but rather corrupt it. The language of the commons does not operate within the old terms typical for power relations, such as citizen, public goods, individualism and community, particularity and universality. The old language and rhetoric of solidarity are also, as Lewis (2012) shows, present in critical pedagogy. In critical pedagogy, the opposition to a neo-liberal regime is based on the illusion of the autonomy of the public sphere and school – the university. We assume that the new language of the commons can develop real ‘solidarity’ and help us to create free educational institutions without state and/or market interference. We know that this is only a (somewhat utopian) hope and that, in actuality, theoretical thinking has its own limitations.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.