From phm@a2e.de  Wed Jan  9 16:34:07 2002
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 17:34:07 +0100 (CET)
Subject: [Patents] Re: schooling "industry" in UK and US
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201091327090.10002-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201091714320.10960-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>

>   http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,629209,00.html
>   Schooling up for sale
>
>   The creeping corporate takeover of education is being fostered to build
>   up exports
>
> you find another very well account of extremes of privatisation in
> anglosaxon countries.  When people speak negatively of 'neo-liberalism',
> they are missing the point.  The problem is the transfer of a success
> experience known from the market economy of tangibles into the economy of
> intangibles.

Some one objected to me that providing education services is actually
"tangible". It is not of course, because the concepts involved do not
belong to the realm of using controllable physical forces but to that of
"rules of organisation and calculation".  Even if some rules of
organisation deal with empirical knowledge (such as the knowledge about
how pupils may react to a certain teaching method), such rules are outside
the realm of controllable physical forces and therefore also outside of
industrial applicability, in the sense in which this word has been mostly
used, especially in continental europe, since the "industrial revolution":
they cannot be used for automated production of material goods, for which
a per-piece price is charged, so that the laws of demand and supply work
as they should according to the schoolbook.

As soon as we leave the realm of controllable physical forces and
automated material production, we get into a realm where laissez-faire /
privatisation leads to another well known form of competition:  not the
money machine but the power machine.  That's why I would not speak of
neo-liberalism but of neo-feudalism.  Liberalism has been alive for a long
time.  It has never died, so there is no grounds for implying its revival
by prefixing the syllable "neo".  But we are in fact witnessing a revival
of feudalism: neo-feudalism aka digital feudalism, and of course
the "digital republicanism" of free/opensource software et al as a
counter-movement.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                          http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	     http://swpat.ffii.org/
100,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/






