Breaking bonds: How academic capitalism feeds processes of academic alienation

There is renewed interest in Karl Marx’s critical concept of alienation, applied to the context of higher education, to explain the growing dissatisfaction of academic labor. Academics feel that new primarily economic priorities have supplanted ideas of working for the common good. Constant competition, expressed through rankings, evaluations and funding metrics, stresses performance and output. Indicators mean more than substance. Commercialization and commodification of higher education has been subjected to wide critique, not least in the literature on increasingly transnational academic capitalism. As universities are subjected to increasing pressures to produce—graduates and innovations—these pressures are passed on to academics, who struggle to reconcile their personal motivation and the ideal of collegial and cooperative academic work with the imposed extraneous motivation of endless assessments and competition under precarity. Knowledge production in ‘academic factories’ is characterized as commodity production. As a result, the dissatisfaction and ill-being of academics is only increasing. This chapter discusses Marx’s concept of alienation as a critique of the capitalist mode of production in higher education, illustrated in dialogue between two national contexts—the UK and Finland. Finding avenues of disalienation may require a radical reimagining of the current form of academic labor.