Universal basic income revisited: COVID-19, biopolitical trade-offs, and the expropriation of digital academic labour

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the biopolitical trade-offs inherent to contemporary capitalism are cascading down to higher education. Based on insights derived from theories of digitalized capitalism, this article argues that the emergency shift of educational activities online has much potential to heighten the expropriation of digital academic labour. The net result is an intensification of the master process of digitally driven academic proletarianization. At the same time, the reopening of campuses in countries and regions with high infection rates demonstrably puts academics and others at risk. Both of these developments provide reasons, the article maintains, to support the introduction of universal basic income (UBI). After drawing the crucial distinction between UBI as an emergency response and UBI as an institutionally frame-breaking initiative, the latter – non-emergency UBI – is advocated as a solution to the increasingly binaristic choice between work and life in the neoliberal university and beyond.

Attempts at a Unified Practice

This chapter considers how Newton combined his understanding of Johann de Monte-Snyders with motifs and practices drawn from Philalethes. To Newton, no single alchemist had revealed the entire set of processes necessary to acquire the philosophers' stone. On the alchemical principle that “one book opens another” (liber librum aperit), it was necessary to assemble the full set of stages from multiple authors in order to arrive at success. In order to get a sense of Newton's mature melding of Snyderian motifs with those drawn from other chymists, the chapter examines another manuscript from the King's College collection, Keynes MS 58. This fascinating text, though heavily Snyderian in orientation, brings in elements from Philalethes and Sendivogius as well in an attempt to arrive at foundational elements of a “master process” in Newton's overall chrysopoetic quest.

Paternalism, craft and organizational rationality 1830–1930: an exploratory model

This paper reflects on aspects of industrial and political history in Birmingham from the 1830s to the 1930s. Its object is to consider the strategies adopted by capital and labour in response to the challenges posed by successive phases of capitalist industrialization, urbanization and bureau-cratization. A convenient way to begin is by responding critically to the approach exemplified by the work of Richard Price and Clive Behagg. Although there are differences of emphasis, Price and Behagg have both explored workshop-based craft traditions, paternalistic labour management strategies and the complex links between them. They pay attention to the broader matrix of forces surrounding industry, including the impact of political movements. However, their main concern is the implementation of specific profit-seeking strategies in the sphere of production and the responses of key social actors, especially artisans and large employers, whose interests are advanced or harmed by these strategies. The master process, implicitly at least, is capitalist industrialization as shaped by the dynamics of domestic and international competition.