Technology and Poverty from the Viewpoint of the Third World

Jose Maria Sison
Chairman, International Network for Philippine Studies
May 18,1995

The Existing Level of Science and Technology

The existing level of science and technology has the potential of effecting the development of the underdeveloped countries in the third world, up to the level already achieved by the industrial capitalist countries. Unfortunately, there are socioeconomic and political factors which prevent the underdeveloped countries from realizing their right to development.

The biggest irony in the world today is that science and technology can effect industrial development and eliminate poverty but is used by the multinational firms and banks to exploit the people of the world, extract superprofits and debt service from them, deprive them of the boon of development and consign them to worsening levels of poverty.

To accumulate the capital with which to exploit the people of the thir world, the monopoly capitalist firms have directly extracted their profit from their employees at the work place and the market and have augmente these profits with subsidies and tax incentives for research and development and with the gold plating of contracts in both military production and civil works at the expense of the public.

There is the widespread but false notion that the monopoly firms and banks have made so much productive investments in the third world countries and transferred so much technology to them that the industries built there take away the jobs from the people in the industrial capitalist countries. Right within the industrial capitalist countries, another false notion is being whipped up that migrant workers have come to take away jobs from the host people.

These wrong notions are deliberately spread in order to confuse the people and obscure the real causes of unemployment and the social malaise in the industrial capitalist countries. These notions are generating chauvinism, neofascism and racism. The truth of the matter is that today the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is rapidly worsening and becoming more acute.

On the one hand, there is the high development of the forces of production, which include high technology (such as the use of microchips, lasers, robotics, genetic engineering and maximal use of raw materials) and the high level of education and training of the actual and potential work force. On the other hand, the capitalist relations of production require the supermonopolies to compete effectively and maximize profits by cutting costs—by reducing the use of labor power.

There is now the phenomenon of jobless growth, a result of corporate “re-engineering”, to use a current fancy term in the United States. The supermonopolies keep on increasing their constant capital for still higher technology and reducing the variable capital or the fund for wages. In the competition, some companies win, others lose.

The resulting aggravation of unemployment cuts the effective demand for the goods and services produced. For entire national economies, there s the tendency for the rates of profit to fall and there is the tendency either to overproduce at one time and underproduce at another time. For instance, the increased production and slight recovery made by the industrial capitalist countries in 1994 are leading to unsold inventories and decreased production in 1995. The high productivity is made possible by science and technology has relentlessly caused the capitalist crisis of overproduction.

Over the last few decades, there has been a trend towards the overconcentration of investments in the industrial capitalist countries. In 1968, investments in the world were concentrated in Europe to the extent of 69 percent. In 1993, these rose to 83 percent. In fact, there has been a big outflow of capital from the third world countries in the form of remitted superprofits and debt service. The trick of modern imperialism is to invest a little and to take out big profits.

Underdevelopment and poverty in the third world countries have therefore been aggravated and deepened. The monopoly bourgeoisie in the industrial capitalist countries retain the core industrial processes and the most advanced technology and deprive the third world countries of these. Technology transfer is actually limited and lopsided. What have gone to the third world countries are the enhanced technology for raw material production, the fringe processes in export-oriented manufacturing and the latest high-tech goods for consumption, including cars and electronic gadgets.

Under the terms of the World Trade Organization, the industrial capitalist countries and their supermonopolies tighten their control over science and technology under the slogan of protecting “intellectual property rights”. Among themselves, the imperialist countries compete bitterly to acquire the latest technology for the purpose of profit-making and they go so far as to engage in industrial espionage against each other. They draw scientists and technologists from the third world and the former Soviet bloc and buy cheaply from them the results of research and development financed by their home countries. The technology and productive equipment made available to the third world countries yield low net value as the foreign monopoly firms take out their superprofits, especially through transfer pricing. High-tech media and the electronic consumer products have further conditioned the consciousness and consumption tastes of the public. The worst of neocolonial and neoliberal ideas are rampant. Export income and foreign borrowing are wasted on the overconsumption by a few (no more than 10 percent of the population) of high-grade consumer items from the industrial capitalist countries.

In extracting superprofits and debt service from the third world, the foreign monopoly capitalists are the biggest plunderers of human and natural resources and despoilers and polluters of the natural environment. The environmental issue as well as the demand for sustainable development can be seriously addressed only by criticising and repudiating imperialism and by struggling for liberation.

In the scheme of neocolonialism, the general run of third world countries have been victimized by being compelled to engage in the overproduction of raw materials which is subject to ever-deteriorating terms of trade with manufactured imports from abroad to resort to excessive foreign and local borrowing to cover trade and budgetary deficits. There are only a few countries in the third world which have managed to build some basic industries under the auspices of the state. Even in these countries, there are extensive areas where poverty is similar to that in the other third world countries. Such industrial economies as those of South Korea and Taiwan are exceptions in the capitalist world.

More than 60 percent of the people of the world still live under agrarian backwardness. You can see them in the third world where unemployment and poverty are concentrated. Here you find the overwhelming majority of the world’s unemployed and underemployed, respectively 120 million and 800 million according to ILO statistics. Eighty percent of the people of the world live below the poverty line. This includes the impoverished people who are nearly ten percent of the total, contributed by the breakdown of production in the former Soviet bloc countries. In terms of economic retrogression and poverty, many of the former Soviet bloc countries qualify for membership in the third world.

The monopoly bourgeoisie in the industrial capitalist countries can exploit and impoverish the people in the third world because there are the corrupt bureaucrat capitalists, the big compradors and big landlords collaborating with imperialism and performing their own share of exploiting the people.

The Role of the University, Scientists and Technologists

Capitalism has achieved a high level of development in science and technology and social production. But the capitalist class has sought to perpetuate itself by extracting and accumulating surplus value from the proletariat. In the past, colonialism was also a major part of the primitive accumulation of capital in Europe. Now, foreign monopoly capitalism is engaged in the neocolonial economic and financial manipulation of the third world countries to keep its sway.

The worst capitalist crises of overproduction have led to the most bitter competition among capitalist countries and to two inter- imperialist global wars as well as to the US-instigated cold war (the so-called third world war). These crises and wars have resulted in the awesome destruction of productive forces. Science and technology has been utilized in frenzied military production and has resulted in the diversion of social wealth and the destruction of productive forces.

In the current situation, it would seem as if monopoly capitalism can reign over the world forever. But among the global centers of capitalism, the United States, Japan and the European Union, there is at the same time sharpening competition in the world market and their collaboration at the expense of the people of the world. The trade war among them has already begun. But the countries of the third world, which have been continuously the worst afflicted by imperialist exploitation are more and more exploited and impoverished and are now the main arena of social turmoil in the new world disorder.

The right of the university and its academic constituents, including the teachers, researchers and students, to academic freedom and autonomy must be well understood. It is their right to run their own programs of study and research and to protect them from the undue interferences and political repression from the state as well as from the non-state forces of obscurantism. However, the right entails social responsibility. Academic freedom is not merely a protective mantle for cultivating an egotistic and self-gratifying type of enlightenment and expertise or for undertaking the study, training and research programs approved by the capitalist state and its monopoly firms.

Aside from being the keeper and disseminator of received knowledge, the university promotes the advance of knowledge to a new and higher level for the sake of social progress. It has the obligation to perform critical and creative functions in the contemporary world. Here lies social responsibility that leads to social progress.

Your university is one that focuses on science and technology. But I presume that prior to and simultaneous with your technological training, you have a fair amount of studies in the social sciences. I also suppose that you are well aware that science and technology alone on their own account cannot spread to the advantage of the exploited or the entirety of mankind merely through fonnal university education, through the partnership or network of universities, through state-financed so-called development programs and projects and through investments of the monopoly firms. Your university is not isolated from the capitalist social context despite assertions of academic freedom and autonomy. The bourgeois mode of thinking dominant in society inevitably circulates in or pervades your university at the present time. The monopoly bourgeoisie never ceases to influence the university in the capitalist world. In addition to the tuition fees paid by the students, funds and other resources are received by the university from the state and from the capitalist firms and certain requirements consistent with the demands of capitalism are attached to these resources.

Academic freedom is best exercised and practised when you perform your critical and creative functions, when you can see through the workings of monopoly capitalism and criticize the capitalist appropriation of science and technology to extract profits, exploit the proletariat and the people, impose neocolonialism on the countries of the third world and relegate the people there to poverty and misery.

Under the current circumstances, academic freedom must protect and serve the university and its constituency in performing the social responsibility of liberating science and technology from the clutches of monopoly capitalism and all reaction. To the exploited and oppressed people, academic freedom would be practically a useless or even harmful abstraction if it is interpreted to mean the imperialist and reactionary control of the university and its functions.

It is your creative function both to raise the level of your scientific knowledge and technological skills and to find ways of putting science and technology in the service of the people in your country and improve their environment and quality of life. It is also your creative function to develop solidarity, mutual understanding and cooperation with the peoples of the third world and your counterparts in science and technology there who aspire for national liberation, democracy and development. So long as the countries of the third world are dominated by foreign monopoly capitalism and by the local exploiting classes, so long as the people have not yet liberated themselves from these, science and technology in the hands of the bourgeoisie do not only prevent development but cause maldevelopment and exacerbate poverty. In fact, there is a relative surplus of university-educated men and women, including scientists and technologists, in many third world countries. But they cannot be accommodated in the local economy and are compelled to seek employment abroad.

Both economic and political refugees run into hundreds of millions. Their plight involves the violation of human rights as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

As the crisis of capitalism worsens even in the industrial capitalist countries, you find common cause with the people and your counterparts in the third world against monopoly capitalism and for a world that is free and independent from imperialism and that is socially just and progressive.

At the moment, the rapacity of the big bourgeoisie is becoming more and more obvious in the industrial capitalist countries as unemployment increases, social cutbacks are made, public enterprises are privatized, the wealthy and the monopolies are given tax breaks and public funds are further appropriated for the welfare of private corporations at the expense of the people. I am aware that social benefits for students in the Netherlands have been steadily cut back and that unemployment is staring at many of those graduate from the university.

There are certain ways by which you can effect solidarity, mutual understanding and cooperation with the people in the third world. These are some of the ways:

You can develop exchange of information and other types of relations with the students and teachers in the third world, especially with their anti-imperialist organizations. In the Philippines, there are the League of Filipino Students and teachers’ organizations like CONTEND. There are also the League of Scientists and Technologists in the multisectoral alliance called BAYAN and Science for the People in the underground National Democratic Front. These organizations stand for a national, scientific and mass culture and for the use of science and technology in national industrialization and land reform under a comprehensive program of national-democratic revolution and with a socialist perspective.

You can demand from your state and university authorities greater autonomy and bigger funding for programs to enable you to go to the third world in order to do research and extend assistance. There your counterparts will welcome you.

You can develop close relations with the students and teachers of the third world who come over here for study and training.

You can demand the expansion of the program of study and training for the benefit of third world students.

You can go to countries in the third world for extended stay in connection with your professional training and expertise. You can be there in cooperation with the people’s organizations. In the case of the Philippines, you can start to link up with BAYAN or with the National Democratic Front.

But in any event, you can link up in solidarity with the people and the scientists and technologists of the third world, if you can have a common understanding with them about the nature of monopoly capitalism or imperialism and you sympathize with and support their struggle for national liberation and democracy and development. It is in this struggle that science and technology can be liberated in the third world and can be used to serve the people and lift them from their poverty.