Today, the market and the demands of global capital are increasingly driving the control of science and its advances. Neither the objective of advancing science as a knowledge system nor that of serving the needs of the people, are being served in the current regime of science. Increasingly, knowledge and larger social goals are being sacrificed to the needs of a neo-liberal economic order that valorises immediate gain as the only driver of science. Increasingly, science as an open system, at least amongst the scientists, is giving away to the logic of the capitalist enterprise. The role of science in the knowledge economy is driven by the demands of a private research system, which is today embedded within the heart of the educational system. The goal of research is no longer production of knowledge but creating monopolies for either private capital or the “scientist as entrepreneur”. The output of scientific research is not scientific papers in journals but patents, which can be turned into money. One of the key determinants of today’s world is the speed with which innovation takes place and is brought within the sphere of production. The growth of technology is a continuous driver of the economy. In order to understand the way innovation finds its way to commodities and the market, we need to focus on both the production and the reproduction of the innovation.
Production of Knowledge : The Institutional Structure of Science
The earlier system of development of scientific knowledge resided primarily within the structures of higher education. The universities, colleges and other institutions of higher learning were the centres where new advances in science were located. As these centres of education were relatively autonomous of both the state and the market, the system of generating new knowledge was not closely bound by immediate class needs of society. This is what produced within the university system a sense of independence and self-regulation – the education given to the students had a larger purpose than merely serving capital or the needs of the state. This is also why the educational system also provided a place for contestation – it was the place where new ideas arose not only in the various disciplines but also about society itself.
The view of science and technology fitted itself very well into this overall structure. Science was supposed to produce new knowledge, which could then be mined by technology to produce artefacts. The role of innovation was to convert ideas into artefacts. The system of intellectual property rights arose to provide protection to useful ideas that were embodied in artefacts.
The transformation of this system that existed for more than a hundred years has come from two different sources. One is that science and technology are far more closely integrated than before, making the distinction between scientific knowledge and technological advance more difficult to distinguish. An advance in genetics can translate to the market place much more quickly than earlier. Computers and communications have also a similar pace of development, drawing some of the sciences much closer to the systems of production than earlier. The second is the conversion of the university systems into, what are essentially, profit making commercial enterprises under the neo-liberal order.
Market fundamentalism under neoliberalism has altered the fundamental nature of the system of education. Students are regarded as consumers and the university-education system is structured like any other commercial enterprise that looks primarily at its bottom line. A deeper analysis of nature which has no immediate commercial market is now being downgraded in favour of what the industry considers as lucrative research. Not only does it distort the larger system in which long term knowledge is devalued in favour of immediate and short term gain, it also shifts research priorities away from what the society needs as a whole to what those who can pay need. As research is increasingly being funded from corporations (or by the state working at the behest of corporations), a wholesale shift in research priorities is taking place. Science is no longer seen as a way for advancing knowledge and the well-being of society but almost entirely for generating profits for large corporations. . The impact of such a shift is visible. In India, for example, a major thrust to agricultural production (termed as the “green revolution”) arose out of public domain science – there was no price to be paid by the farmer for utilising its advances. Today, the gene revolution is controlled by a few private corporations – and they are seen as the possible drivers of a second “green revolution”. When Salk was asked who owned the patent for his polio vaccine, he is believed to have said : “the people”. This is an answer that one would expect from few scientists today.
The trajectory towards private appropriation of knowledge is typified by the the Bayh Dole Act in the US. The Act, enorced in 1980, reversed the almost universal assumption that public funded research should not be protected by private rights in the form of intellectual property protection. The Act allowed Universities and other non-profit entities to patent rersearch that was funded from public sources. The Act created the conditions for the University system in the US to work much more closely with largely corporations. Fortune Magazine held the Bayh Dole Act responsible for pushing up the cost of medicine in the US. “Americans spent $179 billion on prescription drugs in 2003. That’s up from ... wait for it ... $12 billion in 1980.” (The Law of Unintended Consequences, Fortune, September 19, 2005). The same article also stated that the Bayh Dole Act had actually retarded the progress in science instead of helping it, discovery of new molecules, a measure of innovation in pharmaceutical industry, has actually come down. It helped a few companies, universities and scientists to become fabulously rich, at the expense of scientific development and the common people. Unfortunately, the market fundamentalists world-over are pushing ideas similar to the Bayh Dole Act and other measures to convert the educational systems to University Industrial Complexes.
The system of knowledge production, has also been transformed due to other factors set in motion by neoliberal policies that have been adopted across the globe. Public funding for research has suffered, especially in developing nations, as neoliberal economics has led to a general squeeze on government finances. This has been coupled with a reliance on the market, giving rise to the notion that the way forward is to source research funding from the private sector. There is evidence today that private funding for research distorts priorities and also rides on public funding. So private companies are able to control the prioritisation and trajectory of research. Not just because they fund parts of the research, but importantly, because the fruits of public funded research is placed at their disposal.
The demise of the UN system has also shifted the emphasis from public funded science that embodied the notion of collaboration between nation states. Today, the UN system itself promotes “Public Private Partnerships”. For example, the major share of the WHO’s budget comes from private foundations and donors or from Northern country governments who wish to fund specific programmes that are of interest to them.
The shift is also clear in the case of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which originated in an initiative of the G-8 and the UN Secretary General. The Global Fund provides around 66% of all international financial resources devoted to tuberculosis, 45% of that devoted to Malaria and about 20% of that devoted to AIDS. In order to manage the fund, entirely new institutional structures have been created (largely due to pressure from the US) outside the UN system. The Global Fund’s governing bodies include representatives from NGOs, private business and affected communities, as well as governments and intergovernmental organisations. On its Executive Board sit representatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and McKinsey.
While there needs to be a scrutiny of the growing disconnect between production of knowledge and its public appropriation, new ways of knowledge production point to different possibilities of how the appropriation of knowledge can be democratised. Today, the information technology sector has shown that new technologies and methodologies can be developed by cooperative communities. The question needs to be posed whether it is possible to design such approaches for other areas such as, say, the life sciences ? Is it possible to have new ways of establishing ‘creative commons’, in which new technologies and methodologies are developed by cooperative communities ?
Private monopoly over knowledge – excercised today through the cycle of both knowledge production and reproduction — translates into the ability to extract super profits by using this monopoly to sell the artefacts that accrue, viz. mediicnes, seeds, software, etc.. The potential of a “commons” approach lies in not only preventing such monopolies in the reproduction of knowledge, but also in production of knowledge itself. The commons licenses are only one aspect of the larger struggle of production and reproduction of knowledge. The Free Software movement has shown the power of the new networked structures in the creation of new knowledge and new artefacts.
The impact of privatisation of knowledge and science is also changing the way science is being done. Science is no longer the collaborative and open activity aimed at creating new knowledge about nature. It has become a secretive exercise where a patent is filed before a paper is published. Ideas are not shared as they have now commercial value. This is occurring at a point of time where the possibility of open, collaborative work has multiplied enormously.
It is the understanding that science needs to be put back as an open and collaborative exercise that has given birth to the commons movement. While the environmental and ecological movements have looked at commons and fought against their privatisation, the kind of commons that they have looked at are finite resources such as grazing lands, forests, fisheries, oceans and atmosphere, etc. These commons are still natural resources, which appeared to have been infinite in an earlier era and are now realised to be finite and capable of over–exploitation and degradation. The knowledge commons are intrinsically different in that they do not degrade with use. A law of nature or the knowledge of a genetic code does not have any subtractive aspect : their repeated use does not subtract from them in any way.
Never before has society had the ability to bring together different communities and resources, like it has today, to produce new knowledge. What stands in the way of liberating this enormous power of the collective for production of new knowledge and designing new artefacts is the monopoly rights and private appropriation inherent in the neo-liberal IPR order.
Reproduction of Innovation : Patents and Copyrights
The last two decades have seen the creation of a new category of private property rights called Intellectual Property Rights, bringing under one umbrella what were earlier disparate rights. Thus different kinds of private property rights — creative rights of authors under copyright and industrial property rights such as patents, trademark, trade secrets and industrial designs – has been brought under the common rubric of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The objective of this exercise was two fold. First, it sought to give a cover of individual creativity to legitimise essentially corporate rights. The second was to expand enormously the scope of these rights.
The impact of this new IPR regime, coupled with the global trading regime under WTO, has led to the private appropriation on a grand scale of commonly held biological and knowledge resources of society. The patents regime today has expanded to patenting of life forms, genetic resources, genetic information in life sciences, patenting methods and algorithms in computational sciences and even patenting of how business is done. Not only are methods and algorithms being patented, the copyright has been extended to software and all forms of electronically held information. Traditional knowledge and biological resources held and nurtured by different communities are being pirated by global corporations. Increasingly, the enterprise of science as a collaborative and open activity for creating knowledge is being subverted into a corporate exercise of creating monopolies and milking super profits from the consumers.
The impact of such appropriation is now visible. The HIV/AIDS epidemic has shown that what stands between life and death of the victims is the profit of big pharmaceutical companies. It is impossible for the vast majority of the people in the globe today to pay the costs of new life saving drugs which are patent protected. If the IPR regime has been damaging to the life of those suffering from disease, what lies in store for agriculture is even worse. With biotechnology and bioinformatics, corporate seed companies and corporate plant breeders will control global agriculture and food production. With food prices already sky-rocketing, the impact of such a monopoly on the vast sections of the people can well be imagined.
Software, a specifically 20th century creation, used an 18th century legal form – copyright — to create a monopoly. The problem of this restrictive access is that it does not address the specificity of software – its generally short lifespan, the nature of the work and so on. With changing interpretations of patenting, software is now also being patented in many countries. As the information technology spreads to all our activities, every sphere of such activitiy will be controlled by patents or copyrights. This is the Brave New World of IPR that we are entering today under the hype of the knowledge economy.
Intellectual property rights, is nothing but an attempt to exclude people from the domain of knowledge by enclosing it, similar to the enclosing of commons carried out over the last 500 years. It is simply using a legal artifice called IPR to privatise knowledge which is publicly held. Any enclosure of knowledge is doubly pernicious – it not only reduces access by others, it also puts a price on access to something which is infinitely duplicable. The enclosure therefore of knowledge using the IPR regime is even more iniquitous than the earlier forms of enclosure movements. The struggle against intellectual property rights of various kinds becomes a battle for preserving the global commons, specifically knowledge in its various forms.
Looking at knowledge and science as commons is a different paradigm from the dominant neo-liberal one of private intellectual property. It started with Free Software movement which asserted that software code, which is neither revealed nor open to change, is against fundamental rights of consumers. Richard Stallman created the GNU Public License, using the same legal means – copyrighting — to subvert the copyright regime. “Copyleft” or use of a specific copyright license which allows others to use it and modify it provided all further users are given the same rights, has created a community that is challenging the software multinationals. It has used the open, collaborative structure common to scientific endeavour of the earlier period with the power of networked communities through the Internet to create quality products.
Similar approaches are being tried to combat intellectual property right enclosures, particularly the patenting regime in other areas. Open source drug discovery and open source biology are options being tried using some form of commons license as alternatives, along with the old fashioned way of putting knowledge in public domain. Interestingly enough, creative commons license has borrowed heavily from the GPL to extend these ideas into arts.
The enclosure of the commons is not only taking place in sciences, but also in traditional knowledge. Community based knowledge is appropriated by pharmaceutical and other companies and privatised in various forms. This pertains both to biological resources nurtured by communities or specific knowledge and practices. The struggle for protecting the rights of such communities is also a struggle for protecting the traditional knowledge as commons. These commons are not public domain, but the common property of a group and therefore allows for community rights as opposed to private property of individuals or corporations. Recently, the commons license approach has also been considered for protecting traditional knowledge.
Science, Society and Democracy
The next question we need to address is how do we bring back societal concerns into institutions of science. How do we democratise these institutions, so that larger social goals determine the priorities in science ? How can diseases that affect the poor become objects of research if the budget is coming from the corporate sector who are not interested in developing medicines for people who cannot pay ? How do we bring the concerns of the poorer countries who have neither the money nor the scientific resources to address their problems ? How do we bring equity back into the system of advancing scientific knowledge ? This brings us to the larger issue of how society as a whole can exercise control over the enterprise of science. If science today is a major economic force, the larger goal of democracy and equity in society will also play itself in science. It is not surprising that a number of crucial questions in today’s world requires an understanding of science. In the absence of this understanding, a few scientists in the ruling establishments place their decisions as the “scientific” decisions for society.
Earlier movements of scientists placed this within the context of the social responsibility of the scientist. The scientists, in this view, owe it to society to be conscious of his or her activities and bring it to public notice. The scientist had this two fold responsibility – understanding the implications of science for society and also becoming an active champion for the right kind of science. The role of scientists in the nuclear disarmament is perhaps the most important of this earlier work. The scientific workers movement, the movements for popularising science amongst the people that developed in the in the 40’s and 50’s grew out of this perspective.
Today, the need for organising the scientists to struggle for a more democratic scientific decision making must go hand-in hand with a strong movement for bringing science to the people. If global warming is to be combated or nuclear disarmament pursued, it is not enough for the scientists to say so. There is a need to bring out science from the ivory tower and de-mystify it so that people, who are affected by such decisions can also assert their voice. Science is too serious a business to be left to the scientists – it must be a part of our larger struggle for equity and democracy in society.
Structuring the Discussions on Science and Democracy in Belem
In Belem, we can use the struggle for knowledge commons as an overarching theme to bring together different forms of struggles against the current neo-liberal regime of knowledge production and reproduction. The focus will be on how we can “democratise” science not only for the scientific community but also to give the people the right to control the directions of scientific enquiry. Specifically, the discussions in Belem can be structured in the following manner :
Production of Knowledge : The Institutional Structure of Science
Shift in public support to knowledge production, privatisation of public institutions
Growing private appropriation of knowledge, links between public institutions and corporations
Demise of global co-operative structures between nation states, rise of Public-Private Partnerships
Corporate led decision making regarding research priorities
Alternate structures of creating knowledge and innovation, viz. the “Commons” approach
Reproduction of Innovation : Patents and Copyrights
IPRs, trajectory and implications in different sectors, viz. health, agriculture, software, etc.
Alternate non IP based systems of reproduction of knowledge using the “commons” approach
Traditional knowledge, its private appropriation and possibilities of safegurding it from private appropiation
Science, Society and Democracy
How appropriate are the current structures of science to meet the needs of society and the people ?
How can the people and society as a whole control the scientific and technical institutions that today drive the process of innovation and change ?
Evolve instruments of the struggle to democratise the process of knowledge generation and reproduction and of the functioning of scientific institutions, also looking at different attempts people are making in creating “commons” structures.
Examine how different kinds of movements – popular science movements and ecology movements are interrogating science and the scientific institutions.