The Workers’ and Punks’ University

Class-struggle after the end of class-struggle

WPU, the Workers’ and Punks’ University (http://dpu.mirovni-institut.si/ ), is a collective of students, researchers, and activists who organize series of public lectures, workshops, and seminars on issues that are both theoretically crucial and politically urgent. Located in the Autonomous Cultural Centre Metelkova and affiliated with the Peace Institute (Ljubljana), it provides a radical local alternative to the academia as well as politics. Instead of degrees it offers public debate, and instead of expert knowledge, theory.

WPU was established in 1998. Its board comprises students and activists who practice in their organizational work the politics of self-management. The core of WPU represents a series of lectures on a topic selected by the board. The lectures given by both academic and independent researchers run each year from November to May. Tackling politically and socially relevant issues in an accessible as well as rigorous manner, they are aimed at a broad audience that actively contributes to discussions. The lectures are accompanied by reading seminars that either supplement the lectures or develop their own problematics, fostering in each case the interaction between WPU and the community. To that aim, week-long symposia have been organized in recent years around Labor Day. Representatives of WPU are also engaged in social struggles such as student demonstrations, union strikes, and activist movements.

The topics of the WPU series of lectures have been:

Revolution (1998), Neo-conservatism (1999), The New Right (2000), The Left (2001), Utopistics (2001-2), May ‘68 – REvision (2002-3), Love and Politics (2003-4), Post-Fordism (2004-5), Political Ecology (2005-6), On Sin (2006-7), Totalitarianism (2007-8), Stupidity (2008-9), School as an Ideological Apparatus of Economy (2009-10), Class Struggle after Class Struggle (2010-11).

In 2011-12, the WPU will focus on the issue of Financialization. For the last thirty years, we have been witnessing a continuous development and increase of power of the financial sector concerning the structuring of social and economic relations in the global capitalist system. The rise of financial sector has in this period manifested itself in a global expansion of financial markets, in unprecedented growth of financial wealth in various forms of securities (such as shares, bonds and derivative contracts), in increase of public and private debt mass of national states, and in growing importance of financial institutions and various financial instruments concerning the organization of global economy. The functioning of the latter seems to be at all levels increasingly guided by corporative-managerial criteria, by which the profit of shareholders became the sole principle of economic decision-making.

In the dominant discourse of both orthodox and heterodox economics, the growing financial sector is often presented as somewhat irrational, even fictitious compared with the allegedly healthy and authentic kernel of “real economy” from which the misty sphere of financial speculations appears increasingly distant. However, seen from another point of view, the role of financial institutions and mechanisms in the age of neoliberal restoration was precisely not in any sense distant from the sphere of production, but quite central in the course of the latter’s reorganization. This reorganization comprised the broad processes of concentration and centralization of capital, of accelerated deindustrialization and of new, “innovative,” techniques of disciplining the workers. Furthermore, the financial institutions proved to be indispensable for crediting aggregate demand: when, in the period of neoliberal economic policies, the working class and the rest of the population faced the decrease of wages and loss of social income, sufficient levels of consumption could be maintained only through the relative ease of acquiring loans. At the same time, the financial sector played a key role in the redistribution of social wealth, which flowed from the working class to “financial oligarchy” in form of interests and high dividends. The current global financial crisis, which started as a mortgage crisis in the US, has later spread around the world as a bank-insolvency crisis, and has recently endangered the very existence of the Eurozone, taking the form of debt crisis of the peripheral EU countries. This crisis in general has thus demonstrated that even national economies in the core of capitalist economy are not immune against the fluctuations on financial markets.

At the macroeconomic level, these trends imply the growing dependence of production and even social reproduction in general on financial mechanisms, a dependence which manifests itself at the microeconomic level as an increasing subsumption of everyday life under financial capital. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, the corporative logic of financial investments and shareholder-value creation have spread in all areas of social life; for example, the privatization of public services brings gigantic profits to financial corporations, while making the basic social services (such as rents and health insurances) dependant on the financial sector. Furthermore, the process of increased integration of households in fragile financial markets can easily end in miserable images of neighborhoods full of empty, decaying homes and homeless workers – as the recent mass confiscations of property in the US have proven. Finally, we are witnessing a mass introduction and proliferation of student loans, through which the students – who are presented by the neoliberal ideology as entrepreneurs investing in their “human capital” – are being already during their studies subjected to the mechanisms of financial exploitation. It seems that one of the consequences of neoliberalism was, in the words of David Harvey, “financialization of everything.”

Should we then really try to explain the hypertrophy of the financial sector in the last decades with the growing gap between the financial and the “real” sector? Is the process of financialization just an anomaly, a sporadic dysfunctioning of capitalism that was caused by exaggerated and irrational speculations? Or is it in fact a process integral to contemporary capitalism in which financial mechanisms, institutions and services bring about the reorganization of power and class relations and a general change in more and more spheres of social life?

NASVIDENJE V NASLEDNJI REVOLUCIJI!