The Revenge of Athena Science, Exploitation and the Third World The Revenge of Athena

Linkages between Economics and Modern Science

The linkages and interrelationships between economic factors and modern science work in both directions   economic factors have an impact on science and technology direction and policy, and science and technology aid in fulfil­ling the economic designs of dominant powers. It is only by conceptualizing this bi directional loop that the full implications can be spelt out.

To put the discussion in perspective, reference is made to an incident narrated by Dr Richaria. During his time at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute (MPRRI), the institute was close to making an important breakthrough on developing High Yielding Varieties (HYV) of rice from local genetic resources. These varieties, while having the potential of dramatically increasing the output of rice, also required little artificial fertilizing. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines, together with western interests, immediately referred to the World Bank. The bank characteristically offered a US$4 million loan to the Madhya Pradesh government for rice research on 'condition' that the MPRRI was scrapped! The MPRRI was indeed put on ice and Dr Richaria made redundant.

This example illustrates the general point that economic and political domi­nation by the West has infused a love of western science and technology into the minds of Third World policy makers, which makes them blind to any other equally viable alternatives. At the same time the prohibitive cost of converting science into technology, leaves only the option of importing technology from the West. Expensive, high tech in particular, normally benefits only a small sector of the population mostly in the urban areas. Governments, in turn, are

cajoled into providing expensive infrastructure to make this technology

operational. The country's resources are spent on such projects and additional funds are borrowed to make good the foreign exchange shortfall, thus adding to the already crippling debt burden.

More insidious is the effect on the equitable distribution of wealth resulting from the anti democratic nature of this technology. As has been demonstrated by events like The Green Revolution and Operation Flood, the impact of tech­nology is pronounced in shifting resources from rural areas to urban areas, thereby reinforcing the disastrous process of the impoverishment of rural peo­ples. Such projects also require foreign inputs like fertilizers, insecticides, pesti­cides and irrigation machinery. These, in turn, add to the debt burden year after year, without providing any credible level of import substitution.

The impact of the economic domination on science and technology, particu­larly in the development of military technology is well documented. Indeed, western states have been referred to as military industrial complexes. Now, since more than half of the expenditure in the leading western countries is devoted to such efforts, the implications for western science and technology and their outposts in our countries are too frightening to contemplate. Further doses of such technology can only increase the Third World's subservience and dependence on the West.

If survival with dignity be the major objective, then all these linkages need to be understood and strategies for their unravelling put forward. A major plank of any such strategy should be the delinking of the Third World from the secular dynamic which institutionalizes the hegemony of the West. Also present should be a plan to cultivate confidence in indigenous values so that local creativity can flourish and evolve into a more relevant way of knowing and utilizing nature without the alienating, dehumanizing and inequitable characteristics of western science and technology.

Recommendations

1. Increasing awareness of the linkages between economic forces and the operation of science and technology. This should encompass:

(i) Awareness of military research budgets and their intended recipients. The extension of such projects/grants into the Third World can be rejected by mobilizing popular opinion.

(ii) Identification of prestigious high tech projects which have little benefit for the masses, but which entrench western technology in Third World coun­tries and increase the crippling debt burden at the same time.

2. Identification of major 'externalities' in science and technology pro­grammes and projects. Thus, those that require excessive borrowing or result in perpetuating inequity can be made the targets of popular protest.

3. Science and technology policy making institutions be infused with credible political scientists to help in working out the total impact of such policies.

4. Studies be initiated to chart out more equitable ways of knowing and

utilizing nature. A critique of western science and technology is a necessary pre­requisite for this task,

5. Ways to graft the critical concept of 'sustainable' use of resources on any emerging paradigm for utilizing and knowing nature.

Science and Hazards in Technology, Work Process, Products and High Tech Holocausts

With the startling rise in the occurrence of major high tech disasters all over the globe, the credibility of modern science has been seriously questioned. These disasters, which have taken place in capitalist and communist countries, and which are associated in the public mind with modern science and technology, reflect the crisis in this system of knowledge.

The Bhopal gas disaster, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, the Challenger tragedy, the Minamata tragedy of Japan, and now, the Sandoz Ciba Geigy BASF pollution of the Rhine river, have become the major turning points on the road of popular disenchantment with modern science.

The association of science and violence operates, however, at more conscious levels than may be seen in such industrial disasters. In the Vietnam war, for instance, science collaborated closely in an obscene military programme based on the use of chemical and biological weapons that eventually ended in ruining and destroying the entire living environment of the Vietnamese people.

Yet, none of these developments, horrendous as they are in their conse­quences, can match those arising out of the close and active alliance of modern science with the nuclear weapons industry and the nuclear arms race. The intensity of the planned violence inherent in this arsenal is not reduced just because it has not yet been used. With the expansion of modern science and technology, this madness has also passed on to Third World governments and the science they support.

Thus it can be seen that modern science has become the major source of active violence against human beings and all other living organisms in our times. This association of science and violence, as exemplified in what we have stated above, cannot be dismissed as being of an accidental nature; industrial disasters are not accidents, the barbarities of war cannot condone scientific activities in peacetime. Third World and other citizens have come to know that there is a fundamental irreconcilability between modern science and the stability and maintenance of all living systems, between modern science and democracy. In our view the very idea that science should be free of democratic control has been responsible for much of the violence associated with the scientific system in the past.

Recommendations

1. High tech and large scale industrial units must henceforth be subject to democratic consensus in all countries. Opposition to undemocratically imposed science should be supported everywhere, across the globe.

2. Governments in developed countries should introduce legislation to forbid the export of hazardous products and industries which are banned in their own countries.

3.Third World countries should strengthen their capacity to monitor, regulate and control the import of hazardous industries and products. Legislation should be enacted to ensure:

l occuptional health standards equivalent to standards in the industrial countries;

l adequate controls over the various types of pollution and environmental degradation;

l that hazardous products are not allowed entry into the country.

4. Third World governments should provide political support to ideas, pro­cesses and institutions that utilize non western science and technology.

5. Third World governments should pool resources and action to deal firmly with the perpetrators of all high tech disasters.

6. A $1 billion fund should be raised by Third World governments to take care of victims of modern science, high tech disasters, and this fund should also be used for the care of victims of the First and Second Worlds.

Science and Racism

Racial discrimination involves far more than racial prejudice or even inequalities of opportunity; it is an integral part of science, supposedly the most objective and neutral of human enterprises. The racial connotation of the IQ debate, generated by the work of Eysenck and Jensen, is now well known. The recent work of sociobiologist Edward Wilson is not as well known. Sociobiology seeks to promote a notion of humanity that sees intrinsic inferior­ity in the genes of certain racial and social groups. Eugenics, a 'science' which was abandoned in the early 1930s, is set to make a comeback. Sperm banks containing sperm of intellectually superior people have been established. Those with the means and desire to produce offspring of certain racial and intellectual purity will have access to appropriate sperms in the near future. Recombinant­ DNA techniques are on the verge of cloning human beings; science has a habit of turning today's faction into tomorrow's fact.

In science education, racism starts early during secondary schooling. The dominant western model of schooling, by now adopted in most countries, is geared to classifying students for their future roles in the capitalist labour market. Although all students have the capacity to learn, their ability to learn depends partly upon their different cultural backgrounds. Today's competitive

dividualist structure of schooling widens the differences that students bring to school; it stratifies them along the lines of culture (race), as well as class and gender. In addition, teachers' (often unconscious) prejudices influence stu­dents' choice of school subjects and levels.

Thus, classroom practice and formal testing procedures turn out to define many students as being of low ability because they either cannot or will not submit to the criteria that the schools set for achievement. Expectations of these children are correspondingly lowered. Occupational hierarchies then appear as the natural result or as 'racial' differences in ability, diligence, etc.

At many workplaces, especially in the West, it is the cultural groups labelled as having lower ability who are relegated to the worst jobs or unemployment. Modern science and technology, as servants of capitalist power, have helped intensify that exploitation.

To take just one example, the micro electronics industry promises us all the benefits of labour saving devices, yet it creates drudgery for some and unemployment for others. In the West is generates a two tier labour force, in which Third World immigrants and their children are stuck in the bottom tier. In the USA, the mass production of integrated circuits on which the entire industry depends reserves the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs for Asian and Hispanic workers.

Western multinationals have also exported that model, along with its chemical processes so hazardous that they would not satisfy western safeguards for health and safety. At their service, Southeast Asian governments have eagerly com­peted to offer these multinationals the most attractive terms for exploiting their countries. The Free Trade Zone (FTZ) in Penang, for example, employs not the local unemployed but mainly rural Malay women, whose cultural traditions are manipulated in deference to the authority figures who enforce the rigid discipline of the factories. The deference is reinforced by legal restrictions on the workers' right to organize. In the absence of any effective requirements for protecting the workers' health and safety, many become unemployable after a few years. Thus, in the name of providing employment, Third World governments squander their countries' resources in collaboration with the multinationals.

Recommendations

Schools should oppose racist stereotyping in several ways:

1. Course content: science courses should not repeat the claims by some scien­tists that there are important racial differences that have a genetic basis but emphasize the scientific evidence against the existence of distinct races. History courses should teach race as a concept that was devised by imperialist countries to justify exterminating or exploiting so called inferior races.

2. Structure of education: to avoid 'ability' labelling, the pedagogy should de emphasize exercises based on memorization and rapid note taking, in

favour of ones based on group discussion and co operative problem solving. Assessments of students should de emphasize competitive timed tests, in favour of group assessments of how well the students have helped each other to learn. 3. Cultural differences: schools should maintain a respect for the cultural backgrounds of all students. At the same time, they should make students aware of how cultures have been shaped historically.

In the workplace efforts should be made to overcome the employers' power to manipulate cultural differences for dividing workers and for super exploiting those considered inferior.

1. Wherever low status (low paid and/or dangerous) jobs are associated with one cultural group, there should be efforts to upgrade those jobs and remove the stigma.

2. To facilitate solidarity, all restrictions on workers' rights to organize should be lifted, as well as all restrictions on their rights to express themselves in print or public assembly.

3. Employers should be forced to divulge any information relevant to workers' health and safety.

Science and Sexism

Modern science is based on and continually reproduces unequal relations which give white, western, middle class men power. Behind the facade of the male, scientific and technological elite there is an invisible support network of women: assembling the equipment, cleaning the offices and the laboratories (often hazardous in itself), and providing material and emotional support.

Women's relatively disadvantaged position in this sexual division of labour within science and technology means that they have little say in the decisions within those worlds. Yet, in the 1980s, science and technology are playing ever more powerful roles in shaping their lives. For rural women, this can involve coping with the latest piece of machinery which may render her labour obsolete, ineffective or more difficult, or with pesticides which endanger her (and hence her unborn children), or her family; or she may cook by burning biomass, the smoke of which is a serious health hazard. In many cases, technological innova­tions either push women off the land or draw them into the factories of the cities. In others, the introduction of new technology has led to environmental pollution and deterioration and resource depletion. This strikes directly at their subsistence through pollution of water sources and denudation of forests and topsoil. Although the quality of life of the whole family is affected, it is women who bear the brunt of this suffering.

In urban settings, women's lives are often even more pre structured by scien­tific experts. The designs of their homes and the range of domestic products at their disposal emerge from technologists who are largely unaware of and

unconcerned with women's needs and interests. Nevertheless, in both rural and urban environments it is women who cope with the problems and disasters created by technology: dealing with droughts, shortages and famine, and caring for the victims of illnesses and accidents.

Gender biased designs in the area of fashion, for example, have reduced women to the status of commodities. Most designers of women's apparel and footwear are men in the First World who deliberately accentuate the female body for their own pleasure and titillation. Through the mass media these fashions have been imitated and adopted by women in the Third World. Often this has been achieved at the expense of their health and nutrition, for example, factory women in Malaysia have been known to work overtime, forego their meals to earn and save money to pay for new clothes, shoes and cosmetics.

But science and technology also invade the privacy of women's lives. They find themselves used as guinea pigs in technological trials in contraception and birth control. For instance, women in Bangladesh and longhouse communities in Sarawak were given the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera without being informed of its ill effects. Innovations in this realm, as in many others, are designed mainly by men, for profit, to be used on women. Their'rights to control their own bodies have been usurped by medical expertise and the technocratic power of transnationals. High technology monitoring of preg­nancy and regulation of birth through ultrasound monitoring, mechanical foetal heart monitoring, amniocentesis are further features of the medicalization and dehumanization of women. In the case of the ultrasound monitor, it can be used to determine the sex of the foetus and has very often led to the aborting of female foetuses in patriarchal societies. This bias has been further enhanced with the advancement made in biotechnology today. Apart from this, danger­ous drugs (e.g. psychoactive drugs), cigarettes and alcohol are promoted to women as a panacea for their problems which often arise as a result of their socially defined roles and through expectations of them in modern society. Food technology has also led to a decline in breastfeeding and infant nutrition with the introduction of infant formulae and weaning foods, which are both costly and hazardous. This craze for profits has led to thousands of infant deaths and untold suffering for millions of children and their mothers in the Third World.

In the field of mass communications, the advertising and movie industry has advanced the commoditization of women to an extent which is unparalleled in human history. Women have been reduced to objects of sex and violence in many insidous forms.

In addition to these immediate dimensions of women's encounter with sci­ence and technology, they also witness the sapping of resources for military technology. It must be understood that militarization and the buildup in modern nuclear armaments in the First World has been achieved at the expense of Third World resources, the plundering of which affects women first and fore­most. Once again, decision making in military science and technology is mainly

controlled by men, while most women would not support the build up of the arsenal.

Today, many women are protesting against the insidious and growing power of scientific and technological experts. They are challenging their hold over their lives.

Proposals

1. Women workers such as those in the new micro electronics industries, are paying the price for this technological revolution. More stringent regulation of their working conditions (including health and safety measures requirements of shift work, etc.), and rates of pay are required. They should be guaranteed full workers' rights (including the right to join trade unions) and the support of other trade unionists. Elsewhere women should demand appropriately designed machinery and gadgets to suit their needs and laws must be enacted to ensure that this is carried out.

2. Governments should enact laws to safeguard the dignity of women. Adver­tisers and the mass media industry should not be allowed to promote or depict women as sexual objects or as neurotic patients in drug advertisements for psychotropic drugs.

3. In the era of reproductive rights, women must have more control of their own bodies. This necessitates, in the first instance, the banning of dangerous contraceptives such as Depo Provera (many of which have already been banned in the West). It also means that resources should be devoted to non chemical, and accessible forms of birth control. Women must no longer be subjected to the experiments of manufacturers keen on profit in this sector.

4. Related to this, women should have more freedom to choose the conditions of pregnancy and childbirth. This requires a firm control of medical and tech­nological interventions in these processes and the encouragement of breast, rather than infant formula feeding. Laws should be enacted to protect women from these dangerous technologies.

5. Governments should ban infant formula and only allow its use in exceptional cases. It should be made available on prescription like pharmaceutical products.

6. The sale and marketing of tobacco and alcohol should be restricted. High taxes should be levied on these products to discourage consumption.

7. There is a need to develop relevant unhazardous technology to lighten the burden of women, especially in the rural areas of the Third World. Such use of science and technology would make greater sense than the present allocation of resources on military technology.

8. There needs to be a strong representation of women in decision making about science and technology. This should include all groups implicated in the struggles to transform the worlds of science and technology. This is to guaran­tee that they have a say in the construction of new forms of knowledge and

expertise appropriate to their lives; that products will be designed with their needs and priorities in mind.

9. The re allocation of resources away from military technology towards immediate nutritional, housing and other social needs would effectively pro­vide more support for women. As the primary care takers most women are literally carrying the burden of this over investment in militarized technology.

Science and Militarization

Increasing numbers of scientists and technologists from many countries are using their scientific knowledge for destruction whereas it is the responsibility of scientists to use their knowledge for the betterment of humankind. Such use of science has led to the invention of ever more effective weapons of destruction.

It is clear that the social, economic and political problems of the world cannot be solved by military means. All countries must refrain from using the threat of force or force itself to settle disputes, including disputes within national boundaries. No country should allow the military forces of another country on its soil, as in Afghanistan, nor should any country use its mercenary forces against another as is happening in Namibia, Angola, Mozambique and Central America. It is imperative that scientists refrain from participating in the milita­rization of science and that ordinary citizens do their utmost to reverse the militarization of our common world.

World militarization is accelerating at an exponential rate. Fifty million people are engaged in military activities worldwide, including 500,000 scientists and engineers in military research and development. This would account for approximately 20 per cent of the world's scientists and engineers engaged in military work during the 1970s. In the USA and UK 40 per cent of the scientists are engaged in military research.

Global expenditure on military research and development in 1980 was US$35 billion in 1985. Expenditures for all military facilities and activities reached US$900 billion in 1985. The US military budget alone is about $300 billion a year.

In the Third World military spending has increased by five times since 1960 and since then the number of countries ruled by the military has increased from twenty two to fifty seven. In 1980 the Third World spent $116,872 million on the military and only $40,827 million on health. For every physician there are twenty five soldiers in developing countries. The worst use of modern science and technology in the Third World is the utilization by despotic regimes and local ruling elites of weapons developed by modern western science and tech­nology to pacify their own people and preserve existing exploitative structures.

The biggest scandal in Third World development is that these countries utilize a large share of their nations resources and current budgets to purchase military weapons. Nuclear arsenals have the capacity to destroy every person on the

planet many times over, and still nuclear weapons continue to be built every day. The superpowers have 50,000 nuclear weapons between them with a destructive power one million times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet both superpowers have acknowledged officially that a nuclear war cannot be won because civilization as we know it would be destroyed. The most dangerous feature of the arms race is its increasingly destructive capacity which, when coupled with regional military confrontations, could lead to total nuclear annihilation.

Military advancement has been costly in terms of damage to the environ­ment. Nuclear testing by both the USA and France has caused many inhabitants of the Pacific Islands to suffer from cancer, leukemia, and radiation sickness. Some of these islands have become totally uninhabitable through damage done by this testing.

We face the threat of not only nuclear but also biological and chemical devastation. The US Congress has just voted to start production of binary nerve gas weapons although this action is a violation of existing treaties. All nations, including the superpowers, should abide by existing treaties such as the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. These treaties have been signed by almost all the nations of the world and ban the use of any such weapons. Despite this ban, Iraq has used certain of these weapons.

Sponsored research programmes in academic areas such as political science, anthropology, biology, chemistry and physics have been used against the inter­ests of Third World people. For example, the US Army sponsored the Pacific Bird Project in Bangkok to record the migratory pathways of many species of birds from their breeding grounds to their wintering grounds. This research was done by Asian civilian bird lovers who had no idea their work was for the US Army. This data could later be used to introduce diseases into certain areas, as research has also been done to see if birds can be carriers of disease. Insects and animals can be used in biological warfare to make people sick or to kill them. Toxic chemicals can also serve as weapons to attack people, livestock and crops. The US is actively developing new types of chemical weapons and is preparing to mass produce them. The US Congress is also being asked to fund dangerous testing of biological agents.

The US Army used bombs in the Vietnam war which destroyed all life in an area of more than 3,000 square metres by absorbing all the oxygen in the area. Bodies of hundreds of people who had died for no apparent cause, without wounds on their bodies, were found. The weapon (code named Fuel Air Explo­sive) kills by making use of a chemical to deprive humans and animals of oxygen. Other chemicals such as Agent Orange were used by the USA to con­taminate water systems and destroy forests and crops in Vietnam. These chemi­cals have been found to cause cancer and deformity of the foetus in those exposed.

Science has also been used for the torture of human beings in many countries of the world. This particularly obnoxious abuse of science must be condemned.

Military research has also employed cruel experiments on live animals to test the effects of these inventions.

Proposals

1. The world's political, economic and social problems are not solvable by military methods. There should be no military intervention by any country in any other country. This includes the placement of military bases.

2. Money and resources spent on military research and development should be diverted to finding means to fulfil basic needs.

3. Developing countries should not fall into the trap of purchasing armaments or accepting so called military aid to suppress their own populations, to set up military bases, or to prepare for military conflicts with neighbouring states. 4. Efforts to establish nuclear free zones around the world should be com­mended and supported. In particular the stand of the people and government of New Zealand in preventing the harbouring of nuclear warships should be commended.

5. The militarization of outer space, to which the present Reagan administra­tion is resolutely committed, must be halted. We encourage the scientific community to joing the 6,500 scientists and engineers in the USA who have signed a pledge refusing to engage in Star Wars research.

6. There should be an immediate halt to all nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

7. There should be an immediate halt to torture and cruel experiments on animals for military purposes.

8. The scientific community should sign a pledge against research into chemical and biological warfare.

9. The USA and the Soviet Union should sign a treaty to abolish research and development of nuclear weapons.

10. India and Pakistan should refrain from devoting their limited scientific, technological and economic resources to their ongoing nuclear programmes. Let South Asia become a nuclear free zone in every sense of the word.

11. The use of chemical weapons in the Iran Iraq war should be condemned and stopped immediately.

12. Scientists of the world must stand united in pre empting any attempt by South Africa and Israel to further their political ends through the superiority of their military technology, including nuclear power.

13. No military research should be done under cover of civilian institutions, either government or private. This applies to all countries without exception. Third World countries should be wary of any US government sponsored programmes in areas involving political science, anthropology, biology, chemistry and physics. The results of the research could be used for the purposes of developing military capacity, especially chemical and biological warfare.

14. Torture of any form must be condemned. Scientists must not offer their services in the creation or implementation of tools used in the torture of people.