[Patents] Re: schooling "industry" in UK and US

[mattias.lundstrom@digitalroute.com (Mattias Lundström)]

I was the one that responded off-list to Hartmut with the idea that
this is an offtopic thread. Those only interested in patent discussions
should feel free to stop reading now ;-)

I did not seem to manage to make my point clearly, though. Another
attempt follows.

PILCH Hartmut wrote:

 >>  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.
 >>

Hartmut seems to argue that the privatization of education is bad
because it is a service instead of production industry. I objected
not to the conclusion (even though I am not convinced it is true)
but rather to what seemed to be the implied assumption
"X is a service => privatization of X is bad".

This is at least to me clearly absurd since this would mean that
there should be no private service sector.

 >
 > Some one objected to me that providing education services is actually
 > "tangible". It is not of course, because the concepts involved do not

I did not mean that. Looking at the mail I sent I agree that it could
be read like that.

 > 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.

Again the reasoning is suspect.
As a counter-example consider the private service sector.
Do you not think the established market economy works at all here?

 >
 > 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

In the society of today money and power concentrations are strongly
correllated anyway. I do not really see that the service sector is more
of a "power machine" than the production industries. In fact I would say
that it is the other way around since the production markets much more
easily degenerates into monopoly situations.

 > 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

The usage of "neo-liberalism" is used to signify that the modern version
of liberalism is quite different from the original version. (And perhaps
"neo-feudalism" would be a more appropriate term as eg Chomsky has been
known to argue).

 > of feudalism: neo-feudalism aka digital feudalism, and of course
 > the "digital republicanism" of free/opensource software et al as a
 > counter-movement.

As a little nitpicking I do not see that "digital feudalism" makes a lot
of sense as a synonym for neo-feudalism used as a replacement for
neo-liberalism. But perhaps I am misreading Hartmut's meaning again ?

-- Mattias