Richard Hall

“The Hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable.”

Faced by the realities and lived experiences of intersecting crises, the University has become hopeless, in two respects. First, it has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, and has become an anti-human project devoid of hope. Second, it is unable to respond meaningfully with crises that erupt from the contradictions of capital. Thus, in its maintenance of business-as-usual, the University remains shaped as a tactical response to these contradictions.

The Hopeless University examines the structures/forms, cultures/pathologies and activities/methodologies of the University, in order to question what kind of higher learning we yearn for and deserve. In looking at the ways in which the University represents our entangled, intellectual existence, Richard Hall asks whether we might compost the structures, cultures and activities that engender hopelessness and helplessness. Might other modes of intellectual work and higher learning be possible?

In addressing this question, individuals and communities are invited to consider the potential for reimagining intellectual work as a movement of sensuous human activity in the world, and as a refusal of its commodification. As widespread social struggles against capitalism are revealed, we are reminded of our ability to make history. Thus, we must discuss how to reimagine and recycle intellectual work in society. We must discuss how to compost The Hopeless University as an indignant movement of dignity.

Richard Hall is Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is a National Teaching Fellow and writes about life in higher education at: richard-hall.org.

You can read the book online below, download it for free (and donate a suggested £1 if you like), or purchase a paperback copy at your local bookstore or online.

Teppo Eskelinen, Tuuli Hirvilammi and Juhana Venäläinen (eds.)

The Nordic welfare states, despite their history of successful welfare generation, have recently experienced a penetration of capitalist market relations to ever new spheres of life. Also their failure to create ecologically sustainable welfare models has been undeniable.

Simultaneously, community economies have emerged as a source of ideas and practices on what ‘the economy’ fundamentally could signify. In their multiple manifestations, community economies are about enacting the economy differently, on a grassroots level.

Yet community economies have typically not been analysed as inspirations and challenges to the future of the welfare state. This is despite that, to some extent, they share the same ethos with Nordic welfare states, based on the values of universalism and decommodification.

This book presents a number of empirical case studies of community economies in the context of a Nordic welfare state to better understand the potential of community economies and the interaction and friction with state governance, and more generally the conditions in which community economies and Nordic welfare states can co-exist and cooperate.

Could a Nordic welfare state be an enabling platform for community economies to diffuse? And could community economies show the welfare states a future based on decommodification and respect of the ecological limits?

The authors of the book are Finnish academics with an activist leaning, representing a number of different academic disciplines.

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Monika Kostera

We have been led to believe that the commons met their tragic fate because they were outdated and ineffective as a way of organizing human economic and social activity. However, this story only makes sense if we adopt a severely truncated understanding of being human, shorn of insights from psychology, sociology, or ecology. This book proposes organizational ideas and practices born out of the archetype of the commons, as well as tools reclaimed, renewed, and recycled from the vast repository of modern management models. Capitalism is failing and we need to find a better way to organize ourselves, more humanely as well as in accordance with the ecosystem.

About the author

Monika Kostera is Professor Ordinaria in economics and the humanities at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and professor in organization and management at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She is the author or editor of many other books and articles. She has worked in Polish, Swedish and UK universities. Her current research interests include imagination, alternative organization and organizational ethnography. She is member of poets’ cooperative Erbacce Press, Liverpool.

You can read the book online below, download it for free (and donate a suggested £1 if you like), or purchase a paperback copy at your local bookstore or online.

Toni Ruuska

Capitalism is ecologically irredeemable. It simply cannot be fixed. This is because capitalism is based on endless capital accumulation, entailing growth in material throughput, whereas the planet Earth is finite. From this conclusion of ecological Marxism, this book continues to theorise how capitalism is reproduced in the 21st century. It is argued that the logic of capital and production based on the profit motive, competition and productivity enhancements is not enough to reproduce capitalism, but a wide variety of national and transnational institutional arrangements, repressive and ideological state apparatuses are needed as well to secure and protect its continuation. One of the most important state institutions from this perspective is higher education. Higher education has an integral role not only in educating people to become part of the capitalist production, but also has a significant role in providing knowledge, innovations and other outputs for expansive capital accumulation. Based on neoliberal restructuring of contemporary higher education, it is claimed that one of the primary purposes of higher education is to reproduce capitalism, and because of this higher education is increasingly functioning on an ecologically unsustainable basis.

About the author

Toni Ruuska is a University Teacher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Economics and Management. This book is based on his doctoral dissertation.

You can read the book online below, download it for free (and donate a suggested £1 if you like), or purchase a paperback copy at your local bookstore or online.

Ruuska_REPRODUCTION REVISITED_ B-Format Paperback_COVER_FINAL_ebook_pdf

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