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ON A RAINY EVENING IN OCTOBER 2011 WE ARE SITTING IN THE GENERAL Assembly of Occupy London Stock Exchange in the courtyard of St Paul's Cathedral. It is day four [...]

To the extent that their labour produces value and surplus value, teachers are productive labourers. This paper discusses teachers' labour in relation to the production of new labour power, explores the extent to which it is alienated, and explains how it produces surplus value. But the classroom is also a site of struggle. The paper explores some of the ways in which teachers and students may both refuse capitalist work and create space in order to pursue alternative projects that better meet their own needs. To this extent, teachers and students are productive, not of value, but of struggle., Introduction Marxists have long recognised that educators play a key role in the reproduction of capitalist relations f production in general, and of that special commodity, labour power, in particular. [...]

To develop a meaningful understanding of living standards and the distribution of income in capitalist economies, it is important to consider the length of the working day. Since Karl Marx's […]

Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler (eds.) What is to be Done? Leninism, anti-Leninist Marxism and the question of revolution today Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002 ISBN 0-7546-3231-8 (hbk) 46.50 £ What is [...]

Arena Publications, 2002, 318 pp. ISBN: 0-9598181-6-2 (pbk) Australian universities are in crisis. That is the premise of all 13 of the contributions to this collection, which forms a special [...]

We are in the midst of a 'research-bourgeois' revolution within higher education in the UK. Part of the global project of neo-liberalism to strengthen the link between money and work, and driven by research assessment, diverse research use-values are being subordinated to homogeneous RAE-value. Academic research workers are becoming alienated from the product of their labour. Once freely available to all academics, 'intellectual commons' - well-stocked library, material security, time and other resources - are being enclosed, access becoming dependent upon production of RAE-value. Two new classes are emerging in academia as some research workers are forced to alienate their own research-labour-power, selling their ability to carry out research work to 'research capitalists', who are able to appropriate a portion of the RAE-value which results.

The United Kingdom must establish a research unit to compile and secure information regarding areas used in the past as radium sites to facilitate cleanup. The establishment of formal records appears to be the biggest challenge as shown by past pressures exerted by developers and financiers to oppose the proposals for an official Contaminated Land Register. However, the after-effects of radium should not be ignored since the legacy of the radium industry still exists in the form of contaminated land and buildings, waste and products.

Tara Brabazon The University of Google: Education in the (Post) Information Age Ashgate, 2007, 234 pp. ISBN: 9780754670971 (hbk) 30 £ The University of Google is a positive book, an [...]

This article pries open the black box of the social impact bond (SIB), the novel financial instrument at the heart of social investment. We discover that concrete information is currently limited and our method is thus more speculative. We address the obfuscation of the nomenclature of the instrument and explore the mechanics of SIBs to suggest that they are not simple bonds but rather also bear properties akin to those associated with derivative contracts. We speculate on possible developments of the market in these bonds by considering the history of some previous financial innovations, namely, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) underpinned by microfinance loans and the short-lived policy analysis market. Our discussion leads us to reevaluate Goodhart's law and the ways in which it operates in relation to SIBs. We conclude by suggesting that SIBs' inherent indifference to the underlying state of the world renders them ultimately unlikely to delivery improvements in public services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom is pioneering a new model for the delivery of public services, based around the device of a social investment market. At the heart of this social investment market is an innovative new financial instrument, the social impact bond (SIB). In this paper we argue that the SIB promises (partial) solutions to four aspects of the present multifaceted crisis: the crisis of social reproduction; the crisis of capital accumulation; the fiscal crisis of the state; and the crisis of political legitimacy. In this sense, we conceive the social investment market as a crisis management strategy. We draw on evidence from the world's first SIB, the Peterborough SIB, launched in 2010, as well as from other SIBs, in order to assess the extent to which the social investment market delivers on its four promises. In doing so, we argue that the crisis of neoliberalism and the social investment market are not only in historical correspondence, but in a relation of causality to one another. In developing this argument, this paper contributes to contemporary theories of neoliberalism by investigating how concrete state developments and societal restructuring is being advanced around the idea of linking marketization with progressive social change. It also supports critical practitioners by offering a theoretical lens to identify the contradictions of this increasingly popular policy approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]