2. What is the university today? From the capitalistic point of view, it is one of the sites for the hierarchization of the workforce. The mechanisms of valorization, devalorization, declassement and segmentation of the workforce are based on knowledge and the control of knowledge production. But the university is not the only site of such control, because there is a spillover of knowledge production from educational institutions: it is widespread in networks of social cooperation. These networks are ambivalent, a conflictual combination of autonomy and capitalistic command, of struggles for freedom and marketized outcomes. So, in the wider metropolitan context, the university becomes ever less central in capitalist hierarchies. Nevertheless, it remains a site of great space-time concentration of the workforce.

3. How is value produced in the university? When knowledge becomes a central means of production, the capitalistic problem is how to measure it. In the last round of edu-factory discussion, we wrote that in what we call cognitive capitalism there is also a ‘cognitivization of the measure’. That is to say, the imposition of artificial units of measure to reduce living knowledge to abstract knowledge. The copyright and patent systems, student credits, the accumulation of social and human capital, the writing of references for researchers and teachers (Matteo Pasquinelli talks about a sort of ‘reference economy’) are examples of such artificial units. These are also artificial units to measure the value of each institution in the university hierarchy. The liberal cult of the meritocracy is dead, and we’re not sorry about this in any way. Today the corporate university is based on a parasitical rent. From this point of view, it is paradigmatic of contemporary capitalism.

4. The hierarchisation of the university is not governed by a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. In contemporary global capitalism there is no more outside, there is no outside between the university and the metropolis, there is only an inside marked by exploitative relationships. Differential inclusion is the response to movements that in the Sixties and in the Seventies challenged university governance. For example, in US the response to the Black power movement and the creation of autonomous institutions for Black Studies was a combination of brutal repression and differential inclusion. This is evidenced, as Noliwe Rooks has recently illustrated, by the strategies of the Ford Foundation and its selective funding to Black Studies programs which favours moderates and marginalizes radicals. So, contemporary university governance aims to include so that it can control. But this also means also that such governance is a process continuously open to crisis and based on the impossibility of the classical forms of governing living labor. In this framework, as effectively described by Mezzadra and Neilson, the production of borders becomes the main device of governance and multiplication of labor regimes: borders are not lines that divide by processes of inclusion and exclusion, but they are mobile, flexible and changing areas of hierarchization.

5. But there is always an excess within this inclusion: living labor/knowledge. From this point of view, borders are also sites of resistance and lines of flights. Precarious workers and students – as workers, and not workforce hierarchically integrated in the education process – are border subjects. This does not mean they are marginal and oppressed figures who are not completely included: they are a potential excess in the hierarchization process. We learned an important lesson in the recent ‘precarious researchers’ mobilization in Italy: when precarious researchers exclusively claim the recognition of their place in the workforce hierarchy and their inclusion in the ivory tower, this excess is politically closed. From this point of view, the ‘creative class’ or ‘knowledge workers’ are not simply categories of sociological theories. They are first of all political concepts. On one hand, they legitimise the out-of-date and unusable ‘concept of the international division of labor’ and ‘the correlate spectrum of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers’ (Mezzadra and Neilson). The division between intellectual and manual labor – as well as the gender division of labor, the division between productive and reproductive labor, or between cognitive and affective labor etc. – is not objective, but a device to hierarchize and to control labor power. On the other hand, the actors of the ‘creative class’ want to claim their legal rights in the differential inclusion regime, but they don’t bring this regime into question.

6. The university is not central to capitalist production. But it is central as a political site. In last edu-factory round we saw some great examples of students, graduate students and precarious workers mobilizations all around the world: from China to the US, from Greece to Italy, from South Africa to France. We use the terms of Italian ‘operaismo’, the relationship between the technical class composition (fundamentally based on capitalistic division of labor) and the political class composition, that points to the combination between exploitative relationships and processes of subjectivation, conflicts and collective identification: then the university workers (that is to say, students and precarious workers) are central in political class composition, not in the technical one. Within workers’ struggles and class composition there is a hierarchy, but it is not determined by the capitalist hierarchy: on the contrary, it is based on the articulation between positions in the production system and subjectivity, that is to say the potential refusal of capitalist hierarchy. Such hierarchy is continuously put into question by the struggles themselves. There is a relationship between technical and political composition, but no homology and symmetry. So, how we can transform the university into a political site for struggle and exodus? This is the question. In fact, the metaphor of the ‘edu-factory’ does not mean that the university is the same as industrial factories. Rather, it means that we have to organize ourselves, as industrial workers did, but in a different mode and with different kinds of institutions.

7. This is the specific base of the translation issue. The diffusion of the Anglophone university as a model of ‘global university’ happens through continuous translation: ‘homolingual translation’ to use the effective categories proposed by Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon. For example, in Italy the corporate university model is not fully developed, but mixed with the conservation of feudal academic power. Nevertheless, this does not contrast the corporatization trend. On the contrary, feudal power is the particular way in which the corporate model is translated into the Italian university system. The interruption of capitalistic translation in the global university does not mean to return to the national university of culture, but to pose the problem of translation (that is to say, ‘heterolingual translation’) from the point of view of living labor/knowledge. ‘Heterolingual translation’ refers to the question of the relationship between technical and political class composition, between singularity and the production of the common, and it also refers to the communication of struggles. This translation moves in an autonomous space-time dimension that intersects the global capitalistic plane but doesn’t coincide with it. Today anyone who uses the historicist and traditional centre-periphery model is not able to analyze global capitalist development. First of all, she has been unable to see that this model was shattered by struggles and the irruption of the margins in the centre.

8. Dwelling in the Ruins, this was the question posed by Readings. That is to say, dwelling without nostalgia. But also, dwelling without shutting ourselves up in elective ghettoes. Dwelling in the ruins brings up for us the central problem: how we can organize the liberation of living labor/knowledge power? How we can break the filters and gatekeepers of the differential inclusion, university governance and its parasitical rent? We have to distinguish between ghetto and autonomy. The ghetto is completely functional to the governance regime: it is a particular form of differential inclusion. Autonomy is the liberation of collective power. It is struggles and exodus, resistance and flight lines, the refusal of dominant knowledge and the production of antagonistic living knowledge. Chandra Talpade Mohanty says that what constitutes segregation from the viewpoint of power could be overturned in autonomy to create oppositional knowledges from the transformational viewpoint. This viewpoint is constituted by acting minorities, not as marginal but central minorities. We have to abandon the majority point of view, that is to say universalism and the exportation of universal models. The great issue concerning institutions implies the necessity to go beyond the dialectic between institutional and anti-institutional action. Dwelling in the ruins entails struggles and resistance against the corporate university, acting on the borders, and the immediate building up of institutions of the common. As edu-factory shows, all around the world there are a lot of experiences of self-education, autonomous universities, and organized networks of oppositional knowledge production. Now the main problem is the organization and translation of these into institutions of the common. That is to say, institutions continuously open to their own subversion, not universalistic but based on irreducible singularities, aiming toward the construction of the common and collective command within social cooperation.