The revenge of the state: regulation-as-expulsion
International education economies within Australia have been in a period of turbulence and reconstitution. From the overall social positioning of those on international student visas, and in more direct relation to violence, workplace exploitation and school closure, movement and resistances arose, with direct and massive consequences. The relation of resistance to recruitment has the potential to impact upon the relation of exploitation to profit for particular capitals, and for these economies broadly upon the transformation of surplus-value into additional capital, and the responses of the Australian state(s) were efforts to manage (away) this potential crisis of reproduction. Thus these movements and resistances, in their most ‘visible’ forms, have been undermined and largely defeated, by both the intensification of xenophobia and violence on the one hand, and new regulation and enforcement by the state on the other – the latter involving a wave of expulsions and enhanced border control, as well as the sacrifice of a section of private capital in the form of colleges which will end up closing, as part of efforts to re-found “the industry” on new and hopefully more stable bases, less dependent upon the non-rich and overcoming the fragility of the existing integration of Australian institutions in world markets. Though this transition is far from complete, and will likely be far from smooth, the outlines of such a state-managed transition are now evident - we will see the scale on which the state will transform the lower end of the guest consumers into supernumeraries, and the degree of success of efforts to create and develop alternative markets.

Of course, post-expulsion, people become invisible to ‘Australia’ – maybe World Vision can organise some sponsorship for the chronically-indebted families, whole villages even, which will be left in the wake of this moment of restructuring. These are also results of the mediate processes of reproduction.

The student movement was not a student movement
The only student movement in Australia worth mentioning turned out not to be a student movement at all, least of all one in continuity with any of the historical student movements of Australia. Ironically, the once-popular slogan, “education for all, not just the rich”, is now relevant in a way not seen in my lifetime, though in a way invisible within the covertly-national political categories of social democracy and its radical edges.

There is no alternative, not even this one
In almost the same way that the struggle of a section of proletarians to be eg. Australian construction workers contains within it the struggle against the outsider, the struggles of those on international student visas, conducted in terms of the “students” as representation of the social category of the guest consumer, have capital as their horizon.

neologistics
A few days ago I submitted an article to the Sydney-based anarchist zine Mutiny. The collective had asked if I wanted to write something after they had read a post on this blog. The post in question - “international students, women, public secrets” - wasn’t any kind of coherent whole, and as a jumping off point would always have been something I would have wanted to reconstruct, but still I think the collective was probably hoping for, or at least expecting, something different from what I ended up sending. They haven’t said this, but it would be reasonable if this was the case, and surprising if it wasn’t.

What I ended up sending was written quite fast, but after quite a bit of thinking and prior writing on closely related subjects, by which I mean international education economies and matters related to such economies. (It was also longer than they asked for, which I know was rude of me.)

Also, what I wrote was partially written under the influence of the French group and publication Theorie Communiste - or rather under the influence of my attempts to think about issues raised by my reading of Theorie Communiste. These issues include but are not limited to: understanding the history of capitalism as the history of relations of exploitation, and the current restructuring - the restructuring which is contemporary capitalism - as a reconstitution of such relations and a new subsumption of labour under capital; the concept of ‘proletarian identity’ and of the dissolution of same; the specificity of TC’s concept of the cycle of struggle, in relation to their (version of a) periodization of capitalism in relation to phases of subsumption. In any case, for more on TC and these issues, people can take a look at the relevant issues of Riff-Raff and Endnotes.

In any case, as the Australian state has been increasingly founded upon these ‘educational’ economies, those on international student visas have ever-increasingly faced a social terrain of predatory extraction, in (at least nominally educational) institutions, housing, transport, heathcare and wage-labor, for starters - everyone wants a cut and the states want several. Meanwhile a cross-class, multi-cultural phenomenon of anti-international-student xenophobia, focussed on Indian males as seemingly some kind of metonym of international education economies, has been translated into permission for violence, whether for sport or money but emphatically targeting such people. Meanwhile, trade unions and NUS have expressed desires to push international students out of labor markets and the less wealthy out of the country, respectively.

I thought that I would set out, here, a few of the ideas I’ve been using in trying to understand these ‘international education economies’ (as Liz and I have been referring to them), and more exactly the terms I have been using as shorthand.

International education economies
The de facto deal involved years of exploitation and jumping through hoops enforced by the state with the constant threat of deportation, with the eventual pay-off of permanent residency, some kind of qualification giving at least some access to labor markets, and greater access to the general conditions of social reproduction available, at least supposedly, to Australian citizens. Including access to family reunion and other sponsored immigration programs.

Guest consumers
Like guest workers, only these non-citizens are brought in for their cash, initially and still substantially simply for their ability to pay fees, but now the basis of a whole series of economies within (and across) Australian borders. These are guest consumer economies.

Now that the federal government has decided that a section of these guest consumers - assumed to be mostly at the bottom of the socio-economic scale - should be dispensed with, this deal referred to above has been subject to targeted cancellation. The federal government is seeking to re-found the guest consumer economies on new bases, with new forms of regulation and filtering combining with efforts to develop alternative markets, mostly in Asia, and hopefully made up of elites, children of.

Despite all of this some people still act as if we must all be making sure people on international student visas are “genuine students” - the jargon of inauthenticity which takes added force because of these people are also not genuine Australians and thus not genuine members of the Australian multiculture.

Very real subsumption
My stand in for a whole series of problems focussed on questions of the periodisation of capitalism and more particularly the reconstitution of social reproduction on new bases. Hence the subtitle of my Mutiny submission, ‘Causes of the Mediated Processes of Reproduction’. (Geddit?)

An example of these processes in Australia, obviously, being post-secondary education, now properly capitalist, really subsumed, with internal and external competitive markets, exploitation of labor tied to imperatives of income generation, and dynamics of self-expansion as the expansion of value i.e. the very definition of capital. And yet still an institution of social (and labor market) reproduction, so that when the state wishes to shift the bases of these economies it still does so through a reassertion of the importance of labor market management (and border control, the related state concern).

Multicultural patriotism

State-sponsored anti-/racism in Australia takes the form of multicultural patriotism - we are all Australian (except most of the world, obviously). As such this anti-/racism can easily form the basis of xenophobia. Australians can unite against the non-citizen and still have a multicultural good conscience. (Even if many people still think of ‘whites’ - a shifting but persistent concept - as the real Australians.)

Anyway…
The purpose of all this is not to announce the discovery of the new figure of radical politics - which I why in the text for Mutiny I referred to “a new social object” instead of subject, so I wouldn’t be confused with Negri discovering the new revolutionary subject every time he reads the morning paper. But neither do I think that these developments only have significance for those most directly implicated in these economies. In other words, these are attempts to understand the on-going restructuring in which we are all implicated, as well as the tensions and fractures within particular moments, particular aspects of these economies - it is not just a joke to ask about causes of the mediated processes of reproduction.

Political criticism in the United States often focusses on the relation of various politicians to sections of capital - X is a tool of the oil industry, Y has a back-scratching relationship with some lobbyist, that sort of thing. There is much less of this in Australia, and I don’t think this is simply because of a relative absence of any tradition of investigative journalism.

And who doesn’t love a populist struggle against corrupt power?

I’ve often thought that I would like to see a film in which people valiantly struggle against corruption, against conspiracy and the power of donations and lobbyists and particularly evil corporations, a struggle which they ‘win’ - exposing and de-throwning these especially corrupt forces. Only to have their successors in state power - better people, reasonable people, neither crazy-dogmatic nor bought-and-paid-for - make more-or-less the same decisions, not because of individual or collective corruption, but because of the imperatives which define the reproduction of states within capital.

In recent times I’ve been writing for the Indusage, an English-language-based Indian community newspaper in Melbourne. There are several of these Indian newspapers now, some of which seem to consist solely of advertisements targeting the local Indian community and Indian international students, decorated with news about Bollywood and related celebrity crises.

The Indusage is easily the best for political reporting and commentary, including articles by the editor which tend to be long, sophisticated and collectively amount to an account of the development of post-colonial elites in India and Australia and the forms of politics and representation this has entailed. In addition, of the Indian community newspapers, the Indusage reputedly has the largest circulation.

My most recent work, “Global Thinking: Victoria’s Action Plan for International Education”, was available on-line in the Febuary 2010 edition, but apparently something has gone wrong with the domain.

Despite which, I think that people should write for the Indusage.

The most cowardly, unresisting people become implacable as soon as they can exercise their absolute parental authority. The abuse of this authority is, as it were, a crude compensation for all the submissiveness and dependence to which they abase themselves willy-nilly in bourgeois society.

[…]

The unfortunate wife was sentenced to the most intolerable slavery, and this slavery was only enforced by Monsieur de M… on the basis of the Code civil and the right of property, on the basis of social conditions which render love independent of the free sentiments of the lovers and allow the jealous husband to surround his wife with locks as the miser does his coffers; for she is only a part of his inventory.

Karl Marx, “Peuchet: On Suicide”, 1846.

The Melbourne gay/queer/somewhere-in-between publication MCV recently printed an article by Nicholas Richardson, a short, straightforward argument about the politics of ’same-sex marriage’, current campaigns for.

Rodney Croome, “gay advocate”, briefly responded to Nick’s article:

He seems to think the practical benefits don’t count for much (tell that to a same-sex partner whose denied hospital visitation rights because she can’t prove her relationship to her sick partner).

And he completely overlooks the way marriage allows partners to belong, to be included in and to connect with, not only each other, but their families and the broader community.

The idea that the former problem can only be addressed by state-validation of same-sex marriage is disingenuous, to say the least.

And the second paragraph quoted is even more ridiculous, since Nick didn’t “completely overlook” any such thing - the article is about the politics of such connections, inclusions and belonging being dependent upon - allowed by - officially-sanctioned ‘marriage’-status. Which Croome surely knows, if he read the article.

In fact, the second sentence is a pretty good summary of problems with the socio-legal concept of ‘marriage’, heteronormative or otherwise.