Knowledge Production in Neo-Liberal Times

The following is an excerpt from Prabir Purkayastha’s book Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive Science and Technology published by LeftWord (2023). 

There are two transformations taking place today in educational institutions. One is to treat educational activity like any other business. The quantification of output in terms of teaching hours, students’ performance, research papers, contributions to the income of the university from business and students, or ‘key performance indicators’, have become the yardstick for judging teachers, departments, and institutions. In this view, an educational institution should be treated like any other commercial activity. Its objective is to maximise output—in terms of more students, more patents, consultancies, research grants—while minimising costs.

The second transformation is the privatisation of the output of institutional research, even when publicly funded or funded by government grants. This generates more income for the university, while a still larger share of benefits flows to the corporations who are able to ‘enclose’ the output by buying patents on the findings and applications of such publicly funded research. Such instances are most visible in the case of the pharmaceutical industry. They are facilitated by the state’s decision that the output of scientific or technological research, even if supported by the state, should be handed over to private capital.

Increasingly, markets and the demands of global capital control science and its advances. Neither the objectives of advancing the knowledge system, nor those of meeting the needs of the people, are served by the current practice of science. Knowledge, and larger social goals, are sacrificed to the neoliberal economic order which values immediate gain as the driver of science. Science as an open system, at least among scientists, is giving way to the logic of capitalist enterprise. While we may talk about the knowledge economy, the output of scientific research has been privatised, even when publicly funded within the heart of the educational system. Before a result is published, scientists are already busy with establishing the claim to prior knowledge indispensable for filing patents. The output of scientific research no longer comprises research papers in journals that increase the boundaries of knowledge, but patents which can be turned into money.

This has led to a new goal within the scientific community: creating a new class of scientists who behave as entrepreneurs. They often operate within the public science institutions, but have become science entrepreneurs using the output of their research. The goal of research is no longer the production of knowledge but the creation of monopolies for either private capital or for the ‘scientist as entrepreneur’.

Monopoly over knowledge, whether used to sell a software program, a medicine, or a seed, translates into the ability to extract super profits. It also aborts the possibility of science being developed through an open network. It is paradoxical that while the internet and open access to knowledge have made it possible for large groups of people around the world to work together and bring about major advances in science, we are also witnessing a time in which knowledge is packed into cubbyholes, precluding cooperation.

The free software movement of the 1980s showed the power of new networked structures in creating software, and their superiority over privatised software development. Never before has society had the ability to bring together different communities and resources on this scale. We have seen what collaboration is capable of when harnessed to scientific activities such as particle physics or astronomy. So, what stands in the way of liberating this enormous power of working together for the generation of new knowledge and new artefacts? Clearly, the impediments are the monopoly rights and private appropriation inherent in the intellectual property rights (IPR) order. The understanding that science needs to be restored as an open and collaborative exercise has given birth to the commons movement. While the environmental and ecological movements have also fought against the privatisation of the commons, the kind of commons they looked at are finite resources, such as grazing land, forests, fisheries, oceans, and the atmosphere. These commons are natural resources, once thought to be infinite, and now understood to be finite, capable of over-exploitation and degradation. The knowledge commons are intrinsically different in that they—a law of nature, let’s say, or knowledge of a genetic code—do not degrade with repeated use. Open use on a large scale enriches the knowledge commons.

Also read: Prabir Purkayastha Memoirs: An Unbroken Commitment to Rationalism, Scientific Temper and Justice

In this ‘commons’ view of the world, intellectual property rights are attempts to exclude people from the domain of knowledge by enclosing it, in a manner similar to the enclosure of the village commons carried out over the last 500 years. It uses a legal artifice called IPR to privatise knowledge that was always publicly held. Any enclosure of knowledge is doubly pernicious: it not only restricts access to others, but also puts a price on access to something which is infinitely duplicable and does not degrade with use. The enclosure of knowledge using the IPR regime is even more iniquitous than the earlier kind of enclosure movements, which had argued that private property rights prevented the degradation of the commons. The struggle against intellectual property rights of various kinds becomes a battle to preserve the global commons, specifically knowledge in its various forms.

The earlier system of developing scientific knowledge resided primarily within the structures of higher education. Universities, colleges, and other institutions of higher learning were the centres where new advances in science originated. As these centres of education were relatively autonomous of both state and market, the system of generating new knowledge was not constrained by the immediate class needs of society. This produced within the university system a sense of independence and self-regulation, and the education given to students had a purpose larger than merely serving capital or the needs of the state. This is why the educational system became, additionally, a space where new ideas arose not only in the various disciplines, but also about society itself.

The humanist view of science and technology fitted very well within 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—thence the patenting system that provides protection to useful ideas embodied in the artefacts. Artefacts could be patented, but not knowledge of nature.

The transformation of this system after more than a hundred years has come from two distinct sources. One is that science and technology are far more closely integrated than before, and scientific advances can be turned rapidly into marketable products. For example, advances in biology that create new pharmaceutical compounds,13 or advances in physics entering the latest chip- making machines,14 happen much faster today than they did earlier.

Unfortunately, market fundamentalists the world over are pushing measures similar to the Bayh-Dole (Patent and Trademark Law Amendments) Act,15 to enclose the advances in knowledge created by public funding. The Bayh-Dole Act, introduced in the United States 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 research funded from public resources. It created the conditions for the university system in the United States to work much more closely with large corporations. Publicly funded research can now be privatised by the university, by selling the patents to private corporations. The people pay twice: once for funding research with public money, and the second time by paying a high price for products developed from publicly funded research.

Other factors have also contributed to transforming the system of knowledge production, most notably the neoliberal policies adopted across the globe. Public funding on research has suffered, especially in developing nations, as neoliberal economics has led to a general squeeze on government finances. This, coupled with a reliance on the market, has given rise to the notion that the way forward is to source research funding from the private sector. There is evidence today that private funding of research distorts the priorities upheld by public funding. Private companies are able to exercise decisive control over the trajectory of research by funding only select parts of a research project. And, of course, the fruits of public-funded research are placed at their disposal.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founder and editor of NewsClick.