Abstract

Student as Producer is a curricula for revolutionary teaching that emerged from inside an English university at the start of the 21st century. Grounded in a pedagogy derived from Marxist social theory, Student as Producer provides a practical and critical response to the on-going assault on higher education by the social power of Money and the State, with a focus on Police. This account of Student as Producer is set within a particular moment in time: between the student protests and urban riots that erupted in England in 2010 - 2011 and the 2017 General Election in the UK, when students and young people played a significant role protesting the politics of austerity and supporting the politics of Corbynism. This book explores the intellectual origins of Student as Producer, with particular reference to Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer (Benjamin 1934), and develops the concept of Student as Producer through an engagement with the work of major writers on revolutionary education: Jacques Ranciére, Paulo Freire, and Paula Allman. Student as Producer’s revolutionary curriculum is framed around unlearning the law of labour as a critique of capitalist work and the institutions through which the law of labour is enforced, including the capitalist university. The critique proposes a new form of higher education institution: a co-operative university, as a moment of revolutionary transition towards communism: making a clear link between democracy and Marx’s law of value. This moment of revolutionary transition is consolidated by drawing on the power of Strike, not to defend labour but to move towards the abolition of capitalist work. And, finally, at the end of the book, a thought experiment about how such a university and its communist sociality would be defended: not by Police, but another form of Authority and Authorship. The theoretical frame for an alternative to Police is taken from the work of the Soviet legal theorist, Evgeny Pashukanis (1891-1937) based on common purpose and social defence. Authority comes from a critique of authoritarianism recovered from ancient Roman philosophy. Authorship is after Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer inflected with a dialectical twist.