Trading in education futures: between profit and loss/the political and the economic

This paper examines the trade in services agreements currently under negotiation (TISA, TTIP, TISA) or have just been concluded (TPP) which include education services. I argue that they embody a fundamental contradiction, regarding education and formal systems of knowledge production. By attempting to lock in the rights of investors into the future, education and knowledge production is placed at the service of profit-making. Yet a more dynamic, rather than contained, constrained and uncreative approach to knowledge production, is fundamental to the development of innovation and a dynamic knowledge economy. This paper separates out the interests of the political and the economic elite. The profit motive might suit investors and the economic elite as a form of monopoly capitalism, but it delivers considerable losses to the political elite, whose ongoing role via the state is to create the conditions for the ongoing productivity of capitalism in general.