Just as Marxian theory is not the only way to classify members of a population, revolution is a word that might exist in other contexts too. Etymologically, it relates to revolve, to roll back, from late Latin revolutio. Whatever that might mean, it is about movement – you cannot have revolution without movement.
Capital is a constantly revolutionising force. It changes the way we think about the world. And it is about movement. That is, capital, taken in the meaning of self-accumulating value, can only be achieved through movement. If revolution is also about movement and if we are participating in a movement, then what is it of capitalism that makes it stink like milk gone bad? Democracy is about movement too, right? Power is supposed to rotate between one group who 'represent' the people to another; the power to decide who this is going to be, comes back to the people in regular time-intervals. But these two movements are of different kinds. The myth of capital as producing democracy has now lost all its legitimacy: the only thing they are left with (and they have done really well in convincing a lot of people) is the dogma of no alternative. Even worse, for those who think that they don't buy the TINA mantra, the alternative is Keynes. This is why you have some places in the world (Germany, China) talking about growth, and others (e.g. the US after a brief prelude of light Keynesianism) imposing austerity. But this is besides the point.
We all more or less have wondered of the class content of the student movement. Classifying people is something we do all the time, but not necessarily through a Marxian frame. When Obama talks of the middle class, he does not necessarily imply Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. In simple terms, in every society, no matter when or where, there is a portion of the population who work; that is, a subgroup of society use their muscles and brain to transform nature in some way (through 'socially necessary labour') that produces the stuff we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we all live in, etc. There are other groups of people who live off the stuff produced by the group of people who work: children, the elderly, sick people, soldiers, students, doctors, teachers, etc. This means, that the group of people who work, (have to) produce more than that they themselves consume: this group is the (productive) working class and the extra they produce is the surplus. In this sense, it is impossible to abolish the working class – strictly speaking. So, when we try to figure out what's the class content of the student movement, let's bear in mind that whatever that is, it is not working class proper (in the sense that we participate as students or as teachers, even if one might also be a worker).
Of course there are millions of reasons of supporting non-working groups of people. But their role in society is different and falls outside the scope of strict analysis: doctors' or teachers' work is invaluable (contrary to the value that can be assigned to the products of labour) and the decision of what we do for them is always already made by society. Imagine a society that does not feed or clothe children. Hypothetically speaking: simply let them die on the street. This decision has been made – consciously or not. In some cases, not making a decision amounts to making one. Of course there are also groups of people who do work but not produce, in the sense of using their brain and muscles to transform nature and so on: these groups too live off (in the biological sense) from the surplus of the productive working class (cf. blue-collar/white-collar).
In education, a problem arises when assigning value to its products. The products of the work of students (exams, essays, etc.) on the one hand, and the Research Excellence Framework on the other. While we all know that education is a process; how can you measure the value of that? We all know that the National Student Survey is a futile attempt to measure aspects of higher education; this is not only so because of the consumerist model it implies (an ideological perversity in itself), but because of the underlying impossibility of measuring the transformation that takes place while studying, no matter how hard we try to time-structure and institutionalise the process.
Now, the problem is that the people who produce the surplus are not the same who decide how this is distributed. Some people produce the surplus, someone else gets it and decides where it goes to. This is the capitalist relationship strictly speaking. It doesn't matter whether this 'someone else' is the state or a corporation; in both cases a different group of people get the surplus. In the one case it is the state officials and in the other the board of directors. Capitalism was never about individuality. This is simply bourgeois ethics of the marketplace and can never been more than a marketing rhetoric. So, if capitalism is about movement and collective decision-making, were does our collective movement stand? David Harvey would say here that we need to learn from capital how to do it.
As David Graeber said in the recent Arts Against Cuts weekend, we tend to imagine capitalism as a giant monster and resistance to it as a gigantic force that will hopefully overthrow it. But in our everyday life we all behave as communists – and that's what we need to bring into collective consciousness. We share household work with our flatmates without exchange between us (economy: oikos + nomos = equal distribution of what relates to work done the house). It is only fair that the people who produce the surplus, also keep it and decide collectively, in a self-organised way, what to do with it. There's a double conclusion here: the problem of state intervention (how much, in which ways) is (ir)relevant to both capitalist and communist organisations; and that communist organisation is relevant to production, to work-related activities, both on the small scale and on the large. From this follows that, so long as there exist state organisations, the state is always necessarily a capitalist in relation to workers.
What do these mean for the university? Students who expect the university to provide education, are somehow expecting a return on their investment (fees, time, effort, etc). We need to bring into public consciousness that education in itself cannot be provided by anyone, except by the students and teachers as a collective. Professors are not simply providing knowledge. It doesn't work like that and this is not the work of the professor. The profession of the professor, as Derrida said, is not simply a constative speech-act. It is not a simple a discourse of pure knowledge. It is not an exchange of a fair amount of fees for a fair amount of knowledge and skills. To profess means to declare openly, to declare publicly; in some ways, it is a performative act of speech. This is what we need to bring into public attention. This is the aim of public interventions like the ones of the University for Strategic Optimism, the Really Free School, or student occupations. This is a time of questioning society what decision should be or is being made regarding the university. The university as a common, public space to address common problems.
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