Keeping the Global Struggle Alive for Freeing Up the Commons

An understanding of the relation between science, technology and the socio-economic and historical conditions through which they evolve is known to be central to the analysis of the drivers of social change and transformation. As a trained and practicing technologist with a scholarly interest in science and its history, and as a social and political activist committed to struggles for establishing an egalitarian and just society, Prabir Purkayastha has, over a long career, engaged with those issues. The book under review is a revised and updated collection of the wide-ranging contributions he has made as an analyst and public intellectual in the course of that engagement.

In an understated manner, Purkayastha differentiates his approach and stance to the multiple issues discussed in this book, from that adopted by most progressive and not-so-progressive writers on the subject. In the introduction, he notes that unlike scientists, who in the past came from a university background in which they were also taught philosophy, engineers came from ‘trade schools’ in which they were taught to dirty their hands to build the artefacts that powered investment and facilitated consumption.

Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive Science and Technology by Prabir Purkayastha. Publisher: Leftword Books.

“The objective of science is to know nature”, whereas that of technology is “building an artefact; in other words, of changing nature”. Hence technologists were not too concerned with the philosophical basis of and the existential nature of their work and output. This has meant that, throughout history, science was privileged as belonging to the world of ideas and knowledge, whereas technology was seen as belonging to the world of work that delivered artefacts in activity pursued either as ‘craft’ or based on using scientific knowledge. In the event, as Purkayastha found, discussions on science, technology and society were substantially denuded of the insights that came from the viewpoint of the technologist, which made him conscious of the need to abjure the tendency to treat “technology as a sideshow of science.”

The technologist’s objective of using science to build artefacts that perform pre-specified tasks and deliver premeditated results very often entailed a need to go beyond science and “bridge the gap between what is known and what is not”. In the process there is need to rework the scientific understanding of the fundamental relationships of nature, with implications for science. Science sets the envelope defining what technology cannot do, while technology opens up new opportunities for scientific advance. This interdependence and even interpenetration of science and technology are investigated in more than one essay in the book, with forays into philosophy, discussions of the special characteristics of the two forms of knowledge, and illustrations from the history of science and technology. What emerges and is emphasised is that both these branches of knowledge are the common heritage of humankind, and must belong in the final analysis to all of society, as part of the global commons.

That, however, has historically not been the case. Decisions on what directions the pursuit of scientific knowledge must take, on how available knowledge to produce new artefacts must be deployed, the kind of artefacts that need to be produced and the resultant use to which science and technology are put are embedded in specific social and historical contexts. Besides exploring the nature of science and technology and their relationship, the essays in the volume examine the consequences of the influence that the socio-economic contexts in which science and technology evolve or are sought to be developed and deployed.

Adhering to the Marxist view that scientific laws reflect an objective material reality, the author is quick to note that Marxists also hold that scientific knowledge emerges and advances in response to the needs of society at different points of time in history. Social factors and discrimination linked to gender, race and caste that influence social development also affect scientific and technological practice. But, referring to the Lysenko case in the Soviet Union, Purkayastha cautions against trying to direct science based solely on judgements about forms of science being, for example, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’. While an outside influence driving science may be the interests of the ruling class, real needs or social concerns have also influenced scientific activity. Moreover, while “the categories of thought that we use to capture scientific phenomena do owe their origin to the human being’s social consciousness” ... “conceptual categories—whether mass, momentum, or energy—may have little to do with ideology”.

But there are indeed ways in which the ruling class influences scientific development. To start with, through selective funding and patronage it influences the choice of scientific problems addressed. Socially needed technologies that are not profitable may be starved of funding or ignored. Second, the choice is often determined by the need to reproduce and intensify the domination of capital.  GM seeds developed by Monsanto have the benefit of ramping up corporate profits by eroding the ability of farmers to save seeds as well as by making them dependent on a range of commercial pesticides to ward off new diseases. Finally, in pursuit of profit, capital may restrict access to technology, even when the scientific endeavour underlying the development of that technology is substantially or almost wholly funded by the State.

The ways in which this occurs and the consequences are covered in essays whose concern—the private capture and enclosure of the knowledge commons—provide the title for the volume as a whole, signifying the importance of that concern in the perspective of the author.

The precursors of the capture are the undertaking of science on a ‘planned’ basis at an industrial scale, the integration of scientific and technological activity, the quick conversion of scientific knowledge into marketable applications, and the privatisation of the knowledge generated through institutional research in universities and laboratories. Even when much of the basic and applied research is funded by the state, capital intervenes at appropriate points to take control of the knowledge so generated, and gain monopoly “ownership’” and rights through the use of the international property regime created and strengthened to aid profiteering and capital accumulation.

The knowledge commons is enclosed in the interests of capital, with legal instruments such as the Bayh-Dole (Patent and Trademark Law Amendments) Act and global agreements such as that on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights under the World Trade Organisation facilitating the capture. In this way, the infinite knowledge commons in which knowledge does not deplete when shared, reproduced and consumed, as tends to happen with physical commons such as grazing land, is ‘enclosed to exclude some to protect the “rights” and profits of others.

There is little evidence to show that patent protection is needed to promote innovation. On the other hand, it severely limits access to the fruits of innovation to needy populations, partly because knowledge is not shared and partly because the rents sought for intellectual property ownership render the output of innovation unaffordable to the majority. The failure to reach the vaccine to prevent or mitigate the effect of COVID-19 to a majority across the world, with devastating consequences, is an illustration of the former tendency, and the long period during which treatment for infection from the AIDS virus remained completely unaffordable for affected populations is an illustration of the latter. This occurred despite the fact that much of the science and the technology needed in both cases was funded with public resources.

However, the author’s own experience illustrates that all is not lost even within the boundaries of a profit-driven order. But protecting past benefits and gains requires struggle on multiple fronts. There is need for struggle to democratise institutions that advance scientific and technological knowledge. Lessons from past successful efforts to limit and tweak intellectual property rights, as happened with India’s now-diluted law that refused to grant or recognise product patents, need to be revisited and efforts to liberate the knowledge commons launched. And every effort must be made to conduct the now-inevitable, large-scale research in various fields a cooperative venture, as happened with the free software movement and with experiments in the biological sciences.

Prabir Purkayastha has, as an activist and public intellectual, been and remains a part of that global struggle. But he recognises the threat, in India and abroad, that results from the embrace of neoliberalism, the associated redefinition of the role of the state, and the concurrent and linked tendency to suppress scientific and critical thinking in favour of obscurantism that celebrates the irrational. That too is the agenda of the ruling classes who enclose the commons to further their private interests.

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