Soft privatisation: mapping an emerging field of European education governance (original) (raw)
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To date research and scholarship on privatisation in education lacks critical depth and intensity. Many accounts have been largely descriptive, focusing on how privatisation takes place, or on the threat of privatisation, or its insertion within education systems. Furthermore, work on educational commodification has been substantially dissociated from studies on privatisation in education. This paper builds on this last point. Writing and research on privatisation in education has largely avoided what it represents and calls forth: the development of capital, the deeper capitalisation of education. Furthermore, discussion on educational privatisation typically ignores its implication in the social production of labour-power. Therefore, with reference to Karl Marx, this contribution drives the critique of privatisation in education forward by focusing on commodity form(s) in education and their relations to the capitalisation of educational services and labour-power. Consequently, the points of resistance to privatisation in education are sharpened as anti-capitalist weapons. These points of resistance are derived from aspects of the capitalisation of education: marketisation, privatisation and other related aspects. On the basis of the analysis in the paper, anti-capitalist education is only a first step, it is argued; anti-capitalism in education based on an anti-affirmationist outlook flowing from negativity toward the capitalisation of education, is also required.