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Marxism, Pedagogy, and
the General Intellect
Beyond the Knowledge
Economy
Derek R. Ford
With Foreword by
Stefano Harney
Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect
“Radical stupidity and a rejuvenated General Intellect versus capitalism’s knowl-

edge economy: In this landmine of a book, Derek R. Ford convinces us that we
have everything to gain by choosing the former.”
—Glenn Rikowski, Visiting Fellow, College of Social Science, University of
Lincoln, UK
“Ford’s book beautifully cuts into the pedagogical how of knowledge emerging
and returning from noise, how learning, which both the capitalists and the leftist
endorse, makes knowledge emerge from noise to be ‘grasped,’ made transparent,
and actualized. More importantly, in this stupefying yet clear presentation, he
shows how stupidity can work as an alternative pedagogy that gestures toward an
exodus of returning to the noise as it remains and sustains to build a commu-
nist world.”
—Weili Zhao, Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong, China
“Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect provides crucial suggestions for
the design and conceptualization of a ‘new’ public. The creatively and innovatively
surprising argument generatively builds on Marxist theory and practice, and will
be indispensable for adequately approaching the contemporary situation and
redressing the problems generated by the contemporary capitalistic knowledge
economy.”
—Ryom Munsong, Associate Professor of Faculty of Foreign Languages, Korea
University (in Tokyo) and Vice Chief, Research Team on Contemporary Korean
Studies at the Center for Korean Studies
“One would have to be truly stupid to enjoy this book, as it has no value whatso-
ever! Normally, such a comment would be considered the greatest insult, but Ford
has written a book with a surprisingly subversive thesis that demands an equally
surprising endorsement. If the left is to challenge the knowledge economy, it must
recognize the collective power of stupidity as a refusal to instrumentalize, measure,
and thus commodify education in the name of capitalist value production. Drawing
on a wide variety of sources ranging from Karl Marx to Édouard Glissant to Avital
Ronell and others, Ford produces a unique genealogy of stupefying pedagogies
that enables social movements to claim the opacity and incomprehensibility of
stupidity as resistant to the ignorance and arrogance of educators on the right and
the left.”
—Tyson E. Lewis, Professor of Art Education, University of North Texas, USA
Derek R. Ford
Marxism, Pedagogy,
and the General
Intellect
Beyond the Knowledge Economy
Derek R. Ford
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-83833-1 ISBN 978-3-030-83834-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83834-8
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Pattern © Harvey Loake
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever experienced “imposter
syndrome.” Know that the only imposters are those who think they know what
they’re doing.
Foreword: “You must learn!”
“You must learn!” announces KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions.

The lyrics of the song are an injunction to “learn” global black history. But
in the video that both accompanies and revises the song, we see a particu-
lar figure: a bearded black man dressed in robes. He seems to represent the
wisdom and history KRS-One urges his listeners to learn. He stands hold-
ing two tablets reminiscent of the Jewish prophet Moses. But Moses is not
portrayed with African features in either religious or historical texts, and
this wise man wears dreadlocks. According to our “knowledge” of Moses,
this man cannot be Moses. And yet we are familiar with the portrayal of
Moses holding the tablets. With this figure in the video for “You must
learn,” learning has already turned against itself, undermined itself, cast
itself into doubt. It is more than a correction in knowledge. It is a subver-
sion of learning. In short, learning has turned to study, as Derek Ford
would put it in the revelatory pages to follow.
The incitement to acquire knowledge has been disrupted by this figure
who challenges our knowledge. It raises the question of what KRS-One
means by learning. The image cannot but invoke an unsettling of the
knowledge of who Moses is and what is on those tablets. Moreover, the
image of this prophet in dreadlocks also invokes what might be considered
an antagonism to settled knowledge, a different way of knowing, a differ-
ent way of study. Groundings—as it has most famously come to us from
the conversations Walter Rodney recalls with Rastafarians in Jamaica—dis-
rupt and detour this command to learn with an insistent and ongoing
black study.1 Fifteen years ago, when Fred Moten and I first started to
make the distinction between black study and black studies we did not
vii
viii FOREWORD: “YOU MUST LEARN!”
have the benefit of Derek Ford’s work.2 But we did have Lawrence “Kris”
Parker, better known as KRS-One. What both Ford and Parker teach us is
that learning, or in this case black studies, emerges from study, from black
study, and that this is real injunction: to practice study, black study, in the
face of settled, settler, knowledge.
Next, the wise man tosses the tablets into the air. They land as two
records on the turntables operated by D’Nice during the performance in
the video. The presumably written knowledge on the tablet has landed in
the middle of an unruly aesthetic, in the middle of a hip-hop song. It has
been transformed into the genre in art that has perhaps had more to say
about concept of time, and by extension history, than any other contem-
porary art form. Now learning is not only cut and undercut by the orality
of groundings but also by the musicality of hip hop.
No matter the prophets/profits of the hood, as Imani Perry would
rightly remind us, when any knowledge of history moves through music,
its communicability and transparency as knowledge and as history become
attenuated, opaque, and undecidable.3 And other forms of value emerge.
Music then requires a kind of substitute unit of value, a singer, a track, a
concert, a download. But those only temporarily individuate and com-
moditize what has become, as it has always been, collective study. This is
what Fumi Okiji shows us in her wonderful discussion of record collec-
tions in Jazz as Critique. Against the European tradition where knowledge
of music equates to its internal coherence, the jazz record constantly fails
to capture the performance which is the form, Okiji suggests, and by fail-
ing “cackles with … incessantly reforming constellations.” A jazz record
collection “holds within it a multitude of heterophonic choruses” in
black study.4
* * *
So, when KRS-One raps “you must learn” he is hardly advocating the
path to success in what was already becoming known as the knowledge
economy. For Derek Ford, in his bold analysis, it is the knowledge econ-
omy that brings into relief the implicit pedagogy of capitalism. Capitalism’s
pedagogy also commands us to learn. One might even say forces us to
learn by accusing us of ignorance. Learning under capitalism produces
knowledge for sale. And Ford notes that only knowledge that can be sold
is even given the title knowledge. But he reminds us that this knowledge
also produces ignorance, where ignorance is nothing other than the
FOREWORD: “YOU MUST LEARN!” ix
pressures of capitalist accumulation for more. This ignorance can only be

addressed by more learning, and thus more productivity. Ignorance has
too often also accepted as the starting point for Marxist praxis. By accept-
ing ignorance as a starting point, Marxists risked accepting the capitalist
definition of knowledge. Only knowledge that can be put to use for accu-
mulation and growth was worthy of the name. Thus, Ford reminds us
capitalism drew Marxism into a dialectic of ignorance and learning on its
own terrain. In contrast Ford will stress for us the possibility of maintain-
ing an antagonism to learning, and an exodus from the knowledge econ-
omy. Boogie Down Productions starts learning and ends up studying,
using the antagonism of groundings to keep knowledge a step behind, off
the pace and off the beat.
Key to the concept of exodus in Italian workerist and post-workerist
thought is that with the coming of a knowledge economy, to flee capitalist
work is to smuggle out the goods. On the way out of Egypt, exodus
escapes with the social relations that produce value in a knowledge econ-
omy. Fixed capital becomes unfixed in flight. But just as knowledge is
haunted in its unending revision in groundings, the Italian exodus is also
shadowed by another exodus. Except this exodus throws any knowledge
of the way out of Egypt into confusion. Because the way out of Egypt is
through Ethiopia. And it might be the movement of Jah people. But it is
not clear—as in transparent and communicable—how to get there. This
movement trails exodus with fugitivity, leaving it unfinished and unmapped.
Think of Gregory Isaacs singing “if I could reach the border/than I could
step across.” As if he planned to step “out of dis country” and into
“Africa.” But then he continues “I’m leaving out of Babylon/leaving
out/I’m leaving out to roam/leaving out to roam.” His plan defines the
knowledge of direction and geography. It’s a fugitive plan.
Hiding study where they will not look for it and practicing study where
it can flourish emerge as Derek Ford’s real concern. Here the fugitive
requirement to hide in plain sight or close quarters emerges. And the
knowledge economy in turn reveals itself as nothing more than racial capi-
talism’s latest innovation in seeking, sorting, and managing, and where
necessary destroying, or trying to destroy, what it cannot capture. Gerard
Hanlon in his book The Dark Side of Management uncovers a precursor
text of the field of management studies, written in 1915.5 In this text,
called The Job, the Man, the Boss, the authors Blackford and Newcomb
identify nine physical variables of the human’s capacity to labor in the
body, among them skin color, texture, and proportion. From these
x FOREWORD: “YOU MUST LEARN!”
variables the authors claimed, a boss can find the right role for every
worker. As Hanlon tells us not much has changed in human resource man-
agement, though managers no longer seek to examine palms and skulls as
Blackford and Newcomb would have ideally liked to do with each worker.
In the knowledge economy, the variables become more thoroughly men-
tal than physical, though the mental bears the social history of the physi-
cal. New variables emerge, such as ignorance and stupidity. Ford tells us
whereas ignorance as a variable is easily slotted into the new division of
labor in the knowledge economy, stupidity now sits at the bottom of the
capacity list, redundant and unemployable.
Stupere in Latin meant to be amazed, confounded, struck dumb not
perhaps by superior knowledge but by something superior to knowledge.
But the stupid do not just sit together in wonder, confounded. They con-
found. They hide their knowledge in records and turntables, in ground-
ings and study. The philosophy is not in the music. The music is the
philosophy as Okiji teaches us, contra Theodor Adorno.
Or as Derek Ford sums it up perfectly: “there is always the noise from
which knowledge emerges and to which it returns.”
Vancouver, BC, Canada Stefano Harney
Notes
1. Walter Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers (New York: Verso, 2019). See
also Devyn Springer and Derek Ford, “Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary
Praxis: An Interview with Devyn Springer.” Liberation School, August 12,
2021, https://liberationschool.org/walter-rodneys-revolutionary-praxis-
devyn-springer-interview/
2. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Debt and Study,” E-Flux 14, March
(2010). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61305/debt-
and-study/
3. Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
4. Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited
(Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2018), 94.
5. Gerard Hanlon, The Dark Side of Management: A Secret History of
Management Theory (New York: Routledge, 2016), 36.
Acknowledgments
While this book is short, it’s been a long time in the making. It wouldn’t
have been possible without the knowledge and wonder of friends, col-
leagues, and comrades, most notably Collin Chambers, Masaya Sasaki,
Summer Pappachen, Tyson Lewis, Glenn Rikowski, Curry Malott, as well
as Nirmala Erevelles and Beth Ferri (who taught me about disability the-
ory) and Jodi Dean (who read an early draft of the last chapter). Most
importantly, Sarah Pfohl continues to teach me about disability and always,
gently, forces me to unlearn and question my own habits, judgments, val-
ues, and general way of being in the world. I’m also remarkably apprecia-
tive of those I haven’t met personally but who have provided elements of
what follows, including Stefano Harney, who graciously—and surprisingly
quickly—agreed to write the book’s preface.
My departmental colleagues at DePauw University—Rebecca
Alexander, Caitlin Howlett, Jodi Lach, and Sahar Sattarzadeh—provided
immense yet opaque support for the book, and the Larry and Lesley
Stimpert Endowed Fund for Student-Faculty Research provided explicit
monetary support for the research. I’d also like to acknowledge the anon-
ymous peer reviewers for providing critical and supportive feedback, espe-
cially insofar as it helped the form of the book collide better with its
content. Finally, thanks to Amy Invernizzi and her team at Palgrave for
giving me feedback and facilitating the entire process. Ez kept me moti-
vated as I sloughed through the book.
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Finally, while my name is on the book, the concepts, ideas, arguments,

and stupor in it aren’t “mine” but were produced by the convergence
between the international movement of working and oppressed people
and the specific group of that movement whose concrete labor power
takes the form of teaching and research.
Contents
1 Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge Economy 1
2 The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics 19
3 The General Intellect and the Struggle over the

Knowledge Economy 37
4 The Educational Consensus: You Must Learn! 55
5 A Pedagogical Exodus: Stupidity 75
6 The General Line of the General Intellect 93
Bibliography105
Index113
xiii
About the Author
Derek R. Ford received his PhD in Cultural Foundations of Education

from Syracuse University in 2015 and works as Assistant Professor of
Education Studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches
around the nexus of pedagogy and politics. He’s published four mono-
graphs—the latest of which are Inhuman Educations: Jean- François
Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought (2021) and Pedagogy and Politics in the “Post-
Truth” Era: Insurgent Philosophy and Praxis (2019)—and edited or co-
edited five books—the latest of which are Keywords in Radical Philosophy
and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019) and
Learning with Lenin: Selected Works on Education and Revolution (2019).
Ford helps run three book series, including Radical Politics and Education,
which is co-edited with Tyson E. Lewis. Additionally, he’s associate editor
of Postdigital Science and Education, assistant editor of the Journal for
Critical Education Policy Studies, chair of the education department at The
Hampton Institute, and editor of LiberationSchool.org.
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge

Economy
Abstract Over the last several decades, knowledge has emerged as the
undisputed key to unlocking worldly potential. Clarifying why the author
chooses the designator “knowledge economy,” this chapter introduces
some distinct and antagonistic conceptions of the knowledge economy
and the political orientations and prescriptions that precede and follow
from them. It sketches the history of the knowledge economy and its
internal relation to post-Fordism before providing several examples of why
and how the quest for more knowledge is oppressive, linking the drive
particularly with colonialism and ableism. After, it examines the alleged
liberatory potential of the knowledge economy by visiting the Italian
marxist tradition, the latter of which happened to emerge at the same time
as the former. Finally, the introduction gives a brief gloss at the chapters
to come.
Keywords Knowledge economy • Exploitation • Ableism •

Colonialism • Higher education • Knowledge commons • Post-Fordism
• Knowledge drive
Over the last several decades, knowledge has emerged as the undisputed
key to unlocking worldly potential. There is a widespread consensus across
the political spectrum that whatever the future holds—and whatever we
want the future to hold—knowledge will be vital to getting there.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
D. R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83834-8_1
2 D. R. FORD
Knowledge is the solution to any problem we face. As such, many of the

most pressing struggles today center directly on knowledge, from student
debt and the working conditions, pay, and status of teachers, graduate
students, and adjunct professors and the privatization of public education,
to the reliability of media sources, trade wars, surveillance and data collec-
tion, struggles over copyrights and intellectual property, and the appro-
priation and colonization of oppressed knowledges.
Despite what some critics say, as far as I know no one has ever claimed
that an economy has ever existed without knowledge. The claim is rather
that the role and status of knowledge—including the conditions and
results of its production, distribution, and utilization—have increasingly
taken on a determinant function in economic, social, and political devel-
opment. Whatever one’s take on the knowledge economy, it’s clear that
we are no longer living in an era of industrial capitalism.
There are a variety of prefixes for the contemporary conditions of pro-
duction, each of which have their own emphases, concerns, and presup-
positions: digital, information, attention, neuro, cloud, platform, creative,
and so on. There are two main lines of demarcation entailed by what’s
attached to the prefixes. The first is whether they’re followed by economy
or society, with the former referring to economic production narrowly and
the latter referring to all aspects of life. The second is whether they’re fol-
lowed by a specific mode of production like capitalism or socialism (and
whether these are used to affirm or contest that mode).
Not only are there differences and debates between these designations,
but just because two theories use the same terminology doesn’t mean
there aren’t crucial differences or contradictions between them or that
they share the same origins, lineage, status, or goals. The first chapters of
the book survey these distinct and antagonistic approaches. Through this
survey, we can see that despite their significant political divergences,
they’re unified by the proposition that knowledge and its various manifes-
tations—from data and information to forms of communication and the
role of affect—have assumed a leading role in productivity and develop-
ment, a role that’s radically, perhaps even irreversibly, altered our world.
This alteration is tied up with other concepts like post-Fordism, the new
economy, and so on, all of which entail new organizations and concep-
tions of knowledge. This is similar to the way Christian Marazzi approaches
the “new economy” and post-Fordism: by acknowledging that the distinc-
tion isn’t hard and fast, but that the new economy is one aspect of the
overall post-Fordist organization of life.1 It’s the same with the
1 INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY 3
“knowledge economy,” which isn’t separable from post-Fordism (or neo-

liberalism, or capitalism), but allows me to focus specifically on the peda-
gogical and political transformations and coordinates of our
contemporary moment.
One of my aims in this book is to survey (in an introductory fashion)
these distinct conceptions of the knowledge economy and the political
orientations and prescriptions that precede and follow from them. The
primary distinction I’m interested in is that between capitalist and marxist
(or marxist-adjacent) theories of the knowledge economy.2 Both see the
primary struggles of today—with their problems and possibilities—as con-
testations over knowledge. The World Bank Institute (WBI), for example,
declares that they “must think strategically about how to be most effective
as one player in a large universe of knowledge-based institutions and part-
ners—about how to leverage its comparative advantage.”3 The Edu-
Factory Collective, with a different focus, agrees with the WBI that “the
quality and production of this knowledge itself becomes a strategic field of
struggle.”4 At the most general level, the capitalists want to win this strug-
gle in order to reconcile the changed status of knowledge with the current
mode of production. The marxists want to win this struggle because they
recognize the centrality of knowledge as an expression either of an imma-
nent alternative world emerging in the present one—“the unquenchable
appearance of the future in the present”—or at least as containing new
possibilities for resistance and revolution, ones we can harness to inaugu-
rate a new way of organizing our world: of relating to each other, our-
selves, and the world.5 The struggle for both sides is over knowledge and
the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption.
Why the “Knowledge Economy”?

While this Introduction or book don’t provide a complete literature review
of the rise of the knowledge economy (which other scholars have already
done), it is useful at this point to identify some origins.6 The knowledge
economy or knowledge-based economy gained prominence in the 1990s,
although it “was first coined in the late 1960s by [Peter] Drucker … to
refer to the application of knowledge from any field or source, new or old,
to spur economic development.”7 Since the 1970s, a proliferation of theo-
ries and proposals have emanated about the post-Industrial era. Yet there
isn’t a real consensus over what exactly the knowledge economy is, let
alone the extent to which it’s real, imaginary, performative, anticipatory,
4 D. R. FORD
or something else altogether. The basic assumption of the knowledge

economy, however, is that innovation and knowledge-based commodities
are crucial to individual, national, and global growth and survival in con-
temporary capitalism. As a result, to build a knowledge economy, we need
to produce a learning or knowledge society, “in which increasing lifelong
learning enables further innovation and more knowledge-intensive prod-
ucts.”8 In other words, the knowledge economy forefronts the role of
pedagogy in society today, one that is far from limited to the school or
university walls.
Bob Jessop, for example, examines Daniel Bell’s claims in The Coming
Post-industrial Society, namely that (1) knowledge and not capital would
be the driver of production, (2) intellectual technology and planning for
the public good would replace industrial technologies organized around
profit, and (3) the university will take the place of industry as the orga-
nizer of society. Jessop argues that knowledge economy policies, prescrip-
tions, and theories are constitutive and performative rather than a reflection
of a reality. In practice, the knowledge economy “is much closer to a sub-
ordination of information, knowledge, and learning to the demands of the
expanded reproduction of the globalizing knowledge economy than it is
to Bell’s expectation that we would see the widening and deepening of a
democratic knowledge society.”9 In short, for Jessop the knowledge econ-
omy is an “economic imaginary.” While every economic mode is based on
knowledge, not all are named knowledge economies. In essence, “the
totality of economic activities is so unstructured and complex that it can-
not be an object of calculation, management, governance, or guidance.
Instead, such practices are always oriented to subsets of economic rela-
tions.”10 Its imaginary status, however, doesn’t mean it isn’t real or that it
doesn’t structure our lives. On the contrary, it does so to such an extent
that many write about the knowledge economy without ever defining it.
The choice to frame the book around the knowledge economy, which
is one designator among other competing ones, is neither arbitrary nor
totally purposeful. In what follows, I’ll discuss neurocapitalism, knowl-
edge capitalism, cognitive and digital capitalism, as well as digital social-
ism, biopolitical and immaterial production, knowledge socialism, and
more. Yet I refer to the knowledge economy not only because it’s popular
parlance, but also because knowledge remains central to these other
descriptors; more than central, its changed status now radically determines
so many areas of our lives and ways of being in the world. Whether it is real
or not, a new development or not, the fact is that it is discursively
hegemonic, that it structures and guides not only international policies

but our daily lives. Whatever the case, the fact that it’s discursively hege-
monic necessitates a critical inquiry. As we’ll see in the pages that follow,
whatever one terms it and whatever one thinks of it, education and peda-
gogy are absolutely central to our present and future. Indeed, politicians,
policy makers, lending institutions, supranational organizations, activists,
and community groups of all stripes are campaigners for education. No
one today is against education, and I’ve never seen or heard anyone argue
we should limit access to education.
I also locate the knowledge economy as one aspect of a broader frame-
work for understanding recent transformations around knowledge: post-
Fordism. I do so first because, as we’ll see, knowledge is absolutely pivotal
to post-Fordism (and to the shift away from Fordism). I do so second
because the right, center, and left use post-Fordism to designate the over-
arching emerging mode of production. This is a change within capitalism,
one that leftist researchers and organizers assert represents a potential
transitional stage into another ordering of life and labor.
One Initial Hypothesis of the University

in the Knowledge Economy
Critiques of the academy and knowledge production predate the termi-

nology and domination of the knowledge economy or knowledge society.
Perhaps the most famous—and misunderstood—text to do so is Jean-
François Lyotard’s, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
published in French in 1979 and translated in English in 1984. It’s often
understood as an anticipatory and philosophical text, although in the
introduction Lyotard is clear that it “is an occasional one … a report on
knowledge in the most highly developed societies.”11 It was prepared for
and funded by the Quebec government. At the same time, Lyotard
acknowledges its limitations: that it was written by a philosopher rather
than an expert. The expert “knows what he knows and what he does not
know” and “concludes,” while the philosopher “does not” and only
“questions.” He tries to “combine them … with the result that neither
quite succeeds.”12 Further, the book is a hypothesis that must “not be
accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in rela-
tion to the question raised.”13
6 D. R. FORD
In strategic response to the question of the status of knowledge,

Lyotard proffers that the status of knowledge is undergoing a crisis of
legitimation that may result in the fact that it “will be produced in order
to be sold” and “will be consumed in order to be valorized in new produc-
tion: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end
in itself, it loses its ‘use-value.’”14 The university is de-linked from the state
and traditional conceptions of society. A new principle emerges in “which
society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are
rich in information and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational
‘transparency,’ which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of
knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and
‘noise.’”15 Divorced from modernist principles, the goal of the university
“becomes the optimal contribution … to the best performativity of the
social system,” which means that it’s “designed to tackle world competi-
tion” and to “supply the social system with the skills fulfilling society’s
own needs” so that the institution is “called upon to create skills, and no
longer ideals.”16
Lyotard writes that the university’s disciplinary boundaries are out-
dated and that knowledge “is and will be served ‘à la carte.’”17 The book
is not only strategic, then, but suggests that the university’s mission is
strategic as well, structured in response to capital and the performativity of
the system, or the optimal input-output relation. “The question (overt or
implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institu-
tions of higher education,” he says, “is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What
use is it?’”—questions “equivalent to ‘Is it saleable?’” and “Is it effi-
cient?”18 The university contributes to exchange and the system through
interdisciplinarity and teamwork (which produces imagination and new
knowledge most efficiently) and by providing “job training and continu-
ing education.”19
Today the university increasingly serves the needs of the capitalist
knowledge society. And as knowledge becomes central to production,
politics, and life, some see a shift in the locus of struggle from the work-
place to the academy. The Edu-Factory Collective, for example, about
30 years after Lyotard’s book was penned, proposed that “As once was the
factory, so now is the university,” a bold proclamation that “is therefore an
indication of a political problem.” The crises of the university (and educa-
tional institutions more generally) is a double crisis: “On the one hand,
this involves an acceleration of the crisis specific to the university, the inevi-
table result of its outdated disciplinary divisions and eroded
epistemological status,” while “on the other hand, it is the crisis of post-
fordist conditions of labor and value, many of which are circuited through
the university.”20 The university, however, isn’t a factory and the struggles
of the latter haven’t merely progressed into the former. Instead, the provo-
cation is to move the site of struggle away from the factory and to educa-
tional institutions, informal and formal. Yet as Alexander Means shows, it
isn’t unique to the university, and also applies to secondary and, I suggest,
primary educational institutions.21
The university and education broadly are now seen as primary sites of
battle and contestation in the conflict for and over knowledge and life.
This is especially true as access to and participation in the university have
expanded immensely, such that we can speak now of a “mass university” as
opposed to an elite university.22 If we include lifelong learning programs,
vocational training degrees, and other forms of adult and continuing edu-
cation, this transformation is even more apparent. These, in turn, show
that the university is no longer the privileged site of education. This all
signals that the problems of the knowledge economy are educational
problems that demand educational solutions. What’s interesting, as we’ll
see later on, is that it is primarily the capitalist knowledge economy advo-
cates that pay the most explicit attention to educational practices and
forms. Where the marxists knowledge economy advocates address educa-
tion, they tend to leave it relatively unexamined and untheorized.
From Educational Analysis to Pedagogical Forms

While providing a point of entry into knowledge economy discourse is
one of the main aims of this book, this ultimately serves as the ground-
work for me to draw out and question the underlying and often unas-
sumed pedagogical assumptions that exist across the antagonistic
conceptions of the knowledge economy. Stated otherwise, the point here
is not to rehearse this literature but to lay the groundwork for my primary
goal, which is to demonstrate that, despite their clear and important dif-
ferences, both the capitalist and marxist approaches to the knowledge
economy share a trouble and as-yet unremarked consensus, one that is
educational in nature. As such, I’m interested in showing what educa-
tional theory can offer to our understanding of the contemporary knowl-
edge economy and, more importantly, to political projects that seek to
move beyond capitalism. This necessitates demonstrating how education
isn’t just a component of the knowledge economy but its fundamental
8 D. R. FORD
motor. Capitalism and alternative social, political, and economic orders are
ultimately pedagogical. This means that I’ll be touching on educational
institutions but that I don’t see educational institutions as uniquely or
even exemplary sites where pedagogy plays out. As should hopefully be
abundantly clear after the first few chapters, pedagogy—and particularly
learning, the dominate and dominating pedagogy of the capitalist knowl-
edge economy—is no longer confined to the walls of educational institu-
tions—if indeed it ever was.
What I’m not interested in doing is providing yet another catastroph-
izing critique of the “erosion” of the public sphere or public education, or
common sense and decency, or democracy and deliberation, or teachers as
public agents and intellectuals. In fact, I see these as symptomatic of the
problem I’m trying to address.23 Not a day goes by without another blog
post or book by a “public intellectual” telling us we’re doomed before
briefly gesturing to generic sources of hope at the end. There will be no
doomsday calls of authoritarianism in the pages that follow. This is partly
because authoritarianism is an empty and meaningless descriptor that
applies to any political grouping one doesn’t like—as Friedrich Engels said,
“a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act
whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by
means of rifles, bayonets and cannon—authoritarian means, if such there
be at all.”24 It’s also because I don’t think authoritarianism is the fault line
on which we’re operating. Indeed, the idea that authoritarianism in the
USA emerged with Trump is generously laughable but much more seri-
ously ahistorical (as if the Nazis didn’t get their blueprint for fascism from
the US Jim Crow apartheid regime).
While these characterize so much of what counts as educational schol-
arship, none of it actually gets at what is educational about any of this. In
other words, education is merely equated with dialogue, deliberation,
democracy, and “progressive” values; it’s a vocation or calling of teachers
and professors, the responsibility of students and the community. In what
ways are these educational rather than merely social or political? To be
sure, some of this research provides valuable resources for thinking and
organizing, but it isn’t really educational. At best, they’re political, socio-
logical, or cultural critiques of educational structures and sites.
In other words, I shift from education to pedagogy and educational
theory. This is what enables me to draw out how all sides of the political
spectrum are united in their belief in learning and the production of
knowledge. While my interest in this book is partisan—in that I explicitly
side with the marxists or the Left (without necessarily identifying
wholesale with any one theorist or theory)—this is motivated by my aim

to show how both view knowledge as a raw material, means of production,
product, and subject that is created, distributed, and consumed in a cease-
less demand to produce, to actualize, and to realize. But to put it simply,
both sides agree that knowledge is good, and that the more we know the
better we are. As a result, we must learn, and we must never stop learning.
The Grasping Drive: The Exploitative and Oppressive

Logic of the Knowledge Economy
The undergirding pedagogy of the capitalist knowledge economy—one
that is either implicitly endorsed or even uncritically celebrated by many of
its opponents—is that the opaque must be rendered transparent, the
unknown must be made known, the mute must speak, and the unintelli-
gible must be made intelligible; in short, what is only potential must be
actualized. To briefly indicate some of the problems with this pedagogy,
let me turn to a few examples.
The first comes from research into autism. The overall argument of
Anne McGuire’s book, War on Autism, is to show how autism came to be
a thing that threatens and terrorizes normative life and, as such, must be
eliminated. This is why mainstream autism advocacy organizations don’t
advocate for but against autism. While tracing the various ways autism
came into being as a signifier and organizer of life—separating normal
from abnormal—McGuire highlights the move from locating it as a prob-
lem with the mother to the problem of the individual and finally to the
problem of the individual’s brain. Especially with the ascendency of neu-
roscience, there’s been “a prodigious and multifaceted biomedical (gold)
rush to find its origin story.” This has yielded more questions than answers.
Yet for McGuire, this itself is the unacknowledged lesson. “The lack of
conclusive answers coming out of the field of genetics,” she says, “is almost
never taken up as a provocation to think more deeply about the inherent
uncertainties of the human body, our own and the bodies of others.”25
This, in turn, diffuses surveillance and the pedagogy of the knowledge
society. Since we don’t know the origins of autism, “all bodies are under-
stood as potentially disordered.”26 Autism is some “thing” attached to
some “one” that deforms that “one.” This is why autistic self-advocates
generally refer to themselves as autistic people rather than people with
autism, because autism is not some extraneous thing attached to them.
10 D. R. FORD
The absence of certainty combined with the demand for certainty works
to normalize and legalize violence against and even the murder of autis-
tic people.
Or consider the oppression and exclusion of disabled people in and out
of schools, especially those labeled as “intellectually disabled.” As Ashley
Taylor importantly reminds us, this is precisely a label rather than an onto-
logical status, one that is produced and thus changes over time. For exam-
ple, those with the label are excluded from citizenship and are more
“regularly subjected to epistemic disempowerment.”27 To address this, she
says, entails “deeply transformative measures” such as “including breaking
down institutional and academic barriers that segregate individuals with
intellectual disabilities, developing broader understanding among scholars
of intellectual disability as a construct, and integrating ethical standards
for researcher practices in various fields that are informed by individuals
with intellectual disabilities.”28 It also must involve a redefinition of epis-
temic agency, the final steps of which are the ability to produce and share
knowledge; to realize that which was formerly ineffable. This is not to
argue against the need to liberate those with such a label but to change
the terms and goals of such liberation.
Within the classroom, we see how today even the bodies of students are
transformed into metrics that render their inherent uncertainty knowable.
Biometric measurement is the latest iteration of such commodification.
Kenneth Saltman writes about a few of these projects. In one funded by
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “students wear biometric brace-
lets (Q Sensors) that run an electric current across the skin to measure
changes in electrical charges.” Another project uses “facial recognition
algorithms [to] measure the students’ facial expressions with webcams,
analyze facial movement, and generate feedback reports to teachers.”29
These projects are the latest step in the codification trajectory, the most
linear and explicit way that the embodied is commodified into data and
information. These technologies, tellingly, originate not in the educational
realm but the business sector, where sensors measure responses to adver-
tisements and products, to calculate worker productivity, and to generally
dominate and exert command over workers.
We can appreciate how this pedagogy reinforces colonial relations and
sheds light on how such a pedagogy is predicated on the grasping drive.30
In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant positions colonialism as a literal
and figurative process of grasping. Although he only mentions grasping a
few times in the book, toward the end he offers a definition that makes the
connection explicit. “The verb to grasp,” he writes, “contains the move-

ment of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to them-
selves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation.”31 The subject is one
who not only has the right but the requirement to reach out and bring the
world into themselves and their understanding. Colonialism was moti-
vated by ideological and material interests, yet just as important was a
desire to grasp “the world.” Expeditions were carried out in a fashion that
would make today’s advocates of interdisciplinarity proud.
Accompanied by cartographers, artists, historians, and scientists—not
to mention arms—European colonists set out to bring the “new” world
into the “old,” the unknown into the known. In Learning to Divide the
World, John Willinsky writes of James Cook’s South Pacific travel in
1768–80, whose ships were “a Noah’s ark of the preserved and dead,
bringing home to England the Pacific’s contribution to nature’s order.”32
Cook’s undertaking represented a focus on the presentational form of the
new knowledge gained, and specifically the role of the arts in conveying
not just the findings, but the sense of wonder and access, the idea that the
world was a place of differences out there, open, waiting to be grasped.
Once grasped, the new and different of the world must be brought back
to the homeland and, in the interests of educating and further civilizing
the populace, taught. From museums and public gardens to encyclopedias
and magazines, Europe began to know itself as the center of the knowing
world. More important than the particular content was the idea that the
world could be detailed, cataloged, classified, organized, and appropri-
ated, in short, grasped. “The imperial quest,” Willinsky says, was ulti-
mately “an expression of the will to know that was directed at the
construction of identity and difference.”33
For Glissant, grasping is internalized in the colonies through recourse
to filiation, which traces meaning and identity back to roots. The problem
is that this rests on the notion that these can and should be grasped, which
is to say, known and realized. This is not to say that such realization is pos-
sible. Even though they are never fully known or revealed, any and all
uncertainty is a structural deficit of the subject, which is why the process is
endless. Opacity is nothing but an obstacle to transparency, and the epis-
temological mission of colonialism is overcome precisely this obstacle. “If
we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the per-
spective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement
for transparency.”34
12 D. R. FORD
Dylan Robinson, similarly, shows how Canadian ethnographers in the

twentieth century articulated the grasping of Indigenous music through a
system “consistent with the Western system of zoology aimed at captur-
ing, ‘preserving,’ and categorizing specimens.”35 The colonialist nature of
the grasping pedagogy is evidenced today through the accepted academic
research practice of coding. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang move us beyond
the mechanical definitions of coding in the neoliberal development dis-
course, writing that coding is a way “to manage, to arrange in an order
that is meaningful to the coder.”36 Coding is an objectifying process,
wherein living, breathing interactions and lives are transformed into
objects, which are viewed as objective, thereby mystifying the colonizing
subjective meanings that produce not just the code, but the very grasping
drive that makes coding intelligible and desirable. Tuck and Yang link cod-
ing with settler-colonialism, so we might understand coding as a form of
settling life into objects. The grasping drive is the educational foundation
of the colonial apparatus that wages a war on opacity by positioning it as a
potential that must be realized, as a finding that must be identified through
coding so it can enter into the knowledge economy. By eclipsing the
ongoing history of colonial power relations, the grasping drive occludes
the intractably political nature of knowledge itself.
The Liberatory Potentials

of the Knowledge Economy?
While there is no shortage of critiques of capitalism today, I focus almost

exclusively on those emerging from the Italian marxist tradition (includ-
ing the workerist, post-workerist, or autonomist movements). Not coinci-
dentally, this tradition emerged in the 1960s–70s during the transition
from Fordism to post-Fordism, and as such, the theorists working within
it were among the first to identify the tendency toward this transformation
and later to theorize on this basis. Two key thinkers credited with found-
ing this tradition are Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri who, alongside
others founded the Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) journal in 1961 and
who both later broke away from the journal to found Classe Operaia
(Working Class) in 1963. In the pages of these journals and the accompa-
nying struggles in the streets, factories and, for Tronti, the Communist
Party, is where the earliest formulations arose. Tronti and Negri, although
in divergent ways, captured the proletarian viewpoint on the coming

transition.
During the 1950s and 1960s there was a renewal of spontaneous and
militant strikes that were outside the confines of the Party or the trade
union, both of which had for the last decades functioned to mediate the
worker-owner antagonism. As a result, the struggles were organized
around “the unilateral demand for the immediate satisfaction of workers’
needs outside of any rationale that would see these needs as predicated
upon the buoyancy of the economy” or “a general increase in production
and profitability.”37 This was the material and political foundation for a
new class science, an inversion of marxist thought that rediscovered in
Marx the primacy of labor over capital. Tronti argued that labor preceded
capital, historically and today. Capital can only ever react to workers, as the
latter drive its innovations. As Tronti formulated it early on, the collective
working class “clearly forces, on the opposite side, the class of capitalists to
catch up, with a kind of class-based social organization that tries to directly
replicate--without ever, in the entire arc of capitalist development, suc-
ceeding--certain social forms of the collective worker.”38 This is where the
autonomy thesis emerges: capital needs labor but labor doesn’t need
capital.
At first, the formulation of the “social factory” prevailed, but this was
inadequate as it implied that the logics and operations of the factory
extended to all of society. Work instead had become social, and Negri
theorized the subject of Fordist production as the mass worker and the
subject of the emerging post-Fordist order as the socialized worker. In
1986, from exile in Paris, Negri noted the centrality of communication to
all of production, writing that only by accepting this can we “thereby
understand why socialized work (both that of the factory and socialized
work in the true sense) tends to be concentrated on intellectual labour,”
while “manual labour tends to become intellectual labor.”39 We can no
longer define exploitation strictly by the surplus value accrued during pro-
duction. Instead, because “the only raw material we know of which is
suitable for an intellectual and inventive labour force—is science, commu-
nication and the communication of knowledge” exploitation is the expro-
priation of communication. Capital has to, Negri continues, “expropriate
the community and superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of
managing knowledge.”40
To be sure, the reason I focus on this tradition is not only because it was
the first to identify the transformed role of knowledge in production or
14 D. R. FORD
because many of its theorists and activists continue to accurately describe

it, but because it does so from an oppositional class viewpoint. As a result,
this tradition “opens on the new forms of knowledge and communication
not merely as instruments of capitalist domination, but also as potential
resources for working class struggle.”41 This, however, brings me to the
third purpose of this book, which is to reveal that these resources need to
include new pedagogies. To get there, however, I first have to uncover the
present pedagogical assumptions that undergird the more contemporary
versions of these theories and show how they ultimately reinforce capital-
ism. In fact, as we’ll see, the marxists justify their theories and struggles by
insisting that the liberation of knowledge from capital and state capture
will outproduce the knowledge of the capitalist knowledge economy. This
follows from its primary organizing thesis which privileges labor and its
productivity over capital.
In the fifth chapter, I turn to the (Italian) marxist strategy of exodus,
which mobilizes the indeterminacy of the general intellect to create liber-
ate spaces and new, non-exploitative, and non-oppressive ways of being in
the world. To resist the aforementioned capture, however, exodus has to
entail that which can’t be captured: stupidity. Stupidity is different from
ignorance (which can be cured by learning), idiocy (which is about indi-
vidual private learning), and from arrogance (which is a refusal to learn).
Stupidity is an inability to produce: it’s an anti-value; something that can’t
be valorized.
Stupidity represents more than an insurrection against capital; it’s a
form of resistance against the oppressions that it relies on and perpetuates.
Consider, for example, how central disability is in the matrices of oppres-
sion. As Anna Stubblefield shows in the context of the early 1900s’ USA,
“the concept of feeblemindedness came to operate as an umbrella concept
that linked ‘off-white’ ethnicity, poverty, and gendered conceptions of a
lack of moral character together, and that feeblemindedness thus under-
stood functioned as the signifier of tainted whiteness.”42 Nirmala Erevelles
even contends that disability is “the ideological linchpin utilized to (re)
constitute social difference along the axes of race, gender, and sexuality in
dialectical relationship to the economic/social relations produced within
the historical context of transnational capitalism.”43 Indeed, the disabled
and groups oppressed based on their proximity to the disabled subject are
segregated and excluded precisely based on their “deficiencies” that pre-
vent them from full inclusion in capitalist productivity and state citizen-
ship. Even imperialism and its attendant racial oppression are buttressed
by the threat of stupidity. The “lead panic” in 2007 about “toxic” toys
imported from China was based in part, as Mel Y. Chen shows, on how
“lead-induced IQ loss not only threatens the promise of success in an
information economy, but also involves subtle racial movement away from
whiteness.”44 Capital recognizes the threat of stupidity, and it’s time the
left recognizes it, too.
The call at the end, then, is to collectively embrace and follow our stu-
pidity, which always runs ahead of us. What I advance is not an uncritical
celebration of stupidity and a rejection of knowledge or knowledge pro-
duction. Indeed, such a celebration runs the risk of ignoring the material
and economic struggles for survival of workers and oppressed people.45
Yet if it’s collectivized and weaponized, stupidity can be a necessary hetero-
geneous, complementary, and dialectical pedagogical logic that remains
opaque, mute, and secret, and that, as such, can’t be absorbed within the
circuits of the capitalist knowledge economy.
Notes
1. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the
War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008).
2. I don’t capitalize marxist because, as Marx himself insisted, the theories he
wrote weren’t “his” but those of the international struggle of workers and
oppressed.
3. The World Bank, The State of World Bank Knowledge Services: Knowledge
for Development (The World Bank, 2011), 10–11.
4. Paolo Do, “No Future.” Ephemera 8, no. 3 (2008): 310.
5. Nick Witheford, “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society.”
Capital & Class 18, no. 1 (1994): 110.
6. In addition to those cited throughout this book, see, for example, Michael
A. Peters and A.C. (Tina) Besley, Building Knowledge Cultures: Education
and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2006); Michael D. Kennedy, Globalizing Knowledge
Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2014); Peter Suber, Knowledge Unbound:
Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2016); Shiri M. Breznitz, The Fountain of Knowledge: The Role of
Universities in Economic Development (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2014); and Gert. J.J. Biesta, Learning Democracy in School and Society:
Education, Lifelong Learning, and the Politics of Citizenship (Boston: Brill
| Sense, 2011).
16 D. R. FORD
7. David Guile, The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy

(Amsterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010), 2.
8. D.W. Livingston and David Guile, “General Introduction,” in The
Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning: A Critical Reader, ed.
D.W. Livingston and David Guile, pp. xv–xxi (Rotterdam: Brill-Sense,
2012), xv.
9. Bob Jessop, “A Cultural Political Economy of Competitiveness,” in The
Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning: A Critical Reader, ed.
D.W. Livingston and David Guile, pp. 57–83 (Rotterdam: Brill-Sense,
2012), 58.
10. Ibid., 60.
11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxv.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 7.
14. Ibid., 4–5.
15. Ibid., 5, emphasis added.
16. Ibid., 48.
17. Ibid., 49.
18. Ibid., 51.
19. Ibid., 49.
20. Edu-Factory Collective, “The Double Crisis: Living on the Borders,”
EduFactory WebJournal, zero issue (2010), 4–5.
21. Alexander Means, “Creativity and the Biopolitical Commons in Secondary
and Higher Education.” Policy Futures in Education 11, no. 1
(2013): 47–58.
22. Do, “No Future,” 308.
23. For a more in-depth critique of what I term “zombie intellectualism,” see
Derek R. Ford, Politics and Pedagogy in the “Post-Truth” Era: Insurgent
Philosophy and Praxis (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), intro and ch. 6; and
Derek R. Ford and Petar Jandrić, “The Public Intellectual is Dead—Long
Live the Public Intellectual! The Postdigital Rebirth of Public Pedagogy.”
Critical Questions in Education 10, no. 2 (2019): 92–106.
24. Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” trans. Robert C. Tucker. In The Marx-
Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, pp. 730–733 (New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 733.
25. Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative
Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 51, 53.
26. Ibid., 54.
27. Ashley Taylor, “Knowledge Citizens? Intellectual Disability and the

Production of Social Meanings Within Educational Research.” Harvard
Educational Review 88, no. 1 (2018): 2.
28. Ibid., 20.
29. Kenneth J. Saltman, Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies,
and the Undoing of Public Education (New York, NY: Routledge,
2017), 55, 56.
30. See Derek R. Ford, “Errant Learning in Foams: Glissant, Sloterdijk, and
the Foam of Pedagogy.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 39, no. 3
(2020): 245–256.
31. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191–192.
32. John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 38.
33. Ibid., 51.
34. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189–190.
35. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Studies
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 149.
36. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of
Refusal in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 6.
(2014): 812.
37. Alberto Toscano, “Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the
Subject of Antagonism,” Cosmos and History 5, no. 1 (2009): 80.
38. Mario Tronti, The Weapon of Organization: Mario Tronti’s Political
Revolution in Marxism, ed. and trans. Andrew Anastasi (Brooklyn and
Philadelphia: Common Notions, 2020), 84.
39. Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First
Century, trans. James Newell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 58.
40. Ibid., 116.
41. Witheford, “Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society:” 86.
42. Anna Stubblefield, “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive
Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization,” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (2007): 162.
43. Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a
Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6.
44. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 181.
45. This is Erevelles’ critique of the post-structuralist disability theories that
uncritically embrace all disability, not recognizing how the disability forced
on victims of war is different from that of the autistic subject, for instance.
CHAPTER 2
The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics
Abstract This chapter surveys the dominant landscape of the knowledge

economy today, from right to left, via the center. Each recognizes the
increasingly central role of knowledge in the production and reproduction
of economic value, social relations, and life. Because they’re taking differ-
ent class viewpoints, however, they tell contrasting narratives, utilize dif-
ferent frameworks, and, clearly, have different goals in mind. Whereas the
right wants to understand knowledge production in order to more effec-
tively harness or exploit it for capitalist accumulation, those critical of the
hegemonic capitalist takes on the knowledge economy identify and probe
at its limitations and restrictions, in which they locate new possibilities for
resistance and resources for a movement beyond the accumulation of capi-
tal. They do so by diagnosing the new forms of exploitation and oppres-
sion in the knowledge economy and the attendant potentialities for
resistance and transformation that lie within.
Keywords Hardt and Negri • Andy Merrifield • Knowledge capitalism

• Knowledge socialism • Private property • Commons • Ownership •
Expropriation • Resistance
This chapter surveys the dominant landscape of the knowledge economy

today, from right to left, via the center. As they inquire into the coordi-
nates of the contemporary mode of production, they each recognize the
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
D. R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83834-8_2
20 D. R. FORD
increasingly central role of knowledge in the production and reproduction

of economic value, social relations, and life. Because they’re taking differ-
ent class viewpoints, however, they tell contrasting narratives, utilize dif-
ferent frameworks, and, clearly, have different goals in mind. Whereas the
right wants to understand knowledge production in order to more effec-
tively harness or exploit it for capitalist accumulation, those critical of the
hegemonic capitalist takes on the knowledge economy identify and probe
at its limitations and restrictions, in which they locate new possibilities for
resistance and resources for a movement beyond the accumulation of capi-
tal. They do so by diagnosing the new forms of exploitation and oppres-
sion in the knowledge economy and the attendant potentialities for
resistance and transformation that lie within.
From the Right

In 1996, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) published three landmark studies about the knowledge economy
(or the knowledge-based economy). Three years later, The World Bank
Institute (WBI) even started to position itself as a knowledge bank instead
of a lending bank, as they recognized that “knowledge, not capital, is the
key to sustained economic growth and improvements in human well-
being.”1 States across the world began developing special ministries, cabi-
nets, and commissions dedicated to the study, development, and
implementation of knowledge policies, many of which were either con-
cerned with education or worked in tandem with existing educational
bodies. For international development agencies and almost all of these
states, the question was—and is—how to respond to the now undeniable
changes in knowledge production and distribution. The international
bodies do so by calling on different theories and studies, primarily from
the twentieth century, including those of economists from the Austrian
School like Friedrich von Hayek and Fritz Malchup, management theo-
rists like Peter Drucker, sociologists like Daniel Bell, and communications
and technology scholars like Alain Touraine.
There are no claims that knowledge is a new concern for economics,
politics, or society. What necessitates the designation “knowledge econ-
omy” is the increasingly determinant role that knowledge plays in eco-
nomic production and, relatedly, the speed, rate, and ease at which
knowledge changes—or “develops”—at which it congeals through inno-
vation and diffuses throughout society to spur on new innovation. If in the
2 THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AND ITS CRITICS 21
industrial economy land, labor, and capital were the primary economic
categories, in the knowledge economy these categories still hold but are
less important than—and redefined by—knowledge. As the OECD defines
it broadly in a foundational report from 1996, a knowledge economy is
one that is “directly based on the production, distribution and use of
knowledge and information.”2 The WBI similarly defines it as “one in
which knowledge assets are deliberately accorded more importance than
capital and labor assets, and where the quantity and sophistication of the
knowledge pervading economic and society activities reaches very high
levels.”3 Entrance into and growth within the knowledge economy
depends less on the available quantity of natural resources and labor power
than on developments in knowledge-related industries.
The contents of this definition have changed over time and vary by
institution, which gives a first glimpse at the opacity of knowledge in gen-
eral. The OECD uses over 200 variables to generate a Science, Technology
and Industry Scoreboard for its member nations every year. The WBI
analyzes a wide range of countries (around 140) with their Knowledge
Assessment Methodology (KAM), which produces a basic scorecard and a
Knowledge Economy Index (KEI). The methodology takes a wide view of
the knowledge economy, which is organized around four pillars that
“include an educated and skilled labor force, a dense and modern informa-
tion infrastructure, an effective innovation system, and an institutional
regime that offers incentives for the efficient creation, dissemination, and
use of existing knowledge.”4 The extent to which a country invests in each
of these, relative to their level of development and population size, is the
extent to which they’re part of or preparing for integration into the knowl-
edge economy. The KAM Basic Scorecards, available at the WBI website,
provide a snapshot of what these pillars entail. They include average annual
GDP growth and the Human Development Index rating, the barriers to
trade and regulation and the “rule of law,” adult literacy rates and enroll-
ment in education, the number of workers in Research and Development,
the number of patent applications granted by the US Patent and Trademark
Office, the number of “scientific and technical” journal articles published,
and the quantity and extent of telephone, computer, and internet avail-
ability and utilization. The Knowledge Economy Index, a normalized
score between 0 and 10, is a calculated average of three of the four pillars
(it excludes institutional and economic arrangements).
Their analysis shows a positive correlation between KEI and economic
development: “higher KEI values are associated with higher rates of future
22 D. R. FORD
economic growth, if other factors are held constant,” which “suggests that
higher levels of knowledge in a society do indeed lead to higher levels of
economic growth—and consequently to higher levels of economic devel-
opment.”5 Much of what follows from the analysis is standard fare for the
WBI and the international forces of capital it represents. While there is the
requisite lip-service paid to cultural, geographic, and historical particulari-
ties, this is more rhetorical than substantial. They’re not so much rejecting
the cookie-cutter approach as they are granting a bit of flexibility to the
cookie cutter, allowing it to be bent a few small degrees here and there.
Actually, it might be better to say that they’re sticking with the cookie cut-
ter but granting that countries can add a few sprinkles as their circum-
stances require that they produce new recipes for knowledge growth.
What really matters across the board, though, are decreased government
regulations (which are paradoxically facilitated by the state), the availabil-
ity of venture capital to entrepreneurs and small to medium businesses,
(they still really like microfinancing, too), reduced trade barriers, invest-
ments in infrastructure, establishing networks between universities, gov-
ernment, and the private sector to facilitate R&D, and investment in a
decentralized (watch out for those regulations!) education system com-
prising primary, secondary, tertiary, vocational, and lifelong learning. By
showing interactions over time and between nation-states, the KEI index
allows the WBI to determine the right mixture of policies and investments.
These international development agencies are talking to policy wonks,
ruling-class leaders, and institutional bureaucrats. While they bear particu-
lar force in who gets loans and under what conditions, for these ideas to
really take hold, they need to find popular expression. Enter Richard
Florida, a neoliberal urbanist whose theory of the “creative class” circu-
lates as widely in academic literature and national and local policy propos-
als as it does in TED Talks, op-eds, and popular books. Florida shows how
the same thread that the World Bank connects between knowledge, eco-
nomic development, and human evolution would unravel if it weren’t
woven through cities. The relation between cities and creativity is so old
and evident, he says, that we only need to mention a few large (and
Western, and capitalist) cities like Paris and New York. But something
today is different: creativity is now “the principle driving force in the
growth and development of cities, regions, and nations.”6 We can’t think
about the knowledge economy without thinking about place, about the
spatial arrangement of people, culture, and production, about who lives
where and why. The city is “the central organizing unit of the new
knowledge-based economy.”7
Florida was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1957, a city he describes as
bustling, diverse, and dynamic. His father was an upwardly mobile factory
worker who started on the floor and ended up as a plant manager, a testa-
ment to the American Dream. This all changed in the late 1960s, by which
time he was living in the suburbs. The 1967 race riots brought social ques-
tions of racism and segregation to the fore, while the deindustrialization
beginning spotlighted the question of technology. His later academic
studies all tried to get a better understanding of these dynamics he was
living through, as he turned to economics, organization, and geographic
studies. He was especially enamored when a Honda plant opened in Ohio,
which took the Japanese model of Toyotism to the USA, a model that
“channeled workers’ natural energy through the use of kaizen techniques,
suggestion systems, worker involvement in quality circles, team-based
work, rotation, and supplier involvement.”8 He could see the differences
between the Japanese post-Fordist model and the Fordist model he saw
visiting his father’s factory as a kid.
There was something about the openness and cooperation that was
exciting, which spurred additional research that would culminate in a few
hot books on the creative class and cities. The creative class comprises two
different strata. First there’s the “super-creative” class, a core of cultural
workers like artists, writers, dancers, and designers, and more traditional
knowledge workers like scientists, engineers, researchers, and professors.
These form a super-creative core because they “produce new forms or
designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful—such as designing
a product that can be widely made, sold, and used, coming up with a theo-
rem or strategy that can be applied in many cases, or composing music
that can be performed again and again.”9 The other strata are those who
work in industries like tech, finance, law, and health care, all of which
require knowledge and creativity in more case-specific settings, applying
or combining the forms produced by the super-creative core. He estimates
that this class encompasses around one third of all workers (although it’s
not demonstrated that all workers in these sectors engage in work we
might identify as creative).
The creative class is, crucially, spatial, as innovation results from the
clustering together of creative types in geographically specific places in
temporally specific durations. Florida’s come up with metrics and indices
like the Talent Index, the Bohemian Index, and even the Gay Index, to
24 D. R. FORD
quantify the numbers engaged in this work, trace their movements, and
identify clustering. He’s used these to show “empirically that artistic and
cultural creativity acts alongside the high-tech industry and business and
finance to power economic growth.”10 To rise in the knowledge economy,
the primary question that cities, regions, and nations must grapple with is
how to attract these creative types.
It all boils down to an easy recipe: what he labels the three Ts: technol-
ogy, talent, and tolerance. Cities need robust technology, which is the
bedrock of economic growth, and the talent, or the creative human capi-
tal, to develop and deploy such technology to spur on innovation. These
two Ts are the concrete manifestations of knowledge in fixed capital and
labor power, respectively. Because technology and talent aren’t as fixed in
place as, say, coal or copper, cities need to attract them, which is where the
third T comes in. His analysis and others show a strong correlation
between social tolerance and economic innovation. When people feel free
“to be themselves and to validate their distinct identities,” cities can
“mobilize and attract the creative energy that bubbles up naturally from all
walks of life” and “gain an economic advantage in both harnessing the
creative capabilities of a broader range of their own people and in captur-
ing a disproportionate share of the flow.”11 The knowledge economy isn’t
just economic, it’s social and political, too. Lowering tariffs and taxes isn’t
the way to prosper anymore.
Florida’s been profoundly influential in discourse and in practice. His
Creative Class Group, an international consultancy firm, has been enlisted
by corporations like Google and BMW, local governments like Seattle and
Brisbane, and media groups like The Economist and Financial Times, to
name just a few. His metrics and theories have impacted everyday life in
workplaces, schools, and cities across the world. He’s still minor league
compared to the World Bank because, well, they’re a bank, and so their
recommendations are tied to the availability and price of capital and loans,
a fact that makes them more than recommendations but, obviously, less
than pure dictates.
It’s important to note as well that, especially after the “Great Recession”
of 2007–2008 (out of which we haven’t yet emerged), the OECD turned
to learning and knowledge again as the saviors of the day. As Alexander
J. Means puts it, the recommendations still reflect “a widely held belief
that human-capital education contains almost magical economic proper-
ties.”12 This education isn’t just about explicit or codified knowledge but
tacit knowledge as well. In 2017, the OECD launched a study of “social
and emotional skills” of 10- and 15-year-olds across different countries

and cities, with 3000 students of each age in each location. This particular
report was written after they launched the study, which occurred between
2018 and 2019. The measurements include student self-assessments and
assessments by parents and teachers organized around a 5 point Likert
scale.13
The OECD regrets not pursuing such an endeavor sooner, given the
ever-changing contours of the knowledge economy. “In an increasingly
fast-changing and diverse world,” they say, “the role of social and emo-
tional skills is becoming more important. A faster pace of living and a shift
to urban environments means people need to engage with new ways of
thinking and working and new people.”14 They define these skills as those
that enable one to “regulate one’s thoughts, emotions and behaviour” in
response to our “fast-changing and diverse world,” “the dismantling of
traditional social networks,” and “a shift to urban environments.”15These
destabilizing and concentrating forces result in one needing to deal with
the emotions that arise as a result. Utilizing the “Big Five Model,” these
skills include “openness to experience (open-mindedness),” “conscien-
tiousness (task performance),” “emotional stability (emotional regula-
tion),” “extraversion (engaging with others),” and “agreeableness
(collaboration).”16 Further, they “influence many important life out-
comes” as well as “the development and use of cognitive skills.”17 They
supposedly increase grades and employment opportunities and success:
“In fact, social and emotional skills can be equally, and in some cases even
more important, than cognitive skills in determining future employ-
ment.”18 Yet they’re also important during periods of unemployment and
when people are looking for work. In other words, they’re about adapting
the individual to the capitalist knowledge economy. The problem, they
say, is that there’s a lack of measurement protocols, which they’re setting
out to correct.
Via the Center

Taken as a whole these analyses and policies have done a good deal to
influence not only local and state policies, but more importantly our very
conceptions of what knowledge is, what purpose it has, and how it oper-
ates, and they’ve done so in ways that are at the general service of capital.
On the other hand, the commanding role of knowledge poses a number
of problems for capital and, therefore, a number of possibilities for
26 D. R. FORD
resistance; namely that knowledge in non-rivalrous, non-exclusive, and

doesn’t operate according to the logic of scarcity. For one, knowledge
doesn’t always or readily take the form of a commodity over which one
can claim private ownership. It’s easier to claim a plot of land, a building,
a set of machines, or a batch of raw materials than it is to claim knowledge.
As a result, the status of knowledge as a public or private good is hard to
ascribe. Knowledge doesn’t obey the same laws of scarcity or rivalry as
physical commodities. One person’s knowledge doesn’t eliminate the pos-
sibility of another person’s knowledge. When one person utilizes knowl-
edge it’s not as if the knowledge is diminished or inaccessible to another.
Because it’s hard to draw boundaries around knowledge and designate it
as a commodity, it’s also difficult to exclude people from accessing
knowledge.
This is particularly true given the widespread use of digital technologies
which, as we’ve seen, the OECD and WBI factor into their scorecards.
They also factor in literacy and schooling as well as the openness for trade,
which implies that excluding people from the means of accessing and par-
ticipating in knowledge production will limit productivity in knowledge-
based industries and the economy overall. At the same time, too much
openness will, so the thinking goes, eliminate the incentives for innovation
and encourage “free riding,” which is why patents and trademarks are
important factors in economic development. Overall, the international
development recommendations are focused on balancing these different
requirements. Knowledge’s intangibility, immateriality, and openness
can’t be restricted, encircled, patented, or closed. What knowledge pro-
duction brings to the fore is a future reality that exists in the present: our
ability to live and work in a radically different way.
In his latest book, The Knowledge Economy, Brazilian professor, philos-
opher, activist, and one-time Minister of Strategic Affairs for the Workers’
Party in Brazil, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to mine the contem-
porary manifestations and limits of the knowledge economy with an eye to
the future. Knowledge work is a new form and practice of production, and
knowledge workers are the vanguard that can lead us into a new mode of
production, a new future to fulfill our economic and moral aspirations.
The knowledge economy here is, at first blush, “the accumulation of capi-
tal, technology, technology-relevant capabilities, and science in the con-
duct of productive activity,” an endless cycle of “permanent innovation in
procedures and methods as well as in products and technologies.”19
There’s an intimate link between what and how people produce;
innovation doesn’t remain a goal of the production process but constantly

restructures it. For these reasons, the knowledge economy is the cure for
economic stagnation. Under the industrial economy, technological inno-
vation was episodic, spurring on growth until it reached a new limit, a new
normal, at which point decreasing returns would set in. The situation
could be different under a genuine knowledge economy, as innovation
isn’t applied intermittently to industry but is continuously generated from
within it. Each new idea or innovation rearranges work itself, serving as
the basis for the next new idea and innovation.
This formulation cuts a bit broader than Florida’s, as knowledge work
isn’t confined to particular industries but exists across all of them. At the
same time, it’s deeper than Florida’s, because within sectors and compa-
nies, the people actually engaged in the genuinely creative work of pro-
ducing knowledge are few and far in between. Knowledge workers are
currently an insular vanguard confined to the top echelons, those who
create and then delegate, and who keep the capital to themselves and their
shareholders. This insularity itself is a limit to productivity, because it pre-
vents the creativity of the masses from factoring as inputs into production.
The task before us, then, is to diffuse the characteristics of the knowledge
economy throughout all of society. This requires changing the ways we
think, learn, and relate to each other, as well as the economic, juridical,
and institutional structures of society.
Unfortunately, there’s no simple formula to latch onto, no sexy acro-
nyms to mobilize, no universalizable indices to deploy. This isn’t for a lack
of trying, but because of the very nature of the knowledge economy: per-
petual innovation negates the possibility of easy solutions. To create an
inclusive vanguard, the openness, experimentalism, fluidity, and flexibility
that characterize knowledge production have to serve as general organiz-
ing principles of society, informing education, culture, and law. The prom-
ising qualities of the knowledge economy are, at the same time, the biggest
hurdles. There are two main reasons. The first is that, whereas the indus-
trial economy could spread easily because it was a one-size-fits-all blue-
print, “a stock of readily transportable machines and procedures” the
knowledge economy “thrives on the disruption of routine and repetition
and introduces innovation into the daily habits and arrangements of pro-
duction.”20 Relatedly, the second reason is that, whereas the industrial
economy required—or better, demanded—minimum participation from
the masses, the knowledge economy demands just the opposite. It’s a mat-
ter of high and deep levels of education, for sure, but also “a heightening
28 D. R. FORD
of the level of trust and discretion required of all who share in the work …
the enhancement of our cooperative practices.”21
While this definitely justifies the project as revolutionary, it’s not revo-
lutionary in the sense that one system is overthrown by another because,
again, this would violate the very principles of what makes knowledge
work unique. There’s no blueprint for knowledge work, and no blueprint
for a radical transition into an inclusive knowledge economy. “No regime,”
he cautions, “forms an indivisible system, constituted on a take-it-or-
leave-it basis … Fragmentary, piecemeal, and discontinuous change is not
only compatible with the transformation of such structures; it is close to
being the only way in which they change.”22 It’s not a struggle between
public and private ownership, centralized and decentralized institutions,
or dictatorship and democracy. Instead, it’s a struggle over what forms to
deploy and when. The capitalist system held sacrosanct by the neoliberals
definitely won’t do. For the knowledge economy to take hold necessitates
“the overcoming of economically dependent wage labor as the predomi-
nant form of free work and in a diversification of forms of decentralized
access to the resources and opportunities of production.”23 This is a quite
different recipe for growth than the OECD and WBI. It’s more than social
democracy, which keeps wage labor but mitigates the worst aspects of it
through supply-side redistributive programs, but less than communism,
which eliminates wage labor and private property altogether. It’s likely to
be more about diversifying forms of production, exchange, and distribu-
tion, the ratios of which will themselves be the product of the knowledge
economy.
Marxists also focus on the limits and possibilities of the capitalist knowl-
edge economy, but here the primary problem turns on the private owner-
ship and enclosure of knowledge and the goal is an elimination of both.
The knowledge economy may represent a vanguard mode of production,
but knowledge work itself—and those who engage in it—are already dis-
persed throughout society. The obstacles to face are the ways this work
remains exploited and marginalized.
For Andy Merrifield, the principal struggle in the knowledge economy
is between the professionals and the amateurs, and he approaches marxism
as a kind of insurrection of amateur knowledge production. Merrifield sees
the struggle over knowledge as one between professionals—experts, think
tanks, city planners, state bureaucrats, international development agen-
cies, and so on—and amateurs, the rest of us everyday folks with every
knowledge, with amateur knowledge. He highlights, in particular, one of
Marx’s polemics against a leading bourgeois scientist in Capital, Nassau

W. Senior, who the Manchester industrialists brought from Oxford
University to help make their case against limiting the working day.
Although he “never used the term ‘professional knowledge,’” Merrifield
says, “that’s what he was identifying: knowledge produced by a profes-
sional representative, channeled through the authority of a rich, powerful,
internationally renowned institution.”24 Marx, for his part, was an amateur
in many ways, one without any credentials to legitimate his work in politi-
cal economy. Combined with the fact that he was vigorously critiquing the
most prominent and well-respected political economists of his day—and
those they cited—he often went to great lengths to prove his worth. But
what Merrifield recognizes in Marx is an amateur intellectual who coura-
geously takes on professional knowledge.
His main beef with professional knowledge professionals—like Florida,
who he brilliantly and devastatingly critiques in The Amateur—is the class
interests they represent and the class power they yield and uphold. On the
one hand, under the regime of professionals, “facts are secondary when
conclusions can be mobilised by powerful people to justify their own ends,
through their own means;” On the other hand, facts such as data are pre-
sented as “value neutral, without prejudice, beyond ideology.”25 No mat-
ter how big Big Data is, it can never tell the whole story, and the parts of
the story it can tell are politically distorted.
To get the real picture, we have to paint it ourselves, opposing the
pseudo-expertise of the professional class with critical, amateur intellectu-
als, those that don’t need or want approval or credentials or, if they have
credentials, don’t flaunt them for publicity and fame. It means opening up
knowledge production to all, enabling everyone to participate in—and
therefore change—the knowledge economy. The professional knowledge
regime discredits amateur knowledge and disables participation in knowl-
edge production as “it crushes imaginative flair, ignores the pure joy of
not knowing what you’re doing, of zigzagging and fumbling around a
subject until you master it. That’s the real route to expertise,” he says, “it’s
a process that lasts a lifetime, not a product you buy from a training
course.”26
This requires more than access to knowledge in databanks; it necessi-
tates the actual (whether physical or virtual) coming together of differ-
ences. The urban is the paradigmatic example, and the reason he so often
takes aim at Florida is because of how Florida tries to privatize the city.
Against Florida he holds up amateur urbanist Jane Jacobs who “marveled
30 D. R. FORD
at the ‘organized complexity’ of disorder, the hurly-burly that made peo-

ple want to come to the city and linger.”27 Like knowledge, the urban is a
fundamental contradiction under capitalism. It’s not only where extreme
wealth sits right next to extreme poverty, but also where some of the most
powerful social movements emerge. The urban is where people assert their
right to participate in the knowledge economy, where they debate and
struggle with each other over ideas, plans, tactics, and strategies.
To the Left
The urban is also a privileged site for marxist theorists Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, as it takes the place the factory occupied in the working-
class struggles of industrial capitalism. Yet the urban is just a physical man-
ifestation of a broader concept they (among others) have helped popularize
on the left: the commons. There are three forms of the common. First,
there is the common as it has been thought in modern political economy,
those supposedly natural things such as the air, the water, and the land.
Second, the common “is also and more significantly those results of social
production that are necessary for social interaction and further produc-
tion, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so
forth.”28 Third, the common is not only the results of social production
but also their basis and process. Communication is a sharp example: “we
can communicate only on the basis of languages, symbols, ideas, and rela-
tionships we share in common, and in turn the results of our communica-
tion are new common languages, symbols, ideas, and relationships.”29
Knowledge production relies on common knowledge to cooperatively
produce new knowledge.
The common is linked with biopolitical production, a term that weak-
ens capital’s restriction on what counts as knowledge and encompasses
immaterial and affective labor more generally. Immaterial labor is both the
“informational and cultural content of the commodity,” which corre-
sponds to informational and the cultural content of labor and production.
As such, it engages “a series of activities that are not normally recognized
as ‘work’—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and
fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms,
and, more strategically, public opinion.”30 Affective labor is that which
“produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, sat-
isfaction, excitement, or passion.”31 There are, of course, no hard and fast
boundaries between the two, as producing feeling involves information

and knowledge just as much as producing knowledge involves affects.
That biopolitical labor is hegemonic means that it has transformed
other aspects of work and life. In the same way that the industrial economy
reconfigured agricultural production through the invention of mecha-
nized equipment, changing peasants into wage workers, and so on, the
biopolitical economy exerts its hegemony on industrial and agricultural
production. Previous production regimes have demanded intellect and
affect, but under biopolitical hegemony these are increasingly determinant
attributes of productivity. Thus, in agricultural production, researching,
manipulating and, most importantly, owning the genetic information of
plants and animals, for example, becomes decisive for creating new value
(which is one example of the knowledge of Indigenous and formerly colo-
nized peoples being mobilized for capital accumulation through enclosure
and extraction). To refer to a new era of biopolitical, immaterial, or cogni-
tive production thus doesn’t imply a flattening of differences or an equal-
ity between different kinds of work. Clearly there still exists a violent
hierarchy within labor and between labor and capital. Noting how knowl-
edge production is reconfiguring previous forms of labor, however, identi-
fies a tendency we can use to anticipate future potential developments.
Capital’s ability to control the knowledge economy is, according to this
view, weakened. “Within economic production,” they write, “knowledge
is no longer merely a means to the creation of value (in the commodity
form), but rather the production of knowledge is itself value creation.” As
a result, “capital is in fact confronted with a paradoxical situation: the
more it is forced to pursue valorization through knowledge production,
the more that knowledge escapes its control.”32 The collective, non-
rivalrous, easily duplicated, and immaterial nature of knowledge—as well
as the collaboration and openness required for knowledge production—
make it unwieldy for capital.
This difficulty is the same obstacle that the OECD and WBI try to
grapple with when they acknowledge the intangibility of knowledge. The
capitalist can claim the products of industrial production easily, but their
claims on the commons are more difficult. Moreover, through its coopera-
tion and interaction, common labor produces the common. Capitalism is
therefore more and more external to the production process, and it
exploits the common by enclosing and capturing it. One way this happens
is through dispossession, whereby things held in common and public are
privatized by capital. There’s a new example of this almost every day,
32 D. R. FORD
whether it be Nestle taking water from Michigan’s Great Lakes to sell, or

US troops “liberating” oil fields in Libya, Iraq, or Syria for the benefit of
ConocoPhillips or BP.33 This form of enclosure, which corresponds with
the common as natural resources, has long been fundamental to capital-
ism, from the Atlantic slave trade to the genocide of First Nations people.
The unique form of enclosure under biopolitical production, which
corresponds with the common as social production, entails the expropria-
tion of social life itself. Algorithms provide one striking example, as they
ultimately “capture value produced by the knowledge and intelligence of
users by tracking and consolidating the decisions and links they make.”34
In general, the capture and trade of data is the enclosure of all manner of
social relations in the most literal sense: who we’re connected to, how
we’re connected to them, what words and links we share in common, if,
when, and how often we talk or message each other, and so on. Our labor
producing the common serves as the foundation for capital, providing not
only the value that capital captures but also the networks through which
its command circulates.
The contemporary knowledge economy is driven precisely by this latter
form of enclosure. The neoliberals are clear about this. The WBI, for
example, notes that in the knowledge economy, “knowledge becomes the
basis of a ‘rent’ (income over and above normal profit) that replaces the
rents derived earlier from resources and cheap labor.”35 Knowledge, cre-
ativity, and innovation are valued insofar as they generate rents for capital.
Hardt and Negri show how unjust and alienating this reality is. Our capac-
ity to connect with individuals, to think, to imagine, to feel, are taken from
us to line the pockets of CEOs and shareholders. Perhaps more impor-
tantly, they show how capitalist exploitation actually hinders productivity.
When knowledge and information are enclosed and held in private, others
are prevented from accessing them to create and innovate. What Franco
Berardi defines as “semiocapitalism” is precisely “the capture of the gen-
eral intellect, and the submission of knowledge to the rationale of the
profit economy.”36 The task for marxists in the knowledge economy is to
encourage the production of the common and defend its appropriation
from capital.
The commodification (and thus privatization) of information and
research is one of the primary obstacles to unleashing the full potential of
the common. They redefine research and knowledge production in the
service of capital accumulation, or, in the words of the development
agencies, in the numbers of citations and patents they produce. There are,
accordingly, a whole new series of metrics and measurements to monitor
“impact factors.” These have real material consequences that constrain the
educational subject and reinforce our subordination to capital. The priva-
tization of this research represents big bucks for corporations. In 2018,
Elsevier, the world’s largest academic published, raked in around $1.2 bil-
lion USD in profits and declared around $3.3 billion USD in overall rev-
enues, and this was in spite of growing boycott movements and protests
by universities across the west.37
That academics and researchers, paid by their state, private, or hybrid
institutions produce this research that is then transferred to and enclosed
by for-profit publishers who then sell access back to the university has not
gone unnoticed, and not only by the usual suspects. In 2008, Harvard
University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences started requiring faculty to pro-
vide free access to their research, effectively mandating that they distribute
their work to the commons. Similarly, beginning in 2001 MIT’s Open
Courseware Initiative began making course materials available for free
online. In early 2019, the University of California system stopped sub-
scribing to Elsevier after months of negotiations to lower prices of access
failed. The ambitious Plan S, launched in 2018, has the goal of requiring
authors receiving state funding to publish in open access journals—or at
least journals in which authors retain the rights. Again, as the intangible
quality of knowledge products and their inherent abilities to escape the
confines of market exchange proliferate with infinite reproducibility and
illegal or semi-legal means of distribution—combined with decreasing
budgets—paying monopoly prices for knowledge produced by their own
faculty makes little fiscal or ethical sense.
The clearest manifestations of projects to common the knowledge
economy are the various ones grouped around open education and open
research, from the P2P University and Open University, Open Education
Resources (including non-profit open access journals), and Wikipedia.
Together—and in varying ways—these each challenge the neoliberal
attempts to enclose knowledge by drawing on popular participation and
providing free access to and participation in producing and disseminating
knowledge. What makes them particularly noteworthy is that they’ve
gained substantial momentum from the support of prestigious academic
institutions and even some public governments. For some, the open access
movement is powerful in that it both facilitates a new experience and
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V LUKU.
Pietu on päässyt muutaman isännän reessä yli jään Juhmakan

hoviin. Ja nyt hän seisoo alarakennuksessa hovin isännän kamarin
oven pielessä.
On ensimänen arkipäivä joulun jälkeen. Pakkanenkin on jo taas

kerrakseen tipo tiessään.
Hovin ruokakello soi jo aikaa sitten työhön käskien. Pietukin on

saanut väen tuvassa päivällistä. Mutta kun hän on sanonut itsellään
olevan asiaa isännälle, on häntä käsketty kamariin.
Täällä isäntä nukkuu päivällisunta nahkasohvalla. Lihava vatsa on

kuin kohoava kumpu ja se nousee ja laskee, nousee ja laskee kovan
kuorsaamisen mukaan.
— Tuossa vatsassa on tuhansia, miettii Pietu. Sitten hän tarkkaa,

eikö isäntä heräisi. Mutta kun ei näytä heräävän, kehittelee Pietu
edelleen ajatusjuoksuaan.
— Se käy jo kuudettakymmentä tämä isäntä. On se ainakin jo

neljäkymmentä vuotta tuhat markkaa vuodessa syönyt. Saa siis
panna tuohon vatsaan noin tuota viisikymmentä tuhatta… saakuri…
ollapa se raha… kokonaisen hovin se on jo tämä voiruhtinas
syönyt…mutta kyllä tässä kestää syömistä.
Pietu katsoo ympärilleen. Näkee paperoidut seinät, näkee

maalatun katon ja siinä kaikenmoisia koristuksia: enkeleitä, Aatamin
ja Eevan paratiisissa ja hirveän suuren käärmeen… mistä pirusta se
noita ymmärtääkin maalauttaa… aa… se oli se kuleksiva juoppo
sälli, joka nälin kuolioin matkaili… sehän se täällä oli työssä
kuukausimäärin. Ja nämä ne ovat sen käsialaa…
Hovilainen röyhteli unissaan. Pietu säikähti, kokosi itsensä ja aikoi

alkaa.
— Mutta sehän nukkuu vielä… on se uni makeata ja syvää

tuollaisella vatsalla… ollapa tällainen hoikka ja laiha kuin minulla,
niin ei se liioin röyhtäytäkään… Pietarista ovat kai nämä
korkkimatotkin… miten paljon maksanevat… minä eläisin kyllä sillä
pari vuotta… oh hoh!
Pietu rykäisi. Mutta Juhmakka syvemmin kuorsasi.
— On tässä kompeita… ja kun on paksut kultaperät tuossa vatsan

päällä… lempo kun sillä on komeutta… aja minulta toinenkin käsi,
kyllä jaksat maksaa.
Syntyi sellainen heleä-ääninen kalkutus ja soitto. Sitten käki

kukkui.
Ja Pietu lensi häpeästä punaiseksi.
Mutta se oli vain kello, joka löi.
— Pietarista se on tuokin kometiia. Maksaa sekin. Ja mitä se

kellolla tekee, kun kuitenkin yöt päivät makaa niinkuin minäkin. En
ole minä ensinkään kellon tarpeessa. Herään kun ei ole unta ja
makailen siksi, kunnes sitä tulee. Niinhän se tuota tämäkin tekee.
Mutta silti kellossa käki kukkuu ja panee sen kaiken maailman
pimpelit pampelit… no on niillä rikkailla rojua… Kun uskaltaisi
nykäistä. Siellä ulkona pian hämärtää.
Nyt kuului porstuasta kovaa ääntä ja raskaita askeleita. Suuri

lihava hovin emäntä, jolla on rinnat kuin laajat vehnäispullat ja vatsa
kuin ruoka-aitta, pyörähti kamariin ja ärjäisi Pietulle:
— No nyt on maailman kumma, kun sinunkinlaiset kamariloihin

tunkevat.
Paikalla ulos!
— Ka kun rengit tänne käskivät.
— Etkö tiedä, että tämä on Juhmakan hovi. Luulisipa sinun sen

tuntevan, kun minäkin sinut tunnen. No nyt kumman teki… ethän ole
vain mitään täältä ottanut. Kumaise taskusi!
— Ptyih! Minäkö… minäkö varas — onko täällä todistajia? huutaa

Pietu.
Siitä melusta herää isäntä, hieroo silmiään, tunnustelee ja lopuksi

puhuu:
— Ka mikä melu täällä on? Ja kuka se on tämä mies?
— Täi-Pietu!
— Täi-Pietu! Paikalla ulos… ulos… ulos! Ja lakaiskaa heti jäljet!
Isäntä lensi kuin ammuttuna sohvalta ja tyrkkäsi Pietua.

— Mitä se tänne tunkee! ähkyy hovilainen ja työntää Pietua.
Pietu menee.
— Kuuluu sinulle olevan asiaa. Tuolla väen puolella käskin piikain

sitä syöttää. Ja syötyään oli tullut tänne, puhuu emäntä.
— Jopa nyt. Pitää viedä mies renkien tupaan, jos on asiaa. Käske
sinne! Panen tupakan ja tulen sitten. Mutta lempoako hän minulla
tekee? Tietäähän hän hyvin, että tästä talosta ei anneta kerjäläisille.
Silloin kun annetaan, viedään suoraan hoitolaan. Eikö se hän ole
hoitolassa? Niin niin… sehän kuuluu paleltuneen… mutta ei sen
vuoksi viittä penniä.
Isäntä röyhtelee, venyttelee. Hakee sitten nurkasta

tupakkapöydältä pitkän piipun, lataa sen täyteen ja istuu keinutuoliin
polttamaan.
Siinä hänen jalkainsa juuressa on lattiaan ruuvattu rauta-arkku,

joka on monilukollinen. Siinä se on Juhmakan "pankki", kuten rahvas
sanoo. Ja se on isännästä hovin rakkain huonekalu, sellainen
kappale, ettei moista koko pitäjässä, tuskin läheisessäkään. Se on
puolillaan velkakirjoja ja rahaa ja paljon kalliimpi kuin miksi Pietu
arvosteli hovilaisen vatsan.
Tupakkaa poltellessaan Juhmakka sitä katsoo ja ihailee sen suuria

rautalukkoja.
Ja arkku on kylmän ja tyhmän näköinen, ruma kuin itse itaruuskin.
Mutta tämä se on juuri se alttari, jolla Juhmakka jumalilleen uhraa.

Ei siihen pysty varkaan näpit eikä tulen väki, uskoo Juhmakka, kun
sen rautaisena lattiaan ruuvautti.
Kun Juhmakka on kyllikseen poltellut, menee hän renkien tupaan.
Siellä istuu jo Pietu häntä odottamassa.
Hovilaisen tullessa sisälle nousee Pietu seisomaan. Tuvassa ei ole

ketään muuta.
— Istu, kehottaa hovilainen ja itse asettuu penkille pitkän pöydän

ääreen.
— Rauhallista joulua. Ei isäntä ilkeä suuttua, vaikka minä kamariin

työnnyin. Minähän olen tuommoinen tuhma raukka. Ja kun rengit
neuvoivat, puhuu Pietu, hypistelee karvalakkiaan, joka on kuin
rottien repimä, ja arastelee.
Sillä häntä kovasti pelottaa, miten alkaa. Hovilainen on julma. Ja

tuolla seinällä hänen päänsä päällä on monta ruoskaa nauloissa
riippumassa.
— Ovat koiransilmiä ne rengit. Vasta muistat, että kamariloihin ei

saa meidän talossa tulla, sanoo isäntä ja tarjoaa siitä renkien
pöydältä pennin sikarin Pietulle.
Pietu yhä enemmän aristuu. Hänen kätensä vavahtelee sikaria

ottaessaan ja isännän raapaisemalla tulitikulla sytytellessään.
Isäntä jää siinä tummaan varjoon istumaan. Ja sieltä se Pietua

mulkoilee kuin itse piru puolihämärästä. Hiustöyhdöt sen korvilla ovat
kuin sarvet, suuri nenä uhkaa ja sen tohina pelottaa. Ja tuo kalju pää
on Pietuun kääntynyt tähystävänä kuin kaukoputki.
— Missä kätesi loukkasit? kysyy Juhmakka nähdessään Pietun

oikean käden kääreessä ja kaulassa kannettuna.
— Missäkö? Kyllä hovin herra sen tietää. Pietu ilostui, että asia
alkoikin juuri näin.
— En minä ole mikään herra! ärjäisi Juhmakka.
— Huonompiakin herroiksi sanotaan, semmoisiakin, joilla

housutkaan eivät ole omat.
— Paleltuiko kätesi? Sinähän kuulut joukkoinesi paleltuneen.
— Ei paleltunut. Poika jäätyi ruumiiksi ja ämmältä menivät varpaat.
Pietu syvästi huokasi sen päälle ja tavotteli itkua.
— Sillä lailla! Niin sitä pitää elää, että paleltuu ihmisten nenän
eteen. Sietäisit saada vielä lisäksi raippoja. Rovasti teidät pelasti?
— Rovastiko? E-ei.
— Kas kuin valehtelet!
— No pelasti, myönnytteli Pietu, kun arveli asiansa paremmin

luonnistavan menemällä myötävirtaa hovilaisen kanssa.
— Ymmärrätkö että hänettä et nyt tässä sikaria polttaisi?
— En polttaisi, naureli Pietu.
— Ja niin hän maksoi sinulle pahan hyvällä. Kuulut hoitolassa

häntä haukkuneen päin taulua ja käräjiin uhanneen. Siihen
juttelemiseen käräjissä sitä sinäkin raukka olet perso.
— Että mitenkä?
Pietu häkälteli. Nyt alkoivat asiat mennä vinoon.
— Olet tapellut hoitolan herran kanssa ja kun rovasti sinua nuhteli,

lensit hänen silmilleen. Ettes häpeä, rutja!
— Kuka on kertonut?
— Rovastin oma väki. Täällä kävi nuori herra.
— En ole tapellut. Mutta ne ne tappelivat. Tämänkin nuttuni

repivät. Tahtooko isäntä nähdä? Enkä silmille lentänyt. Rovasti on
aivan erehtynyt eli se nuori herra. Minäkö nyt iskisin rovastia silmiin?
Ja vielä niin koreihin silmiin. Johan nyt mentäisiin… Tässä on suuri
erehdys, kulta isäntä.
— Miksi karkasit hoitolasta pakkaseen paleltumaan?
Juhmakka nakkasi jalkansa ristiin ja lämpeni tutkimaan. Sen silmät

kiiluivat Pietuun kuin kissan viheriänkellervinä.
— Ka, kun retuuttivat riiheen paleltumaan ja uhkasivat pehmeäksi

piestä.
— Kutka?
— Hoitolan herra ja lukkari.
— Mitä teit? Mitä teit, mies? kysäisi Juhmakka ankarana.
Pietu säikähdyksestä hypähti ja sikari lensi hyppysistä lattiaan,

missä kieri savuten ja tulta heitellen. Pietu syleksi, polki sitä jalallaan
ja sammutti. Viskasi pätkän sitten takataskuunsa.
— Mi-mitäkö tein? Enpä juuri muuta kuin puhuin pari kolme sanaa.
— Niitä sinun myrkkysanojasi? Niinhän?
— Onko niissä myrkkyä? Ei kai. Isäntä nyt ei suuttuisi minuun,

vaikka sanoisin teitä kirkonvarkaaksi. Siksi viisas mies on tämän
hovin isäntä. Haukkuuhan koirakin vimmatusti, mutta järkimies ei
sille päätään käännä, se kun on vain koira. Mitä niistä minunkin
sanoistani. Joutavaa typeryyttä vain minä haastan. Mutta pikku
herrat jos suuttuvat, niin eipäs ole järkeä.
Juhmakka jo lauhtuu.
— Mistä se riita tuli?
— Isännän vehnäisistä… niistä jouluvehnäisistä… juuri niistä.
— Etkö saanut tarpeeksesi?
— En vielä tänä päivänäkään ole niistä murenta syönyt.
— Kuka ne söi?
— Hoitolan herra itse joukkoineen.
— Nyt sinä valehtelet, sen kelhu! Juhmakka polkaisi jalkaa lattiaan

ja nousi seisomaan.
Eikö isäntä ole hyvä ja istu vielä pikkaraisen. Minulla on tuiki

tärkeää asiaa. Ja jos sopii, niin istualta…
— No… no… istutaan. Hovilainen istuu takaisin.
— Puhu asiasi!
— Olin juuri palaamassa jouluna kirkosta, kun isäntä ajoi päälleni
ja viskasi minut vasten kiviä siinä hoitolan kupeella. Tämä käsi
silloin…
— No..?
— Tämä käsi silloin meni poikki. Enkä nyt pysty mihinkään

työhön…
— Enpä minä sitä muista. Ja miksi tulit eteen? — Senkin työkyri!

—
Lopun sanoi isäntä aivan halveksivalla äänellä.
— Isännän ori lensi kuin nuoli. Ei siinä syrjään ehtinyt. Käsi meni
poikki. Nyt en pysty työhön. Joukko näkee nälkää.
— Menet hoitolaan. Sitä vartenhan se on. Saat siellä nyt tarpeeksi

maata, kerrankin maata unesi loppuun.
— En mene sinne.
— Kärsi sitten nälkää! Minkäpä minä sille. Pietu oli jo tulistua.

Syrjäsilmällä hän tähysteli hovilaista ja puhui:
— Tulin isännän kanssa haastamaan tästä kädestä.
— Mitä siinä on haastamista? Oma syysi.
— Omako syyni?
— Ka eikö ollut? Miksi jäit oriin eteen?
— Orihan se juoksi minun päälleni.

— Tarvitsiko sinun pahnustaa siinä tiellä? Tiesithän vanhastaan,
että komeasti joulukirkosta ajetaan. Jos sinulla ei ole muuta asiaa,
niin nyt lähde.
Pietu katsoi ihmeissään isäntää
— Olenko minä sitten kuin laho puu, jonka päällitse saa ajaa ilman
mitään?
— Jos oikein puhutaan, niin vielä huonompikin. Sillä puu ei tule

valittelemaan. Menet nyt.
— Enkä mene.
— Vai et.
— Maksaako isäntä kipurahoja?
— En… en penniäkään. Vai olet tullut kiristämään.
— Sitten minä vien käräjiin.
Hovilainen katsoi ympärilleen, näkyikö missään todistajia. Ja kun

niitä ei näkynyt, meni hän ottamaan ruoskaa.
Mutta silloin sai jo Pietu jalat alleen. Hän juoksi ja räkytti:
— Manuutan… manuutan käräjiin. Kyllä koetellaan. Kolme herraa

sinne vien… lukkarin… hoitolan herran… voiruhtinaan. Koetappas
sielläkin ruoskia.
Juhmakkaa hävetti. Sillä pihalla oli hänen omia piikojaan. Ja ne

nauroivat.
Mutta Pietu näytti pitkää nenää ja juoksi jonnekin yösijaa
hakemaan.
Juhmakka viskasi kädellään nenänsä tyhjäksi ja raskain askelin

kulki omalle puolelleen.
— Vai Täi-Pietun kanssa käräjöimään! Laitan miehen sian

pahnaan, jos toiste tulee. Heh!
Ja sisällä kamarissaan suuren rautakirstunsa äärellä yltyi

Juhmakka loisia kiroilemaan. Niistä ei saa rauhaa omassa
kodissaankaan. Ne laiskottelevat, viruvat hoitolassa, elätyttävät
itseään ja senkin seitsemän kertaa käräjöivät. Ovat yksin ja aina
tiellä.
VI LUKU.
Juhmakan hovissa ylärakennus on varsinainen herraspuoli. Sen

edessä on puutarhakin, missä on omenapuita, karviaismarja- ja
kirsikkapensaita, on sireenipensaita ja herkkumansikkapenkkejä.
Onpa ukko Juhmakka kokeillut siinä englantilaisten kurkkujenkin
kasvattamisessa, puhumattakaan venäläisistä. Ja monta muuta,
hyvin monta muuta kasvia tässä puutarhassa kasvaa.
Talvisin pidetään ylärakennus melkein kylmillään. Lämmitetään

vain sen verran, että ruukkukasvit eivät kuoleudu, sillä niitä on siellä
huoneissa koko paljon. Ja ukko Juhmakka on kovin kitsas puista.
Mutta nyt "uudeksi jouluksi" on koko ylärakennus herkulliseksi

lämmitetty, siistitty, puhtaat liinat pantu, kaikki laitettu paraimpaan
karvaan.
Sillä nyt on uuden kivinavetan vihkimisjuhla.
Läävä on suomalaisen rakkaimpia rakennuksia. Varsinkin

karjalainen pyrkii sen rakentamisessa niin sanoen ihanteellisuuteen,
jos hänellä on oikein vahvasti rahaa. Jokaisessa hiukan
äveriäämmässä talossa on se toki kivestä, mutta hoveissa on se jo
nostettu vanhojen maalaiskirkkojen tasalle. Sillä navetasta näkyy
talonpojan silmissä talon suuruus. Ja kun on "voiruhtinas" nimeltään
ja läävässä toista sataa lypsävää, niin onko ihme, jos ihminen
ylpistyy ja kyhää hakatusta graniitista lehmilleen palatsin, johon ei
pysty ensimäinen ajan hammas.
Juhmakan kivinavetta on kuuluisa. Sitä on rakennettu kahdeksan

vuotta ja siihen mahtuu pari sataa sarvipäätä oikein väljästi.
Vieraita saapuu ympäri omaa pitäjästä ja vielä

lähiseurakunnistakin. Onpa joitakin aina kaupungista asti. Sillä
Juhmakan suku on laaja ja tuttavapiiri tavaton. Joukossa on joitakin
säätyläisiäkin, mutta ylipäätään on vierasjoukko Ylä-Karjalan
jäykkäniskaista talonpoika-aatelistoa, jonka hallussa on monen
pitäjän hovitalot.
Isäntä itse on portailla vastassa. Rengit riisuvat hevoset, vievät

talliin, viskaavat kauroja eteen.
On suvinen nuoskea sää ja mätälumi. Hovin piha on kuin

markkinatori täynnä väkeä, täynnä hevosia, täynnä rekiä. Soivat
kulkuset, uljaat valjaat välkkyvät, oriit hirnuvat.
Mutta sisällä ylärakennuksen huoneissa on hyvin hiljaista.

Kursaillaan, ujostellaan, istutaan tuolien ulkosyrjillä ja vaietaan.
Sillä täällä näkee paljon ihmisiä toisiaan ensi kerran elämässään

ja joukko on jotenkin kirjavaa. Mutta kun ehditään ryhmittyä eri
huoneihin yhteiskunnallisen aseman ja rikkauden mukaan, kun kukin
lintu pääsee omaan parveensa ja tuntee laulavansa vertaistensa
parissa, aukenevat suut, tyhjentyvät suljetut puhevarastot ja nyt on jo
ääntä, on naurua, on eloa ja riemua. Puheen porina täyttää salit,
nauru heläjää taas inhimillisenä, sillä ihmiset ovat löytäneet toisensa.
Kun on tarjottu kahvit ja ryypätty viinit, lähdetään juhlallisesti
katsomaan navettaa.
Siellä se seisoo karjapihassa suurena, saavuttamatonna alallaan.

Se on niin ja niin pitkä, niin ja niin leveä, ja niin ja niin korkea.
Keskeltä rakennusta aukenevat suuret raudoitetut ovet. Oven päällä
on hiottu graniittikivi, johon on latinaisilla kirjaimilla piirretty Tuomas
Juhmakka ja valmistumisvuosi, ja alapuolella on suuri härkä.
Jo käy herrasväen suu hymyyn. Mutta mennäänpä sisälle. On

läävässä kokoa, on totisesti. Ihmisten silmät suurenevat sen
valtavasta ko'osta ja kaiku kertaa äänen.
— Kerrassaan ihmenavetta! huutaa rovasti.
Seinät toistavat sen ikäänkuin hyväksyen ja väkijoukko nauraa.
Mutta siellä läävän peräseinällä on kaksi keskikokoista taulua.

Mennään katsomaan. Isäntä Juhmakka istuu toisessa kulmat
käppyrässä ja emäntä Juhmakka peukaloitaan punoo toisessa
lihavalla vatsallaan.
Herrasväki katsoo toisiaan ja on erityisesti huvitettu.
Mutta isäntä Juhmakka selittää tosissaan:
— Taulut on tehty Pietarissa keisarillisella hovihankkijalla ja siellä

ne on valokuvista suurennettu.
— Niin, niin, hyväksyy rovasti ja nauraa hyvin sopimattomasti.
Mutta siinä samassa hän esittää eläköönhuudon uudelle navetalle

ja nyt mylvitään oikein härkämäisesti.
Juhmakka vainuaa jotain pilkkaa, hänen suuret sieraimensa
laajenevat ja nenä tohisee kovin äänekkäästi. Hengityskin on taas
tällä kertaa kuin röhkimistä.
Rovasti muuttaa puheensa ruustinnalle ruotsiksi ja nyt tullaan

hirvittävän vakaviksi ja käydään kädestä Juhmakkaa onnittelemassa.
Välit taas selvenevät ja Juhmakan nenä hiljenee.
Kiitellään ja kiitellään läävää.
Nyt mennään päivällispöytään. On siinä viinaa, on olutta. On

silavaa, lammasta, kanaa, lohta, siikaa, ankeriasta, haukea ja
kaikkea läjittäin. Tuodaan pöytiin mahdottoman suuret liemimaljat ja
paistivadit laajat kuin soikeat sohvapöydät.
Illan päälle ilmestyy pöydille totivehkeitä. Suuret hiotusta lasista

tehdyt karahvit ovat täynnä rommia ja konjakkia.
Ne ovat kiusaavan viettelevät vähän itsekullekin miesväestä.
Kannetaan esille kortitkin. Miesjoukko jakaupi pienempiin ryhmiin

ja naiset ovat erittyneet kokonaan omiin huoneihinsa.
Seura on jo kokonaisuudessaan kuin omassa kodissaan.
Rovasti on vetäytynyt pieneen kulmakamariin. Siellä on hänen

nenänsä edessä aivan mieto totilasi, josta hän tuskin maistaa, ja
valiosikareja.
Hän kutsuttaa isännän ja emännän sinne. Siellä he nyt ovat

kolmen.
Rovasti käypi vakavaksi, vetää kasvoihinsa hartauden väreet ja
nostaa takkinsa takataskusta pienen kullatun uuden testamentin,
jonka lehtien syrjät ovat punatut, ja heittäen hyvin pitkän katseen
aviopari Juhmakkaan lausuu:
— Tällaisena riemupäivänä on meidän syytä muistaa Häntä, jolta

kaikkinainen hyvä anto tulee.
Juhmakka emäntineen panee kätensä ristiin ja vaipuu hartauteen.
Rovasti lämpenee ja lukee hyvin tunteellisesti uutta testamenttia

ääneensä. Rikkaasta miehestä ja Latsaruksesta hän lukee ja sitten
selittää sitä.
Mutta soikeassa kamarissa samaan aikaan pelataan jo suuria

summia ja ryypiskelevien parissa pastorin silmät verestävät. Naisten
seurassa on vallattomuus kohoamassa ja leikeissä suin päin
liehutaan.
Kun rovasti on lukenut, kiittää hän aviopuolisoita sydämellisin

sanoin lahjasta diakonissakassaan. Tämä juuri osoittaa, että he eivät
ole kuin se rikas mies.
— Ja erityisesti tunsin minä tarvetta kiittää hovin emäntää, sillä

hän se — arvaan minä -isännän mielen on diakonissa-asialle
lämpimäksi saanut. Oo — työtä on paljon, mutta eloväkeä vähän.
Ottakaa taivaan siunaus suurista lahjoistanne tälle seurakunnalle.
Joka ilta muistan teitä esirukouksessa.
Rovasti veti kädellään ilmassa heidän päänsä päällitse.
Nyt oli tämä toimitus loppunut.

Isäntäkin kävi hakemassa itselleen totilasin.
Haasteltiin arkipäiväistä.
— Tällaisia juhlia eivät juhli näillä mailla muut kuin Juhmakan

hovin isäntäväet, puhuu rovasti.
— Ja meilläkin vain kerran vuodessa.
— Onko paljon vieraita?
— Lähes pari sataa.
— Sillä lailla! Ja tanssia tulee myös.
— Tulee. Iso tupa on jo sitä varten varattu.
— Ja sinne tulevat alustalaisetkin tanssiin?
— Tulevat.
— Onko monta pelimannia.
— Viisi kaikkiaan. Kolme viululla ja kaksi harmonikalla.
— Oo sitä hauskaa! Mutta minun nyt täytyy lähteä.
— Nytkö? Ei kai.
— Joo… nähkääs… on parempi, että minä menen pois, kuiskaa

rovasti
Juhmakan korvaan.
Nyt ei hovilainen enää vastusta. Isäntäväki saattelee rovastin

herrasväen rekeen asti.
— Pitäkää huolta pastorista. Hän lupasi minulle tultaessa, että hän
nyt ei maista karvaita. Mutta hän näkyy taas tavanneen
vahvempansa, kuiskaa rovasti Juhmakalle rekeen noustessaan.
Vielä samana iltana ajoi rovasti pitäjän toiselle syrjälle sairaan luo.
Juhmakka palaa sisälle. Menee oikopäätä pastorin luo.
Mutta pastorillakin on isännälle jotain hampaan kolossa. Ja nyt on

rohkeutta purkaa se sieltä.
Kun pastori huomaa isännän, nousee hän ylös ja ampuu päin

silmiä:
— Juhmakka on rikas mies, joka vaeltaa leveällä tiellä.
— Hys!
— Te olette juuri se raamatun publikaani, jonka jalkain juuressa

Latsarus viruu paiseissaan. Olette ajanut Pietu Pippurin käden
poikki, olette riistänyt turvan ja tuen perheen isännältä… isältä piti
sanoa. Mutta se ei liikuta teitä ensinkään. Pietu kävi minun luonani ja
kertoi isännän ruoskalla yhä uudelleen uhanneen. Se on kaunista
peliä…!
Pietu oli todellakin käynyt pastorille näyttämässä kättään ja

valittamassa Juhmakan kovuutta.
Tästä huomaavaisuudesta eli arvonannosta oli pastori tullut niin

liikutetuksi, että hän oli luvannut ottaa Pietun suojelukseensa.
Mutta tähän purkautumiseen oli sentään syy syvemmällä. Pastori

hyvin vielä muisti kutsut näihin pitoihin ja tahtoi nyt antaa takaisin
vielä vahvemmasti ja suuremman joukon kuullen.
— Herrainen aika, miten isännällä on kova sydän yhtä

seurakunnan vähäosaisinta kohtaan. Ja seurakunnan pap… pappina
on minun tehtäväni kolkuttaa isännän… Pietu on ihminen hänkin.
Monesti kyllä minuakin suututtanut, mutta hän on minun
lähimäiseni… sen minä tässä julkisesti tunnustan.
— Jo toki, ärähtää Juhmakka.
— Hän on myös kalliisti ostettu seurakunnan jäsen. Pietu itki

minun luonani osansa kurjuutta. Valitti vaimonsa ja lapsensa
kuolevan nälkään, kun ei pysty työhön… Maksakaa Pietulle
kipurahoja. Asia on hyvin arkaluontoinen… hirvittävän
arkaluontoinen… ajaappa jouluna Herran huoneesta palatessaan
kö… köyhältä lähimäiseltään käsi poikki… oi se on poikki.. se
maksaa isännälle vielä paljon, ellette Pietua sovita…minä
seurakunnan pappina lupasin Pietulle teidät saattaa katumaan ja
tuntemaan suurta pahuuttanne, jonka vertaista saa hakea… saa
etsiä.
— Herra nähköön! Onko pastori taas…
— Miekka, joka käypi teidän sydämenne läpi.
— Ei… vain… humalassa!
Pastori kohousi varpailleen ja painoi kätensä Juhmakan olkapäille.
— Minä sanon vielä kerran: maksakaa Pietulle kipurahoja!
— En äyriäkään.
— Sitten saatte Pietun niskaanne. Ja se mies puree kipeästi. Siitä
olen varma. Ystävä! Tahdon vain puhua teille jonkun herättävän
sanan, sillä kerran kuolema teillekin viittaa. Muistakaapa silloin,
miten kävi raamatun rikkaalle miehelle.
Tuossa paikassa oli kamari tyhjentynyt. Sillä Juhmakka oli tuiki

vihassa. Hänen korvantauksensa olivat aivan punaiset. Hän malttoi
mielensä, mutta sanoi painavasti:
— Nyt pastori lähtee nukkumaan, muuten… virka menee!
Pastori säikähti ja antoi taluttaa itsensä kuin pienen lapsen

alarakennukseen nukkumaan.
Alarakennuksen isossa tuvassa alustalaiset tanssivat. Nekin olivat

enimmäkseen loisia. Hovin maalla oli siellä täällä tyhjiä
asuinrakennuksia, mitkä olivat entisiä taloja, jotka oli hoviin liitetty.
Ne olivat tupaten täynnä loisia. Nämä olivat hovin työvoima, joka tuli
sanomattoman halvaksi pitää. Ansioillaan hovista ne saivat niukuin
naukuin leivän ja suolan ja kaikista heikoimmat hoitolassa
talviravinnon. Mutta heidän hiellään lainehtivat hovin pellot
jyvämerenä ja heidän käsillään se oli tämä mainehikas uusi
kivinavettakin nostettu lehmien kodiksi, vaikka he itse asuivatkin
maahan vaipuvissa röttelöissä.
Isäntä kulki viinapullo kädessä ja kaatoi kullekin annoksensa.

Pennin sikareja olivat pöydät kukkurillaan ja kahvia sai jokainen
vatsansa täyteen.
Yön tullen vieraat vietiin ylärakennuksessa nukkumaan, jos niin

halusivat. Mutta suurin osa miehiä uhrasi yönsä konjakin, korttien ja
tupakan ääressä.

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Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General

Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge

Communist Study 2nd Edition Derek R. Ford

Cambridge IGCSE and O Level History Workbook 2C - Depth

American Marxism Mark R. Levin

The Lost Worlds of John Ford: Beyond the Western 1st

General Knowledge 2023 2023rd Edition Manohar Pandey

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

The New Learning Economy: Thriving Beyond Higher

Scientific Reasoning and Argumentation The Roles of

“Radical stupidity and a rejuvenated General Intellect versus capitalism’s knowl-

ISBN 978-3-030-83833-1 ISBN 978-3-030-83834-8 (eBook)

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Cover illustration: Pattern © Harvey Loake

“You must learn!” announces KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions.

pressures of capitalist accumulation for more. This ignorance can only be

Vancouver, BC, Canada  Stefano Harney

Finally, while my name is on the book, the concepts, ideas, arguments,

1 Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge Economy 1

2 The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics 19

3 The General Intellect and the Struggle over the

4 The Educational Consensus: You Must Learn! 55

5 A Pedagogical Exodus: Stupidity 75

6 The General Line of the General Intellect 93

Derek R. Ford received his PhD in Cultural Foundations of Education

Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge

Keywords Knowledge economy • Exploitation • Ableism •

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Knowledge is the solution to any problem we face. As such, many of the

“knowledge economy,” which isn’t separable from post-Fordism (or neo-

Why the “Knowledge Economy”?

or something else altogether. The basic assumption of the knowledge

hegemonic, that it structures and guides not only international policies

One Initial Hypothesis of the University

Critiques of the academy and knowledge production predate the termi-

In strategic response to the question of the status of knowledge,

From Educational Analysis to Pedagogical Forms

wholesale with any one theorist or theory)—this is motivated by my aim

The Grasping Drive: The Exploitative and Oppressive

connection explicit. “The verb to grasp,” he writes, “contains the move-

Dylan Robinson, similarly, shows how Canadian ethnographers in the

The Liberatory Potentials

While there is no shortage of critiques of capitalism today, I focus almost

in divergent ways, captured the proletarian viewpoint on the coming

because many of its theorists and activists continue to accurately describe

7. David Guile, The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy

27. Ashley Taylor, “Knowledge Citizens? Intellectual Disability and the

The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics

Abstract This chapter surveys the dominant landscape of the knowledge

Keywords Hardt and Negri • Andy Merrifield • Knowledge capitalism

This chapter surveys the dominant landscape of the knowledge economy

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

increasingly central role of knowledge in the production and reproduction

From the Right

and emotional skills” of 10- and 15-year-olds across different countries

Via the Center

resistance; namely that knowledge in non-rivalrous, non-exclusive, and

innovation doesn’t remain a goal of the production process but constantly

Marx’s polemics against a leading bourgeois scientist in Capital, Nassau

at the ‘organized complexity’ of disorder, the hurly-burly that made peo-

boundaries between the two, as producing feeling involves information

whether it be Nestle taking water from Michigan’s Great Lakes to sell, or

Pietu on päässyt muutaman isännän reessä yli jään Juhmakan

Vancouver, BC, Canada Stefano Harney

1 Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge Economy 1

2 The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics 19

3 The General Intellect and the Struggle over the

4 The Educational Consensus: You Must Learn! 55

5 A Pedagogical Exodus: Stupidity 75

6 The General Line of the General Intellect 93