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The implications of Autonomist

Marxism for research and practice in
education and technology
a
Richard Hall
a
Library Services, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
Published online: 29 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Richard Hall (2015) The implications of Autonomist Marxism for research
and practice in education and technology, Learning, Media and Technology, 40:1, 106-122, DOI:
10.1080/17439884.2014.911189

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 Learning, Media and Technology, 2015
Vol. 40, No. 1, 106 122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2014.911189

The implications of Autonomist Marxism for research and

practice in education and technology

Richard Hall

Library Services, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK

(Received 4 March 2013; accepted 30 March 2014)
Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 04:05 07 December 2014

This article considers the relevance of Autonomist Marxism for both

research and practice in education and technology. The article situates the
Autonomist perspective against that of traditional Marxist thought illus-
trating how certain core Autonomist concepts enable a critical reading of
developments in information and communication technology. These
include notions of the social factory, immaterial labour and cognitive
capital, the general intellect and mass intellectuality, and the cybernetic
hypothesis. It is argued that these perspectives are particularly useful in
enabling a critique of the place of education and technology inside the cir-
cuits and cycles of globalised capitalism. The Autonomist approach can be
criticised not least for its apparent network-centrism and its disconnection
from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production. Nevertheless, this
position offers a powerful way in to understanding education and technol-
ogy as key sites of struggle. It lays bare the mechanisms through which
technology-rich educational settings are co-opted for work, while also
suggesting possibilities for pushing back against the subsumption of
contemporary education for capitalist work.
Keywords: Autonomist Marxism; education; technology; immaterial
labour; mass intellectuality

Introduction: why Autonomist Marxism matters

In emergent critical debates relating to education and technology, understand-
ing the social development of technology is pivotal. One theoretical tradition
that enables such a critical analysis and description at the level of society is
Marxism. From this tradition emerges a reflection on the deployment of tech-
nology inside the formal and informal institutions of civil society, such as
schools, universities, autonomous educational spaces and online courses.
However, in analysing the relationships between education and technology
across the breadth and depth of society, Marxist theory asks us to contextualise
them through their connections with labour or capitalist work. This is because
education and technology are linked inextricably with organisational and

Email: rhall1@dmu.ac.uk
# 2014 Taylor & Francis
 Learning, Media and Technology 107

structural innovations that create value and thereby enable the accumulation of
wealth, through competition and marketisation.
Thus, Marxs mature critical social theory, developed in the late 1800s, asks
us to question the historical and material development of education and technol-
ogy inside capitalism as a totalising social universe. In a footnote to Volume 1
of Capital, Marx noted:

Technology discloses mans mode of dealing with Nature, the process of pro-
duction by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of for-
mation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.
(Marx 2004, 493)

In this footnote, Marx argued that a critique of the development and use of tech-
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nology helps us to analyse the material, historical and cultural realities of our
society, which themselves emerge through human labour that produces value.
The basis of value is the labour-power sold in the market by the labourer that
is added to other means of production to become the form-giving fire that
creates commodities which can then be exchanged (Marx 1993, 361). From
this circulatory process of production and exchange emerges surplus value,
which may be accumulated as new commodities or as profit, and which can
be re-invested in production and exchange. This is becoming critical in edu-
cation, which is increasingly subject to globalised market forces that commo-
dify and exchange educational services, applications and knowledge
(Ball 2012).
In analysing the social context inside which educational and technological
innovation emerge, the Marxist tradition has argued that technology is utilised
by capitalists both to make labour more efficient in the creation of commodities
and to discipline labourers. In terms of productivity, technological innovation
enables the capitalist to strip away the social and intellectual character of
labour from the student and teacher, in order to invest it in labour-saving
machinery that makes work increasingly routine. In terms of education and
technology this is revealed, for example, by responses to student debt that cat-
alyse pedagogies of consumption; through competition from technology provi-
ders of learning management systems, learning analytics and digital content;
and by colleges, universities and private providers operating as competing
businesses, through for instance massive open online courses (MOOCs). In dis-
ciplining labour in these ways, technology enables the capitalist to monitor the
performance of student and teacher, and to reinforce the material dominance of
the capitalist over social life.
Emerging from inside the Marxist tradition over the last 40 years, the
Autonomist Marxist position has attempted to push-back against this material
dominance and to reinterpret the overarching historical dynamic of capitalism
in its globalised phase. It attempts to invert this power-relation and to analyse
the possibilities for the autonomy of labour from capital. Autonomist
 108 R. Hall

Marxism emerged coterminous to the global student worker unrest of May

1968 and to capitalisms break with the post-war Keynesian settlement in the
1970s. This process of globalised struggle between capital and labour saw
the removal of the metallic (gold) base underpinning global currencies, the
deregulation of transnational finance capital, and the emergence of a worldwide
system of credit. It also witnessed falling real wages in the global North, and
huge numbers of new workers drawn from subsistence and part-subsistence
into dependency on capitalist wage labour in the global South.
Importantly from the perspective of education and technology, this global
turn catalysed the emergence of web-based networked possibilities, alongside
new markets for educational commodities, applications and services owned
by transnational corporations. This connects it to the idea that education and
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technology form critical and increasingly transnational terrains of struggle

between student/teacher and capitalism. Moreover, situating innovation in edu-
cation and technology against such historical and material realities forces us to
question whether those innovations can be truly disruptive or revolutionary, or
whether they are always co-opted by capital either for the more efficient
production of value or for the accumulation of wealth. This includes critiquing
educational initiatives that are allegedly destabilising, such as: the formation of
a web-based, networked learning commons or MOOCs; the role of consumer-
ism or personalisation of technologies; the use of data mining or flipped class-
rooms; or the role of critical pedagogies like student as producer.
In addressing this globalised phase of capitalist development, Autonomist
Marxism emerged as a conglomerate of different perspectives from a European
sensibility. It draws on the Italian Operaismo or Workerist Movement of the
1960s and 1970s, which was catalysed in-part by the praxis of Raniero Panzieri
and Romano Alquati. Key thinkers in the tradition include Berardi (2009),
Cleaver (1992, 2002), Guattari and Negri (1985), Hardt and Negri (2000;
2004), Marazzi (2008), Negri (1988, 1989, 1991) and Tronti (1971, 1979). It
also flourished through specific journals like Quaderni Rossi, Classe
Operaia, Potere Operaio and Primo Maggio. The work of the Operaismo
movement was given a technological flavour through an analysis of networks.
This included Hardt and Negris (2000) work on Empire as a reflection of the
globalised historical moment of capitalism; Virnos (2001, 2004) work on the
Multitude as a recomposed, decentred and networked opposition to Empire;
Dyer-Witheford (1999, 2004) and Roggerros (2011) emphasis on how
labour might use technology to push-back against the accumulation of cognitive
capital; and Berardis (2009) revelation of the mechanisms through which affect
or emotion are commodified and the human soul is put to work.
Through this work, Autonomist Marxism enabled a focus on the question of
why capital moved beyond national boundaries in the post-war years and how it
was transformed into a globalised, transnational apparatus for accumulating
wealth. Critically, this tradition sought to understand the changing nature of
the structure and agency of the working class as the neoliberal phase of
 Learning, Media and Technology 109

capitalism intensified (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Robinson 2004). In this

analysis, education and technology are crucial in examining the ways in
which labour could form oppositional spaces or cracks through which to
resist and push-back against the alienation of exchange and the market
(Neary 2012; EduFactory 2013). Thus, Autonomist critiques of education
and technology focus upon the ability of the student/teacher to develop her
own self-awareness and to utilise technology to act for herself. This emancipa-
tory project is revealed in the epithet in-against-beyond, which questions the
structures that reproduce capitalisms domination, like the State and its edu-
cational institutions. These questions emerge from inside those structures and
from perspectives that are against them, so that alternatives that lie beyond
might be opened up (Tronti 1971; The London Edinburgh Weekend Return
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Group 1980). This recognises that capitalism is a totalising, social universe

and opens-up a global terrain of struggle for autonomy that includes education
and technology.
It should be noted that the different perspectives which shape the Autono-
mist approach share certain precepts and disagree over others. Thus, there are
critical differences over the meaning and significance of key terms, as well as
over issues of power and autonomy, and concerning the importance of technol-
ogy and innovation in restructuring capitalist relations of production. However,
the struggle to control labour presents the working class (including the roles of
student and teacher) with the educational and technological tools to developing
new points of resistance. In developing such alternatives, there are a number of
key ideas that emerge from the Autonomist tradition that are useful in addres-
sing how education and technology relate to the agency of the working class,
acting for itself. Thus, the remainder of this article outlines the following key
ideas:

. the ways in which capital is reproduced inside what is called the social
factory;
. the accumulation of cognitive capital and its relation to immaterial
labour;
. the emergence of mass intellectuality and
. the control society or the cybernetic hypothesis.

It is argued that in relation to these Autonomist concepts, educationalists

might understand how many of the key features of contemporary educational
technology and educational media are developed politically inside globalised
capitalism. Moreover, this tradition offers a powerful means of imagining
how the domains of education and technology might be re-purposed for
truly transformative ends, rather than being co-opted in the name of
disruption.
 110 R. Hall

Structuring the relationship between Autonomist Marxism and

education and technology
Whilst engaging with the fragment on machines in Volume 1 of Capital (Marx
2004), Autonomist Marxism also emerges from Marxs (1993, 594) earlier con-
ceptualisation of capitalism, as revealed in the Grundrisse. Here he argued that
machines:

are the products of human industry, natural materials transformed into instru-
ments of the human domination of Nature, or of its activity in Nature ... they
are the materialized power of knowledge. The development of [machines as]
fixed capital indicates the extent to which general social knowledge has
become a direct force of production, and thus the extent to which the conditions
of the social life have been brought under the control of the general intellect and
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reconstructed in accordance with it. It shows to what degree the social forces of
production are produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as direct
instruments of social practice and of the real-life process.

In Volume 1 of Capital Marx (2004) was clear that it is the productive force of
living labour rather than fetishised forms of fixed capital or technology that is
responsible for increasing value, he was also clear that capital used technologi-
cal and organisational innovation in order to escape from its reliance on labour.
Capital uses technological innovation to control nature, to socialise the pro-
duction and exchange of commodities, and to catalyse the valorisation
process through social efficiencies. In this way it uses such innovation to
subsume and transform labour in ways that enable the further accumulation
of wealth (Panzieri 1976). For example, in the current neoliberal moment capit-
alism has tried to escape the barriers imposed by the national organisation of
labour by globalising production and consumption through outsourcing, the
use of cloud technologies, and the creation of MOOCs (Clarke 1994; Robinson
2004). In understanding these developments, technology has to be situated
inside capitalist relations of production which make both those relations and
the technologies that discipline them appear to be natural or objective (Panzieri
1976).
Thus, technological innovations enable capital to overcome the limits to the
accumulation of wealth, and this has been furthered through the transnational
apparatus of institutions like the World Bank, the G8 and the International Mon-
etary Fund, in agreements like the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and
the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (Lipman 2009). Through this struc-
ture, both globalised information and communications technologies and the
development of transnational educational services act as instruments for the
creation and automation of a world market. As a result, both education and tech-
nology form part of a prevailing alienation of academic labour-power inside a
global apparatus of exchange.
This is important because from the Autonomist point of view nothing is
outside of this process of alienation. Thus work, school and leisure are
 Learning, Media and Technology 111

integrated into the circuits of production and consumption through networked

technologies, so that the whole of society is placed at the disposal of profit
(Negri 1989, 81). Education and technology, as structuring spaces in the circuits
of the production and consumption of value, are therefore situated inside capit-
alism as a part of a single, integrated universe (what Autonomists would term
the social factory). Here, all production is social and all activities are genera-
tive of value, including contributing to a discussion forum on an MOOC, down-
loading a mobile application and sharing personal data, or rating a page on a
social network. These activities can be commodified and exchanged.
Of particular interest here is the Autonomist notion of Empire (Hardt and
Negri 2000), which can be described as the globalised form of capital driven by
transnational corporations. In Marxs terms (1993) Empire represents a new
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technological basis that is consistent with the emergent networked rules of

transnational capital circulation. In particular, spaces that were previously
socialised or publically financed, governed and regulated (such as public edu-
cation) are now sites for the accumulation of wealth and for the deepening of
capitals power over the whole of social life. For example, in measuring, moni-
toring and mining learning analytics, or in hosting educational data in public or
private cloud-based technologies, or in delivering pedagogies for entrepreneur-
ship, education and technology become sites through which the power of capital
can be exerted (Foucault 1990). Moreover, these processes are often undertaken
by transnational corporations which outsource production to low-cost centres in
the global South, whilst they commodify the social life of students and teachers
as consumers in the global North (Robinson 2004). This reflects the Autonomist
idea of capitalisms on-going deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of
social life, through enclosure, commodification and policing of all activity
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983). In this way, contemporary capitalism can be
seen as forming a constant structural adjustment of public life (Ball 2012)
a process that is writ large in contemporary education and technology.
In particular, recent innovations in digital technology reflect a globalised and
networked form of new capitalism, which breaks with both the idea of the all-
powerful nation-state and with formalised, state-based institutions like schools
and universities. Thus, innovations like virtualisation and networked games, life
world simulations, self-organised worlds and MOOCs, as well as reactions to
the development of software commons, the free and open source software
movement, piracy, and software and hardware hacking, need to be seen in
relation to the dynamics of contemporary globalised, networked capitalism
(Dyer-Witheford 1999). Rather than being especially radical, revolutionary or
disruptive, the responses of educators in arguing for networked learning, per-
sonalised accreditation, Bring Your Own Device, cloud-based infrastructures,
and so on, need to be seen inside capitals drive to overcome the barriers to
accumulation.
For Autonomists, resistance to Empire and pushing back against its excesses
are encapsulated in the idea of the Multitude (Hardt and Negri 2000; Virno
 112 R. Hall

2004). The multitude is representative of the fact that indignation, protest and
dissent emerges across a networked globe, and therefore appears in the form
of a fractured, postmodern identity politics (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter
2009). Thus the most effective forms of educational disruption and protest
are transgressive of established institutional structures, and include: student
occupations against austerity (Hall 2011); the work of autonomous collectives
like EduFactory and the Knowledge Liberation Front (Neary 2012); and
attempts to develop alternative forms of educational provision, like the commu-
nity-focused practices of the UK Social Science Centre (Amsler and Neary
2012). The idea of the multitude resonates because it shapes a view of net-
worked, decentralised and global opposition to the hegemony or dominance
of Empire, and because it connects to the democratic and emancipatory
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ideals that many students and teachers see for education.

At issue here is making sense of this Autonomist recalibration of the
capital labour relation, both in terms of the role of technology in defining
twenty-first century educational provision, and in defining educational alterna-
tives through which the social content of labour might be realised. This emerges
from an analysis of technological innovation that is situated against capitalist
relations of production (Alquati 1975). The crucial point to be made is that edu-
cational technology and educational media might well fit with these ideals, yet
such connections are rarely made by those seeking to use digital technology and
digital media to engineer educational change. As such, a strong case can be
made for a better understanding of Autonomist Marxist ideas and principles
within educational technology practice and scholarship.

Understanding education and technology through Autonomist concepts

From the Autonomist perspective, the dynamics of capitalism place increasing
pressure on students and teachers to develop new skills flexibly, in order to
find increasingly precarious work and thereby maintain their existence
(Cleaver 2002; Newfield 2010). Against these dynamics, education and tech-
nology are designed to fulfil two main functions. First, to enable innovation
that drives the expansion of capitalism across public spaces, so that they are
marketised. Second, to reduce the costs of work through the transfer of skills
from labour to machines, or by driving productivity gains (Lebowitz 2003). In
both functions, the rapid obsolescence of accumulated educational skills and
practices makes them a liability to the student/teacher unless they underpin
the constant realisation of new learning. Each student/teacher must therefore
become an entrepreneur, with continual self-transformation in order to create
new value being a core requirement of citizenship inside capitalism (Wend-
ling 2009). In reflecting on this, Autonomist Marxism provides a number
of useful concepts for understanding the limits and possibilities of educational
technology.
 Learning, Media and Technology 113

The social factory

In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx (2004, 286) argues that

It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that dis-
tinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a
standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but
they also indicate the social relations within which men work

From an Autonomist perspective, then, the current neoliberal era of capitalism

signals the spread of capitalist social relations beyond the industrial factory, so
that the forces of production are embedded throughout the whole of society
(Cleaver 1992). Thus, Tronti (cited in Cleaver 1992, 137) argues:
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The more capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the production
of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more the circuit production,
distribution, exchange, consumption inevitably develops; that is to say that
the relationship between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between
the factory and society, between society and the state, become [sic] more and
more organic. At the highest level of capitalist development social relations
become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society
becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function
of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society.

The idea of the social factory therefore refers to a new organising stage of social
relations, through which capitalisms hold over all aspects of life is broadened
and deepened. This takes place on two levels. First is the co-option of the
unwaged, in particular of women and extended families, which enables capital-
ism to reproduce itself at no extra cost by outsourcing the repair and nurture of
the worker. Second is the incorporation of personal, leisure time and activity
(including self-education) into the circuits of consumption and production,
and value formation.
The idea of entrepreneurial educational policies and regimes fits neatly with
the idea of the social factory. The student/teacher becomes entrepreneurial
where: s/he displaces the unproductive time spent in formal schooling from
the workplace into leisure time as lifelong learning, in order to reskill or
upskill with a focus on value-production; s/he underpins study-for-work with
debt, which then drives a consumerist view of the curriculum and pedagogy
(Caffentzis 2010); s/he engages in non-work activities that generate value
through exchange, for instance in interactions in social networks that generate
data and services; institutional strategies drive individual rather than social
engagement, such as bring your own device and consumerisation policies.
Thus, entrepreneurial educational activities are central in acclimatising students
to the idea that debt-driven learning is for work, and that being always-on
extends that work into the social factory.
Technology-based forms of education play a key role in reinforcing this sub-
sumption of life under the aegis of capitalist relations of production, because
 114 R. Hall

technology enables the barriers to capital accumulation imposed by time and

space to be overcome (Marx 1993). Thus, the diffusion of technology across
an interconnected network of formal and informal educational settings helps
to transfer the risk for educational and therefore economic success from
society to the individual. As a result, educational technology can be seen as
underwriting capitals constant breaking down of the barriers to the circuits
of consumption and production, and its [c]onstant revolutionising of pro-
duction, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncer-
tainty and agitation (Marx and Engels 2002, 13). This means that [t]he
social factory is just as much governed by the destabilising experience of
changes in rhythms, differences in speeds, whiplash-like reorientations
imposed on a workforce that is flexible, precarious and permanently on-call
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and equipped with the latest iPhone (Smith in Berardi 2009, 11). Precarious
activity and instability frame all forms of educational activity inside the
competitive universe of the social factory.
Critically, the reproduction of the social factory rests on the dominance of
specific views of what constitutes a meaningful life. In the current educational
moment, this rests on a specific struggle over the idea of the student as either a
consumer or a producer (Neary 2012), and the objective reality of education as
an individualised rather than a socialised good (Bonefeld 2010). This entrepre-
neurialism reflects Marx and Engels (2002, 13) argument that capitals needs
for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over
the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere. However, in the Autonomist view, this
also introduces the possibility of new forms of transnational solidarity, political
organisation and action, including through education and technology. In this
process of forging solidarity, it is important to understand how a second core
concept of Autonomist Marxism immaterial labour produces and
valorises cognitive capital.

Immaterial labour or cognitive capital

In classical Marxism, material production forms the basis of all social life. For
Marx, the magnitude of the value of labour was driven by the labour-time that is
socially necessary to produce a specific commodity under the conditions of
production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill
and intensity of labour prevalent in that society (Marx 2004, 129). Academic
labour, which integrates specialised cognitive and material means of pro-
duction, is particularly valuable as a result of the large amount of socially
necessary labour-time embedded in its products. Academic labour therefore
promises high rates of surplus value extraction, where it can be incorporated
inside new, global educational markets (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009).
However, radical shifts in technology are important here because they revo-
lutionise the creation of surplus value across a networked, digital realm (Harvey
 Learning, Media and Technology 115

2010a). Thus, networked, digital labour has been termed immaterial because it
realises the creation and commodification of what is termed cognitive capital in
virtual space (Zizek 2009). Here, the fusion of digital technology and education
are critical in the production and accumulation of cognitive capital through
immaterial labour. The argument is that activities inside a virtual commons
or learning environment, or through a mobile application, reduces everything
to functions and raw materials, with the result that individual emotions and
affects, cultural cues and mores, and the construction of the relations between
individuals are themselves reproduced as the very material of our everyday
exploitation (Zizek 2009, 139).
Digital educational contexts enable capital to find new circuits for extracting
value from socio-emotional or personalised learning, using technologies like
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smartphones or personal learning networks. Through patents, intellectual prop-

erty rights and transnational trading agreements, an increasingly fluid and iden-
tity-driven set of web-based activities and social relations can be commodified
and exchanged (Virno 2001). These processes of exchange are catalysed by, for
example, the sharing of personal information on cloud-based social networks
that can be aggregated and data-mined. Thus, all activity or work inside the
social factory, including the processes of teaching and learning, serve as the
basis for developing new, immaterial services and applications (Vercellone
2007).
Under these conditions constant innovation becomes a central project in the
continued exploitation of educational labour. This can take many technology-
supported forms, for instance in: monitoring and stimulating cognition
through pervasive technology and mobility; enforcing private property rights
around knowledge through intellectual property and patent law; opening-up
public data so that new cloud-based services based on learning analytics can
be developed and marketised; amplifying innovations like MOOCs and open
educational resources to reinforce the global consumption and production of
commodities; and organising, disciplining and exploiting an immaterial edu-
cational workforce, or cognitariat. Digital technologies therefore support
and sustain a terrain of conflict within education, which sees the increased
exploitation of the student/teacher as knowledge worker. Indeed, instead of
the promised technologically fuelled reduction in toil and labour-time, digital
technology suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing
means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into
labour-time at capitals disposal for its own valorisation (Marx 1993, 532).

Mass intellectuality and the general intellect

These concerns over the production and ownership of academic labour and cog-
nitive capital underpin the concept of living knowledge, or the general intellect.
Marx (1993, 694) argued that the dynamics of capitalism meant
 116 R. Hall

the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of

the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence
appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital [machin-
ery]. (Marx 1993, 694)

Through innovation and competition, the technical and skilled work of the
socialised worker, operating in factories or corporations or schools, is subsumed
inside machinery. Therefore, the general intellect of society is absorbed into
capitalised technologies and techniques, in order to reduce labour costs and
increase productivity. As a result, the human being comes to relate more as
a watchman and regulator to the production process itself (Marx 1993, 705).
The Autonomist approach therefore stresses the need to understand the
mechanisms through which the general intellect is co-opted into technical
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and scientific processes that enable capitalist work and value production
(Virno 2004), so that it might be reclaimed. This concept therefore provides
a valuable counterpoint to the fetishised myth of technology as the creator of
value in the supposedly immaterial production and accumulation of cognitive
capital, rather than emerging from co-operative labour (Marx 2004; Manzerolle
2010). In terms of education and technology this frames the constant drive to
innovate using technology, for instance in outsourcing services to cloud-
based providers or in the use of learning analytics to manage the relationship
between teacher and student. It also offers mechanisms for discussing the
co-operative educational uses of technology.
From such a discussion emerges a focus on alternative educational practices
that develop socialised knowledge, or mass intellectuality, a direct, social
force of production. The idea of mass intellectuality contrasts with the usual
positioning of digital technology within the knowledge economy. Instead,
as Arviddson (2007) argues, alternative attempts can be made to liberate
science and technology across society, and to enable the free availability of
General Intellect in the social environment [which] means that capital cannot
exercise a monopoly over this productive resource. It can be employed for
autonomous or even subversive purposes. There are many forms of education
and technology that can act as critical sites in this struggle to recuperate the
general intellect including: reclaiming public, cloud-based environments that
enable globalised dissemination of knowledge at the edges of capitalist work,
for example through education commons rooted in critical pedagogy; and the
use of digital technology inside the community-building of alternative edu-
cational settings like student occupations, co-operative centres or social
science centres (Amsler and Neary 2012). These struggles for mass intellectual-
ity are an attempt to build solidarity and sharing rather than to support commo-
dification, exchange and accumulation. Thus, liberating science and technology
from inside-and-against capitals competitive dynamics is central to moving
beyond exploitation (Holloway 2002). Inside educational contexts, the
processes of learning with digital technologies offer the chance to critique the
 Learning, Media and Technology 117

purposes for which the general intellect is commodified rather than made
public.

The cybernetic hypothesis

These potentials for resistance notwithstanding, the Autonomist perspective
also highlights the mechanisms through which capital seeks to overcome
these struggles as barriers to accumulation. As the general intellect was appro-
priated by capital through the application of science (Marx 1993), it was con-
gealed inside machinery, techniques and technologies that also enable control
over production, consumption and exchange in the social factory. One
outcome of this process was the use of technologies to open-up and monitor
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labour in order that production processes could be systematised and made

more lean or efficient. From this perspective, technology is increasingly
inserted inside hierarchies of control, so that judgements about performance
can be exerted instantaneously, and systemic risks or barriers to accumulation
can be reduced. This is known as the cybernetic hypothesis (Tiqqun 2001).
The emergence of cybernetics focused upon the science of control mechan-
isms, through which the exchange of information was seen to create stability.
While this is especially important in maintaining the power of transnational
finance capital, education can also be seen as forming a critical new terrain
inside which digital technology is used for control (Dyer-Witheford 1999).
This includes: developing new services through data-mining and learning ana-
lytics; extending the jurisdiction and governance of cloud-based technologies,
including over personalised tools and identities; and using performance man-
agement data about learning to hedge the financial returns on student loans
and bonds (McGettigan 2012). Digital technology is therefore used to reinforce
hierarchies of power that seek the panoptic monitoring, surveillance and
measurement of all activity (Foucault 1990; Dyer-Witheford 1999). In this
view, cybernetics is not just a technological history but a history of the chan-
ging social networks that connected these technologies to the function of the
state and its management (Miller Medina 2005, 17). Thus one of the main con-
sequences of digital technology within educational organisations is to crystal-
lise the power of administrators and education corporations.
For Autonomists, the act of opposing these forms of cybernetic control is not
one of simply refusing high technology, but rather of opening-up technologies
and techniques to reveal the internal, totalising dynamics of capitalism (Meik-
sins-Wood 1997). From this position, alternatives rooted in co-operative self-
organisation emerge (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). As the Tiqqun collective
(2001) has argued, underpinning any attempt to negate the cybernetic hypoth-
esis is rethinking what it means to be human. A critical role for educationalists
using technology is therefore to develop educational opportunities that high-
light the development of counter-narratives of commons, co-operation, solidar-
ity, sharing and public (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Winn 2012). This involves
 118 R. Hall

identifying and highlighting the forms of control that pervade the social factory
through educational work and suggesting alternatives so that capital itself []
becomes uncovered, at a certain level of its development, as a social power
(Tronti 1971, 105).

Conclusion: the implications of Autonomist Marxism for education and

technology
The Autonomist approach is not without criticism. From outside the tradition
this has centred upon its apparent network-centrism and its failure to address
the realities of power that emerge from hierarchical, globalised forces of pro-
duction (Robinson 2004; Camfield 2007; Davies 2011). These realities
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include the privatisation and outsourcing of educational services to the global

South, and the accumulation of natural resources, like rare earth metals, oil
and coal and human capital from that same space. Moreover, entrepreneurial
education and the promise of technology in the global North support precarious
work and hyper-exploitation for those without proprietary skills, alongside rein-
forcing transnational hierarchies. Thus King (2010, 287) notes that from a
structural perspective, even with the transformative powers of digital technol-
ogy, we are not moving into a post-capitalist age. The fundamental property
relationships that underpin the class structure remain intact and have sharply
intensified. The question is whether and how the connections between sites
of exploitation including education and technology can be made.
From inside the tradition critical voices have questioned the focus on the
idea of labour as the permanent and defining crisis of capitalism, rather than
developing a critique of and response to those crises as emerging from the con-
tradictions of capitalism itself (Bologna 2014; Tomba and Bellofiore 2014). It is
through this critique that a meaningful counter-narrative can emerge through
class struggle, rather than the multitudinous refusals of labour. It is argued
that fragmented and potentially unorganised refusals are not enough to lever
change, especially where capitalists are consciously seeking to innovate.
Thus, one might ask, how does Autonomist Marxism help one to make sense
of the use of technology to privatise education in the global North, or to
expand markets in the global South?
Equally, the focus on the socialised worker, who labours in the social
factory, rather than the collectivised worker, who labours in industry, is seen
as privileging a particular view of the working class as Multitude (Tomba
and Bellofiore 2014). As a result it risks defining every alternative use of tech-
nology in education, like open education or personalisation, as a refusal of
valorisation or as the development of a counter-narrative with the power to con-
front capital, rather than to be subsumed by it. Instead, critics have insisted on a
re-focusing on the realities of labour relations and the relations of production in
developing counter-narratives. These might include the refusal of academic
labour in formal educational institutions, the development of the academic
 Learning, Media and Technology 119

commons, the use of free and open source software and copyleft licenses, the
realisation of peer-to-peer networks, and so on.
However, the Autonomist approach enables a critique of the inter-relation-
ships between education, technology and capitalist work, in order to uncover
how the whole of human life is systemically enclosed and mined for the
accumulation of value. The connections between immaterial labour in the pro-
duction of cognitive capital, realised across the whole of society restructured as
a factory, point towards the mechanisms through which technology-rich
educational settings are co-opted for work. Moreover, the Autonomist tradition
reconnects Marxs idea of the general intellect, or learning at a social scale
infused with science and technology, to the idea of working class self-aware-
ness and emancipation through mass intellectuality. It also highlights how
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capital drives beyond barriers using the control of information flows and com-
municative reason through cybernetics, in order to enclose and police both the
social factory as a whole and cracks in the fabric of society through which mass
intellectuality might rupture.
The promise of rupture and the recalibration of life against work by labour
are central in how Autonomist Marxism develops our understanding of
education and technology. In particular, the work of the EduFactory (2013)
collective is important in its critique of how education continues to be designed
for contemporary forms of capitalism, and in highlighting alternatives based
around the solidarity campaigns of students against austerity in both the
global South and global North. These analyses connect formal educational set-
tings to the educational agendas of the Occupy movement (Hall 2011; Amsler
and Neary 2012) in an attempt to recuperate education as a political project that
focuses upon human struggle for subjectivity or emancipation (Thorburn 2012).
These distributed struggles question essentialist ideas of educations role in sus-
taining economic progress and liberal democracy.
In the Autonomist view this struggle for a set of alternatives based around
the interests of workers and the working class is central. Students and teachers
might then ask whether the use of educational technology can be co-opted for
the revolutionary transformation of society? Can they be recuperated for an
alternative value-structure, and alternative value-system that does not have
the specific character of that achieved under capitalism (Harvey 2010a)? Cru-
cially, in this process technology is not to be refused or destroyed, for as
Marx (1993) argued doing so is a form of false consciousness. Instead, at
issue is overcoming the alienation that is made worse by the entrance of
machines into production and recuperating the technologies that are the accu-
mulated real wealth of the industrial social world (Wendling 2009, 2). As the
Autonomist position reminds us this is a deeply human endeavour, demanding
that technology and time, underpinned by co-operative education, are devoted
to finding alternative forms of society and political organisation.
Pace Harvey (2010b), there are clear connections between education and
technology on the one hand and the evolutionary trajectory of capitalism on
 120 R. Hall

the other. The Autonomist position can help develop a critique of how the com-
plexities of control and consent throughout the institutions of civil society are
maintained. In this sense, Autonomist Marxism helps remind us that the digital
age does not simply refer to digital machines and processes but to the entire pol-
itical, social and economic context and infrastructure within which they have
emerged (Burston, Dyer-Witheford, and Hearn 2010, 215). This enables a cri-
tique of how learning, media and technology operate as an ideological terrain
that legitimates the interests of the transnational elite (Robinson 2004; Ball 2012).
The Autonomist position therefore offers mechanisms through which one
might challenge, resist and push-back against the marketisation of public edu-
cation, indentured study and the hidden curriculum that asserts the primacy of
value-for-money, impact metrics, productivity and efficiency (Williams 2011).
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While an articulation of how technologies discipline learning are not unique to

Autonomist thinking (Casarino and Negri 2008; Hall and Stahl 2012), this tra-
dition does help to reveal how the effects of such technologies across an increas-
ingly global, social field like education might be inverted and resisted. Thus, it is
the fusion of ideas like the social factory, immaterial labour and cognitive capital,
mass intellectuality and the cybernetic hypothesis, inside-and-against domains
like education and technology, which might enable the objective, material
realities of social life to be uncovered. One result of an Autonomist reading of
education and technology might be to give voice to possible alternatives.

Notes on contributor
Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University in
Leicester, UK, where he is also the Head of Enhancing Learning through Technology.
He is a UK National Teaching Fellow. He writes at: http://richard-hall.org

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