[Translated from Sozialistische Gruppe]
Nowadays it is a self-evident fact that there must be research and invention so that businesses are competitive and increase their profitability. Today the fact that science and technology are a resource for capital and its utilization is no longer understood as a criticism, but as a prelude to the concern as to whether they adequately fulfill this function.
Entrepreneurs strive to sell their commodities, and as many of them as profitable, in a competition for solvent demand. In this competition they are dependent in two different ways on technical innovations: On the one hand, it is their means to assert themselves against others in the price war: to sell cheaper than the competition. Their efforts are directed at lowering the production price of their commodities so that their profits do not suffer from the lower price. The primary lever for this is “rationalization,“ i.e. the introduction of productivity increasing machines in order for the enterprise to lower wage costs. The inventions of the engineers have to prove to the enterprise that they are an effective means for the enterprise to take more paid work out of the product for themselves, or in reverse: to pay less to the workers for the value produced.
On the other hand, enterprises try to open new markets by new products and so monopolize solvent needs for their sales and profits, or by technical changes in their products add new useful qualities in comparison with those of other manufacturers so that they can expand their customers at the expense of the competition and/or obtain a higher price for their own product.
Scientific results that promise to increase profit in neither one way or the other are of no interest and remain unconsidered.
All entrepreneurs are dependent on the results of the natural sciences – however, each wants to apply them exclusively for their own (and against the others) profitability, which contradicts the general and systematic development of scientific knowledge in three regards:
Because the systematic, general investigation of nature is no means of business and is also not a business, the state organizes science and research separate from capitalist business. It pays for scientists and their working conditions and sets them free to examine whatever questions of science may be posed to them. It relieves its official thinkers of the pressure to always earn money, and to constantly supply results – finally, it is a scientific question what the results of their fields actually are and what the state of science gets going. Investigation into the laws of nature follows the development of technological knowledge, which the state also pursues and whose results it places at the disposal of the capitals generally and free of charge. As long as applications are foreseeable, they access whatever promises to lead to a reduction in the costs of business or new saleable products.
This separation of science from its application makes science the resource of capital. Because science does not decide on its application, it is not formed by its interests or available for criticism, but the presupposed interests of competitive entrepreneurs - separate from it - determine whether and how it is applied.
Because science is useful to the economy, trained workers are needed who can provide it with these uses and others who can at least get along with the modern conditions of work produced thereby. But education is not a business: The trained people do not belong to the enterprise – their education is not an investment in the capital of the enterprise. The state also creates this condition for commerce by establishing schools and universities.
The state organizes education for capital: It provides knowledge on the basis of the criterion of the necessary minimum: do not teach everything, but only what's necessary for functioning. At the same time the transfer of knowledge serves as a sorting of trainees into the hierarchy of occupations. Education takes place as a screening process (that all children are obligated to participate in this selection, that they all must participate in this comparison, is understood as permission – "the right to education “):
Knowledge is thus given to most people in this country very economically. State expenses should be as low as possible to produce the training needed by the world of occupations: lots of stupid people for the normal jobs and a few more highly trained for supervision of the former and for other responsibilities. The content of learning functions the same as the prerequisites: to produce differences in people’s school performances. At the same time, the learners are brought into the learning competition with their conditions abstracted from -- previous teaching by parents at home, material and personnel support from the parents -- so that it is no wonder that education reproduces the class position of the parents in the children.
The hierarchy of educational attainment represents a pre-screening of young people for the hierarchy of occupations, in which the principle applies that the "more responsibility", thus the activity with more power, the higher the income, and the more subordinate, shabby and tiring the work, the less the payment. Therefore, there is the mean saying: One must learn so that one becomes somebody. The fact that one owes one’s position in society to one’s education, however, is not completely true.
A position in the world of occupations arises not from what one has learned, but its respective function for state and capital. To be a politician or entrepreneur is not a question of knowledge, but a question of wealth and power. Vice versa, the needs of capital decide on what is actually considered knowledge that is worth knowing. Someone may have learned something; Whether he possesses a "qualification" depends not on his knowledge, but the interest of employers according to their calculations. Every kind of knowledge is constantly devalued if business does not grow to the expected extent, it shifts to other fields or the knowledge becomes superfluous because of its objectification in new technology. A few years ago computer scientists were needed so urgently that Indians were imported; today they are unemployed along with the native graduates. Their knowledge is not a resource because capital does not need it. The "freedom to chose a career“ is nothing but a private risk whether what one has learned is wanted by the relevant interests, so its qualification is ennobled, or not. However, it is correct that someone without a good education has no chance on the labor market of actually finding an appointment and earning a nice income with it. But nothing is decided by education: It is an offer to the employers that obligates them to nothing.
On a different level, the education system represents the real economic competition around money, but it is about grades and school results, and happens – in a different way than in the real – very fairly: Only the school performance counts. The transformation of the audition in the educational hierarchy into a condition for admittance into the occupational hierarchy is an enormous legitimization of the real competition: in principle everyone in capitalist society takes the place that they deserves on account of their knowledge. It seems natural to everyone that differences in knowledge are by no means only differences in knowledge, but always immediately justify social status.
Actually, it is not the education hierarchy that sets the labor market in the right, but the reverse. Therefore, the education institutions can be criticized by "reality“: If the real demand of the economy for a quality or quantity of workers devalues their certifications, then the schools correct themselves – and strive to produce valuable results by the fact that they try to adapt their output to the needs of the economy.
These three criticisms do not give a criterion for the decision. The sector is useful precisely because of its separation and that it is not a business; that is its starting point: How in line is it with standard practice of what is most useful for the state? How accurately do the number and educational level of the trainees correspond to the current labor market – capital does not even know which sort of people it will need more or less tomorrow. And the price? How much state expenses are worthwhile for the competitive power of the nation?
Because of the irreconcilability of the conflicting viewpoints, effective criticism and reform of the sector always comes about because of the state leader's dissatisfaction with the performance of the nation in economic competition. To that extent, a most unobjective, but on the other hand exactly adequate, criticism of science and education: certainly, it can do nothing for it; but what it is there for is foisted on it as either its success or poor performance.
Politicians are dissatisfied with the performance of their scientific sector; this is expressed in their call for more Nobel Prize winners and "excellence in research." This discontent is not directed at the general supply of the “productive power of science” because with the call for "elite universities" politicians always make known that their “education and scientific institutions“ do not need to hide from the rest world; there is enough "normally qualified“ graduates, these service providers are even redundantly available, as their rising unemployment shows. Enterprises are obviously supplied with enough engineers, computer scientists and other scientists – but all this is just not enough for politicians.
What is lacking for the politicians are “innovations in high technology." They are not available through the usual scientific enterprise, which is why it needs an "elite" and their separation from the "mass university". These "innovations" are to secure a competitive edge for national capital on the world market that other nations cannot catch up to by identical efforts so quickly, and so promote the attractiveness of "science" in the national location for for international investors. Politicians say very clearly that the purpose of science is to be a productive force for capital: It should prove a weapon in the competition which one capitalist nation fights against the other. It has to answer for the fact that very big parts of the world market belong to "us" and not the “others“.
For this superior competitive power, the nation should have a lead ahead of other nations in science and its development. What the politicians want to have from their scientific sector is only good if it is something "we" have and “others“ don’t. With their "innovation offensive" they want to align the intellectual capacity of the nation for just this purpose. For example, the national research institutions should become something like patent machines for spheres of business thought to be "promising", such as gene technology or information technology.
So that science functions for the nation in increasing measure as a source of wealth, the state sees itself challenged to organize the conditions for the development of science anew. By introducing "more competition“ in and between the universities (for finances via third parties and student fees, for famous professors by "payment by performance"), by "high profile education" in the universities (connection of finances to achievements) to using high technology to outsource colleges and faculties, to separate elite universities and departments from the "mass university," etc. It should produce its services cheaper and faster under the pressure of money.
This employment of the national scientific apparatus for the increase of national wealth is not new, nor is the confrontation with other prominent world market nations, which likewise maintain such apparatuses. But the openness with which the national commissioning of science is blared out and the eagerness with which it goes after “elite scientists“ of the whole world in the service of elite institutions is more evidence for how the animosity between imperialistic powers increases. The times of a western “scientific community“ in which all research results were in principle open to all allies draws to a close. In the future, science and research policy will be a fight for the monopolization of knowledge.