ABSTRACT
This chapter linearly progresses from abstract theory to its deployment in an analysis and critique of employability—regarded as the principal ideological device through which the subject remains invested in capitalist social relations—through to a discussion of the concrete possibilities of a Great Refusal or generalised subtraction. The chapter charts out a map for political transformation. Scarcity of jobs and grants is a powerful material and ideological device for justifying repressive submission to the university discourse irrespective of what we know or politically desire. As Herbert Marcuse points out, the productive forces are adequately developed that if utilised for our social needs rather than in the interests of capital, scarcity could be overcome and erotic energies liberated from mundane and alienating labour. A politics that presupposes scarcity as the natural condition of social development is evident here and in the more subtle examples of left-liberal environmentalism.
