They will never give it away for free

With new protests against the fees and cuts being made to Higher Education planned for this Wednesday on what’s being called ‘Day X’ (more information here) it’s necessary to avoid getting drowned in the new slave consensus.  The ‘cuts’, the ‘deficit’ and the whole new way in which economics is being organised are presented as obvious, necessary, inevitable.  They are no such thing.  There are always options.  There are realities that we can imagine but these realities must be fought for, both physically and mentally. We must dream and demonstrate the new reality. The only other option is to let the new ‘common sense’ drown us.  They will never give it away for free, it has always had to be taken from them by force.  This time will be no different.  Prepare to fight now.  It’s the students and universities at the moment, it will be your hospitals, schools and homes next…and soon.

We’re all pretty fucked…It’s not just cuts in education and upping the fees that’s the problem. The problem is that the cuts in general mean we’re all pretty fucked. Whether you’re a student in a F.E college or University, whether you’re a working single-mum, whether you’re self-employed, whether you’re unemployed, whether you’re working a precarious temp job, whether you working a good job in the public sector. The depth of the cuts means most people are going to become worse-off.There are differing trains of thought that link the cuts to ‘The Crisis’ or ‘The Deficit’ or ‘The Tories’ but for many there is a much more simple truth – it’s just called ‘Life as normal’. The rich have been getting successively richer in this country and the poor have been getting poorer. If the cuts are setting out to re-float a busted economy of over-inflated debt and speculation by taking more and more from the poorer section of the population, well, it’s just more of the same for most people. Poverty, crap jobs, insecurity, health problems – well, that’s just how we’ve been living anyway. But do you feel like politicians will sort it out for you? Do you feel like if you keep your head down and work hard, you’ll be okay? Do you feel scared? Had enough of that shit yet?”

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2010/11//468269.pdf

http://anticuts.org.uk/

http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/

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Todd May, in his book ‘Our practices, our selves – or, what it means to be human’ (OPOS), argues that this question is best understood through the concept of practices and as such one of the first things he does is provide us with a definition of what a practice is. His definition goes as follows:

“a regularity (or regularities) of behavior, usually goal-directed, that is socially normatively governed.” (OPOS: 8).

May then cashes out this definition by discussing the three elements of the definition, viz. goal-directedness, socially normative governance and regularities of behaviour. The first of these is discussed briefly and is a vague criteria since it is not a universal but is presented as important nonetheless. May phrases the discussion in terms of ‘most practices’ but allows that some practices will be exceptions to this rule, using Zen meditation as an example since it rests on the paradoxical ‘goal of goal-lessness’. The second aspect of the definition, that of socially normative governance, is distinguished from ‘rule-following’ again through a criteria of vagueness, with the argument that the type of norms involved are not known through explicit thematisation into propositions but rather are known through the mode of skill, or ‘know-how’. This is articulated in the form of the argument that those involved in a practice might not be able to articulate the norms of the practice but they know it when they see it – a practice has ‘norms’ in the form of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of being done and those who can most clearly distinguish these and show others how to distinguish these are classed as experts. In addition to being normative a practice is also social in that there are roles within a practice, what May describes as “normatively governed places in which people engage in the practice” (OPOS: 10).

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