Discurso no Simpósio Trabalho Científico e a Condição de Investigador, da Federação Mundial dos Trabalhadores Científicos na Universidade de Paris-Leste de Marne‑la-Vallée, 12 de Fevereiro 2009
Dear Colleagues:
The financially driven free market economy, after strong signs of distress, crashed last September 2008. It was a blend of Capitalism where speculative investment dominated over productive one, embodied in the neo-liberal ideology, submitting everything to market values.
Capitalism, which started in the early XIX century with the Industrial Revolution, began to change with the end of World War II. It was recognized the importance of Science and Technology for the Victory, and therefore for the development of Capitalism. Its turning point is the publication of
The conditions for the Knowledge Market Society were created. Research and development required large amounts of money. The development of multinational corporations particularly at financial level was the driving force. The election in 1979 of Margaret Thatcher as the British Prime Minister, and in 1980 of Ronald Reagan as President of the
Everything was geared towards creating the mechanisms which allowed capital growth, using the artificial creation of profit, based on the speculative circulation of capital, through the fast growing casino economy supported by stock exchange activities; and the impoverishment of workers, reducing their income, and forcing them to borrow money at high interest rates for their urgent needs. The new order tried to proclaim that everything which was good to private interest was good for public service as well, and this submitted public service to private interest. Everything started to have an exchange value even those elements which must not have it: art, health, education and scientific and technological progress.
Capital accumulation supported itself also on a productive process based on intelligence, capacity of knowing how to do things, mobility of means of production and workers, process of dematerialization of economy. Innovation, which generates obsolescence, and has ecological consequences, was a key concept, and as a consequence technologies changed at faster and faster speed, and the life cycle of virtual enterprises and the information commerce was very short. It followed that the workers’ stability of employment volatilised.
To maximize the creation of capital, the workers rights were attacked and highly reduced, and they were forced to surrender their right to have a stable work position, a personal and a family life and to be at the disposition of their bosses to work when they thought it better. To have a steady work position, the bosses required the high qualified workers to be ready to accept the neo-liberal ideology, which promotes a cruel individualism and destroys worker’s solidarity.
These are also the problems of scientific workers, but in a specific form. The process of production of Scientific Knowledge had a wrong evolution during the XX Century, worsening always, and this has to be stopped. Renewed innovation implied an explosive growth of the numbers of scientific workers. They evolved then from being considered a privileged group into an accelerated unprivileged one, because the artisanal phase of scientific production of the XIX Century and principle of the XX Century, driven by individualities, was followed by the industrial phase with teams which want to became bigger every time, and with objectives and submission to a hierarchy with activity control. They are under stress to produce continuously, overlooking the time required to produce new ideas, and to fulfil their duties as citizens.
The scientific activities started to be understood not as a cultural activity but as a market activity generator, and the scientific workers were forced to be highly involved in this strategy. Research institutions themselves were only declared viable, provided they follow the “diktat” of the financing political power: the Project Culture, spoken this morning by Denis Jonan. They receive their required money provided they submit their projects to state bodies above them, and only after these projects are approved. This is the opposed of the concept of institutional autonomy, and therefore University scientific autonomy disappeared a long time ago. Scientific workers were forced to find their own funding for their activities, and their employers, particularly if the workers have permanent positions, question them for their diligence in finding such investments. The employment precariousness is a corning stone, either through temporary contracts, or grants which survive too long, instead of permanent positions. Scientific workers are also forced to a great extent of mobility, the new precariousness. The assessment of the workers’ activities, vital to get permanent positions or further promotion, was based not on a deep analysis of their work, but on the number of papers published, combined with the number of citations they get, criteria open to manipulation.
All this happen because the political power became completely at the service of big capital interests. The crash happened because political power surrendered the power of regulation and without it market forces worked blindly. At the financial markets the investment rhythm escalated more and more, without material support and their limits were shattered.
It is necessary to bury this distorted political, economical, financial, social and cultural order. As a first step, it is necessary to ensure that political power dominates -financial power to promote sound productive investment and is subject to continuous democratic scrutiny.
At the same time scientific workers, more than ever, must state strongly their quality as intellectual workers, with the right to question the conduction of their activity, and using the trade union activity to present their demands to society as workers. They must demand immediately: the growth of quality scientific work, free from any limitations, with the best conditions for its performance, and adequate financing for each scientific worker, and each institution, re-establishing the autonomy of the public institutions to be free to follow the idea that if a problem exists, whatever its nature, and if its solution contributes to the knowledge grow, it must be studied. It is also required the recognition of the social status of the scientific worker, and its consequences in terms of labour rights and duties, the maximum of rights for carrying out the maximum of duties, the right to work stability, after a balanced and fair assessment and with criteria clearly established and agreed by all, and a salary adequate to the social position and expectations. This must be embodied in a labour statute chart awarded to all the scientific workers, containing: conditions to become a scientific worker; functional content of each scientific worker’s activity, the profession as a whole and each category; clear rules to attain permanent positions, performance evaluation and progression in the careers; preventing practices which destroy it. These rules must reduce to minimum levels the precariousness of the scientific profession.
But this is not enough. Knowledge Market Society, where the present day crash happened, is the one where we try to coordinate the scientific knowledge rationality with the irrationality of the Capitalist system. Instead of this we have to construct the Wisdom Society, supported in collectively making the better use of the acquired knowledge, with superior prudence and good sense, affirming the masses’ collective soul, integrating the citizens’ creative diversity, proscribing people’s mass exploitation, and run by collective action of workers. Economic activities must be submitted to the coordination of the rationality of scientific knowledge with its benefits for citizenship. Only Wisdom Society allows solving present day energetic and environmental problems, as the distortion of North-South development, the fraternal implementation of research in developing countries, and suppresses brain drain.
But a society dependent on the development of knowledge requires a new political organization, where the scientist and technicians are called to play an important role, in defining the future of society. Today and tomorrow the political decision making process requires the permanent assistance of a sound scientific basis to be able to take the right decisions. Quite often the political decision making process does not have any scientific and/or technical soundness.
A forth power, the Wisdom Power, is required along the three other democratic ones, to ensure that political decision making process fits the requirements of Science and Technology. This has to be done using all knowledge based institutions which must be independent of private interests, autonomous from all other forms of state organization, and submitted to public service and accountability. All decisions with technical content, e.g. environmental issues, must go through this forth power, and can only be implemented if it does not oppose them clearly. The dialog between all these powers is a strong requirement for the future salvation of Humanity.
Knowledge Market Society based on capitalist neo-liberal values, has very little wisdom, as there is a fundamental contradiction between the social character of production, the private appropriation of their products and gains, and the historical demand to correspond the impetuous development of productive forces new productive relations. It is the mission of scientific workers to struggle to construct the Wisdom Society, able to free all the emancipating power of all the extraordinary acquisitions of the human work and thinking, put them at the service of Humanity, and to push away for ever the spectra of misery, war and the Humanity self destruction. A new dignity as citizens-producers will emerge to help the assertion of a new rationality. The end of the disposable scientific worker will be the clear sign the Knowledge Market Society ended for ever, and the construction of the Wisdom Society is under its way.
