archive : s0metim3s

The remarks below about the connections between student visas and work in Australia were written by Liz. I moved them from the comments under the post about the taxidrivers’ strike in Melbourne so as to prompt further discussion. - a.

So - if you look at Australia, obviously there has always been the use of low-wage migrant labour, and worse, slave labour for indig crew and Pacific Islanders.

However, I would suggest that the transformations in the Australian economy since trade liberalisation in the 1980s (1989 - Professor Ross Garnaut - Australia and the north east asian ascendancy - the policy document that Rudd’s new climate guru wrote convincing Hawke to move to tariff reductions - in textiles this actually predated tariff reductions in the rest of the West), as well as the nationalist counter-reaction from the trade and student unions, have created new and more direct manifestations of the attempt to drive the wage floor down by deliberately tweaking migration schemes towards the creation of low wage and precarious labour markets. As Ange has said many times, it is possible to trace the intersections between the internment camps and the labour market. I’m going to try to do this with a little bit on student visas too… actually, most of this is going to be about student visas, but with other stuff thrown in as poorly organised thoughts.

The Australian student movement is dead! Long live the global undercommons, may its defiances proliferate! (Read more, download the pdf of an article by Mickie Skelton)

Part two of the edu-factory contribution, also in draft and incomplete. The first part is here.

So, the initial question I posed – that of how to approach questions of hierarchisation without supposing, or imagining, that this might be set aside by the ostensibly universalising reach of the general equivalent – could be better put as a question that does not only obtain for the university, but instead as the suturing of affects, norms and labour that the university partakes in but by no means exhausts.

Part one, still in draft, of the edu-factory contribution. Part two here. The edu-factory site is here.

Addendum: The final version of the below is here - the second part has been delayed by travel …

How to consider the forms of hierarchisation, submission, intolerance, meekness and domination that obtain in the university without at the same time deferring to either the dream of a universality or, what is the same thing, the nightmare of a total mobilisation – which is to say, the absolute hierarchy of the general equivalent?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

This declaration is many things, but it is above all the articulation of a seeming paradox that will preoccupy dialecticians of various shades for centuries.

Here’s what I just sent off for the edu-factory discussions.

– ή θα νικήσει ο τρόμος, ή θα νικήσει ο δρόμος

As is more or less well-known, Kant’s writings on the university, collected under the heading of The Conflict of the Faculties, are preoccupied with establishing limits, borders – above all, the limits to conflict.

After over month-long occupations of universities and protests throughout Greece - below a report from D, via edu-factory: