The age of the corporate State vs the informational and cognitive public domain

The age of the corporate State versus the informational and cognitive public domain

[ Spanish original version ]

La era del Estado empresarial versus el dominio público informacional y cognitivo


By: Zapopan Martín Muela-Meza
zapopanmuela(at)yahoo.com
PhD research student in Information Studies
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK 28 February 2005


This article has been originally published at the Mexican electronic peer reviewed journal Razón y Palabra: Primera Revista Electrónica en América Latina Especializada en Tópicos de Comunicación (Reason and Word: The First Electronic Journal in Latin America Especialized in Topics of Communication):

Muela-Meza, Z.M. (2005). “La era del estado empresarial versus el dominio
público informacional y cognitivo.” En: Razón y Palabra: Primera Revista Electrónica en América Latina Especializada en Tópicos de Comunicación. Abril-mayo 2005, (44).
 http://www.razonypalabra.org.mx/anteriores/n44/zmuela.html
 http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00003658/

Keywords:

Informational and cognitive capitalism. Public domain. Public Interest. Public sphere. Citizens. Cultural political economy. Libraries. Repositories of public knowledge.



1. Introduction

This paper is a philosophical discussion on the constant attacks from the corporate State against the public domain, specifically against the access to culture – information and knowledge—through libraries and other repositories of public knowledge. Thus, the analysis focuses on the political economy and cultural aspects of the public domain. From the literature review, the works of Herbert H. Schiller are the most outstanding. He foresaw at the end of his career that “as cultural production, in its basic forms and relations, becomes increasingly indistinguishable from production in general, a political economy of culture –a rigorous examination of its production and its consumption – becomes more an obligatory and vital site for research and analysis.” (Schiller, 2000, p. 62). He also emphasizes:

“To ignore or minimize the value of this field of inquiry is to relinquish understanding of, and therefore the capability for resistance to, the latest crucially important terrain of capitalism. The political economy of cultural production and consumption is a core element in a twenty-first century understanding of capitalism.”

Therefore, this analysis follows that perspective just mentioned in order to deepen on the research and analysis of the cultural political economy of the current stage of capitalism; the political economy of the so called informational or cognitive stages of capitalism. Thus this piece of research analyses some of the most corrosive effects of capitalism on its frenzied phase of “market imperialism” as termed by Marquand (2004, p. 136). Such effects which are affecting adversely the public domain. As the political economy of culture is a very broad subject, so it is the public domain. Here it is analysed the role that the State plays, which as it is criticised here, has been overtly or covertly transformed into a corporate State. In this study it is consider that this corporate State is the main cause for the hollowing out of the public domain in general, and of the informational and cognitive public domain in particular.

On the same lines, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2000) alerts us about the importance of the politization of the economy due to the recent irrational intents of the capitalist economy to concentrate monopolisticly the media of communication, information and knowledge:

“An extra indicator of the need of some kind of politization of the economy is the perspective bluntly “irrational” of the concentration quasi monopolistic of the power in the hands of a single individual or corporation, such is the case of Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. If the next decade produces the unification of the multiple mass media in a single apparatus that combines the characteristics of an interactive computer, a TV-set, a video and audio set, and if Microsoft actually achieves to become the monopolistic owner of that new universal medium, controlling not only the language employed by it, but also the conditions of its application, then it is obvious that we face with an absurd situation in which one single agent, free of all public control, will dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives, and he will be, therefore, more powerful than any government.” (Zizek, 2000).

Thus, the three elements guiding this analysis are: 1) the capitalistic corporation on the economical part, 2) the State on the political part, and 3) the informational and cognitive public domain on the cultural part. Thus, the part of the public domain analysed is the informational-cognitive but in function of libraries, and, by extension, of other repositories of public knowledge. And since the concepts of “information” and “knowledge” flood all the human relationships, they are analysed based on evidences found on the literature from some of the varied forms of production, or distribution, or storage, or use of either information or knowledge. To that goal the phenomenon is approached from diverse angles such as ethical, educational, social, political, or others. All of this with the aim to invite all the public in general and the community of libraries and other repositories of public knowledge, in particular, to the reflection and debate on some of the destructive effects that the tenacious and persistent attack from the capitalist States and corporations are inflicting against the public domain in general, and of its institutions in particular. At the same time to invite them to counter attack such a trend of destruction by the market imperialism with its neo-liberal policies commanded by the corporate States against the public domain, like Marquand (2004, p. 134) warns us. All of this, precisely to re-establish the more and more undermined essence of the library ethos of offering public services, in this case, of information and knowledge, available, accessible, and usable in a free, free of charge, egalitarian, and democratic fashion to all of their communities of real and potential users.

2. The advent of the corporate State versus the informational and cognitive public domain

What is the State? The fundamental features of the State characterized by maintaining society divided in classes. The dominative classes ruling the political power have self entitled their right to expropriate the socially generated wealth and to exploit and subdue the dispossessed classes under their domination. Nevertheless, the dominative ruling the State –and its various apparatus such as the government to manage the social affairs-- needs from the dominated classes, under the pretext of existing; rulers and governed keep a sine qua non relationship. Engels defines the State in this way:

“Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which not only sanctified the private property formerly so little valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest purpose of all human society; but an institution which set the seal of general social recognition on each new method of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at continually increasing speed; an institution which perpetuated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes, but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the latter. And this institution came. The State was invented.” (Engels, [1884], 2000).



Although this is the essential nature of the State, in this analysis some functions are highlighted of the republican democratic State related to the provision of social services to the public which traditionally have been free, free of charge, democratic and socially equal. These services are the basic necessary ones so people do not degrade to levels of slavery, barbarism, or savagery. Nevertheless, it is not discussed here the disappearance or establishment of any other alternative state to the bourgeois parliamentarian State. That is beyond the aims of this analysis.



Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize how the class essence of the State influences in the ways that its rulers in turn provide the aforementioned social services to people. To the extent that the ruling classes of the State ignore their minimum mandate of providing people with such services in the way considered here, in such extent, quantitatively and qualitatively will be hollowed-out the the democratic principles of the public interest, the public domain. Those principles under which the State should be subordinated. In the quantitative and qualitative degree that the State deprive the public from such services, it is a the same time the degree which degrades and alienates the people.



What is the public domain? The public domain should not be confused with the public sector; this is included and subordinate to the public domain:

“In the public domain, citizens collectively define what the public interest is to be, through struggle, argument, debate and negotiation. If the rulers of the State and the officials who serve them are not accountable to the citizenry and their representatives, the language of the public interest can become cloak for private interests.” (Marquand, 2004, p. 33).

And what is it the corporation? The characteristic features of capitalism are: the privatizations of public services, deregulations where corporations are free from being accountable for their activities by the State power, advocacy for free trade or free exchange, to pay the lowest taxes, etc. The corporation –enterprise; free enterprise; incorporated, or limited institutions for profit; entrepreneurship—is that vehicle of embodiment and materiality of the philosophy of the dominant classes of the capitalism-imperialism that precisely and sharply carries out the mandates of its class. For practical purposes and based in some evidence, in this work it is considered the corporation –in its Anglo-Saxon definition—as the most representative institution of the whole capitalist and imperialist system of exploitation and expropriation of wealth. Thus, this is the most adequate definition:

“As the corporation comes to dominate society –through, among other things, privatization and commercialization –its ideal conception of human nature inevitable becomes dominant too. And that is the frightening prospect. The corporation, after all, is deliberately designed to be psychopath: purely self-interested, incapable of concern for others, amoral, and without conscience –in a word, inhuman. “ (Bakan, 2004, p. 134).

Bakan criticizes that the features which are common to all corporations are their:

“obsession with profits and share prices, greed, lack of concern for others, and a merchant for breaking legal rules. These traits are, in turn, rooted in an institutional culture, the corporation’s, that valorises self-interest and invalidates moral concern.” (2004, p. 58).

He also exemplifies that all corporations are even prone to their own destruction like the case of the Enron corporation. All of this as an integral part of its institutional character, inherent to its nature with psychopath features. “Greed and moral indifference define the corporate world’s culture.” (Bakan, 2004, p. 55).

Bakan (2004, p. 56-57) highlights –based on an comprehensive research of the psycho-pathological character of this institution—a list of features which define the essence of corporations as being psychopath. The corporations are:

*

Irresponsible. In an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is a t risk, including their own share holders.
*

Manipulative. Corporations try to manipulate everything, including public opinion.
*

Grandiose. Corporations self claim grandiose, always insisting they are the number one in their competition with the rest.
*

Asocial. Corporations lack of empathy and have asocial tendencies. Their behaviour indicates they don’t really concern themselves with their victims of competition, greed, or damages to the public or the environment.
*

Insensible. Corporations refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse for their victims.
*

Superficial. Corporations in order to achieve their bottom line aims of greed, profit, and money above or against everybody else, corporations relate with the public in a nice appealing ways, but in fact they they may not be like that.

Bakan also reported in a well documented way, several serious cases of corporations’ negligence, ecocide, and crimes (2004, pp. 87-88). But it is also well known, of the several times where dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of humans die in labour accidents, or in other circumstances where corporations are involved. Needless to mention the cases of ecocides where they generally pay some fines, and none of their members can be brought to the State justice. However, to assess all of these cases goes beyond the limits of this paper. Sufficient is to clearly State the corporations’ psycho-pathological character. This is crucially important to emphasize it since in many disciplines –and particularly in library and information science--, the majority of academic communities have adhered to or have been seduced, consciously or unconsciously, by corporations’ good-natured and charming discourse. But such positive discourse is contrary to their true nature: to lie is their essence to sell and knock down their competition.



Why a corporate State? In some countries the States are achieving to implement legislations of free access to information acts from the government bodies to bring them accountable before their citizens. Such acts try to avoid corruption in government of various kinds: nepotism, favouritism, interest conflicts, and the like (Muela-Meza, 2004a). However, in the majority of Western democratic States corporations’ owners can also be elected members or appointed in government positions. And notwithstanding that there are nowadays more anti-corruption locks, the true is that corporations’ owners will not abandon their corporate ideology, or they are not forced to dissolve their corporations or commercial societies they own.


The State, and the public domain, where it is confined, have diametrically opposed aims to those of corporations. And it is precisely this overt or covert fusion of the State and corporations which represents grave dangers to the democratic State as such and to the public domain. (Marquand, 2004, p. 24). On the other hand, “the State power has not been reduced. It has been redistributed, more tightly connected to the needs and interests of corporations and less to the public interest.” (Bakan, 2004, p. 154).

Thus, at the time of assessing public policies in general, or particularly related to libraries and other repositories of public knowledge, to any level of government to the interior of any country or on the international scene, it can be determined which are the social classes, sectors, or groups of people who are going to be benefited or affected. And how it has been comprehensively analysed in this article, the social class character of this fusion between the State and the entrepreneurial corporation is precisely the character of the dominating classes of capitalism-imperialism with their neo-liberal policies. On the other hand, the dominating classes of capitalism-imperialism are exacerbatedly becoming more political, they close ranks, but they do so precisely to depoliticise the public domain like Zizek criticises:



The great new thing in the current post-politic era –the era of the “end of ideologies”-- is the radical depolitization of the economical sphere: the the economy works (the need to cut the social expenditure, etc.) is accepted like a simple datum in the objective status quo. Nevertheless, to the extent in which this fundamental depoliticising of the economical sphere be accepted, all the discussions, about the active citizenship and the public debates where all the collective decisions should be brought, will continue to be limited to “cultural” issues of religious, sexual or ethnic differences –that is, differences of lifestyles-- and they will not have any real incidence on the level where the long term decisions which affect us all are made. (Zizek, 2000).

Therefore, to the extent that society –including librarians-- participates or does not participate to acknowledge and resist such increasing psycho pathological character of the public administration through the the corporate State or the entrepreneurial corporation ruler of the State, to that same extent will be the outcomes for the good or bad of the public domain in general, or the informational and cognitive public domain of libraries in particular.

3. Information and knowledge societies or plundering societies of the nature and the public domain?

The self called “information societies” or “knowledge societies” are in fact neologisms which hide the ideology of the dominant classes of capitalism in its most violently renovated imperialist phase. In this paper such terms or concepts are avoided because they are considered false euphemisms which swindle the essence of such social phenomenon. On the contrary, it is analysed and criticised their underlying ideologies, and their character of bourgeois class of the corporate State of their condescending ideologues, or followers, or apologists, or logographers who echo them.



From the scarce critical and analytical literature reviewed, it appeared remarkable the work of the Mexican poet, essayist, editor, and critic Juan Domingo Argüelles, from his book ¿Que leen los que no leen? El poder inmaterial de la literatura, la tradición literaria y el hábito de leer (What do They Read those Who don’t Read? The Immaterial Power of Literature, Literary Tradition, and the Habit of Reading). Following his analysis from the perspective that reading should be done freely and for pleasure, he accomplished a substantial hermeneutic analysis of some critiques of the so called “information society.” He highlights the works of the French sociologist Dominique Wolton: Internet, ¿y después? Una teoría crítica de los nuevos medios de comunicación (Internet, and after? A Critical Theory of the New Mass Media) y Sobrevivir a inernet. Conversaciones con Olivier Jay (To Survive Internet: Conversations with Olivier Jay). Likewise he considers Wolton’s works some of the critical few ones which escape from praising the ideology of the dominant classes, that of the creators and advocates of their masterpiece “the information society.” Thus, accordingly with the plan of this study, he states that:

“For the market ideology, the over abundance in the offer is, in itself, the democratization of its access, which of course is false: buys who can afford to buy, not who has at hand offers but lacks of money. With the same perspective, the over information is not in itself a benefit; it can be over-informed and lack of the capacity to understand, value, discern such an informative accumulation. … The critical function is more important than the capacity of access. (Argüelles, 2003, p. 165).

The ideologues of the dominant classes of the corporate State are a volcano in constant eruption: like red-hot lava they must cover everything as they advance. So, currently they now are talking of the disappearance of the World Wide Web. To replace it, new neologisms have up-surged: World Wide Grid, Omninet, Hypergrid, Oxygen, etc. All of them driven by the needs of corporations, and of great deal financed by the public domain purse via universities, such as the MIT case. Their aim is the development of technological megalomanias, where computing capabilities, through electronic networks of bits or quobits, permeate all human life almost as to its totality as with oxygen (Von Baeyer, 2003, p. 6). It might be said as well that they control it, dominate it, subdue it, exploit it, oppress it, etc. In fact, the ideologies and apologists of the fallacies of the “societies of information and knowledge” despite the fact they lack of a critical analysis, they also lack of modesty. The triumphalist megalomania of the cognitive capitalism (Dyer-Witheford, 2005) blurs their sight. From the physics field, Hans von Baeyer, in one of his few glimpses to theorize with a social consciousness, demystifies the happiness-giving character of the information and communication technologies. At the same time he place them in a dimension more accord to the reality of the conditions of life of the human beings and their environment:

“We are still learning that the impact of the age of information is not universal as it seems. For us in the developed West, information technologies appear to domain life, but for the majority of the global population they are vastly irrelevant. The World Wide Web will not solve the problems of poverty when half of the people in the world don’t have the means to make or receive a telephone call. Self-driven cars will not improve the living standards of three billions of people who survive with less than 2 dollars a day. Robotic surgery will not cure more than a million and a half who don’t have access to drinkable water. Eventually, an appreciation of the treacherous depth and width of the digital divide may begin to suffocate our limitless appetite for information. (Von Baeyer, 2003, pp. 6-7).

So, of what kinds of ages or societies are we talking about? Von Baeyer also shows strong evidences of the dangerous physical limits in the production of all the material bodies which combined make possible the computation and transmission of information. He evidences its hidden costs or those that the happiness-giving ideologies hide, in the production of such bodies: to produce a simple computer chip of 2 grams it is required 36 times its weight in chemicals, 800 times its weight in energy –mainly electric which in turn is derived until today mainly from fossil fuels—, and 1, 600 times its weight in water. At the same time he criticises that the champions of the “information society” advocate for fallacies, since the very same concept of “information,” at least within the field of the most materialistically objectifying of all the sciences, physics, it has not been defined it yet or incorporated to its cognitive body. He also criticises Shannon’s theories that until today information technology lacks of the main element critical for humans: information technology is incapable to compute meanings. And therefore, a great proportion of information found in the Internet –if it is found at all—lacks of meaning, it is badly organised, or it is simply wrong, so much of it is neither accessible nor useful. (Von Baeyer, 2003, p. 7). However, Von Baeyer's analysis, according to the position sustained throughout this paper, presents some weaknesses. When he tries hard to reach for a conceptualisation of “information” as the new language that permeates all sciences, he does not criticises the negative effects of commercialization of information for the public domain or the environment. On the contrary, he states that information should also be measured in the same fashion as already does the concept of “energy” in order to become a commodity and be commercialized. (Von Baeyer, 2003, p. 11).

On the other hand, and right in the centre of the debate of the plundering societies of information and knowledge, their ideologues hide the antagonisms between the the nature of information and knowledge that cannot be owned by anyone, and on the contrary, the roles for expropriating, usurping, and plundering information and knowledge by the dominating classes of capitalism-imperialism through the corporate State and their ad hoc national and international organisms in charge to subdue all the human beings of the planet to their legislative bills, by making everyone criminal and punishable for producing, reproducing, storing, and sharing information and knowledge that formerly existed free of human domination, now in its natural state, now social. To fill such vacuum, Zizek question them:

“By any chance, are not enough, the two mentioned phenomena (the unpredictable global consequences of the decisions taken by private companies; the evident absurd of “being owners” of someone or of the media individuals use to communicate), to which we have to add at least the implicit antagonism in the idea of “being owner” of scientific knowledge (since knowledge is by its nature neutral to its propagation, that is: it is not wasted by dispersion or universal use), to explain why current capitalism must resort to strategies more and more absurd to keep the economy of scarcity in the information sphere, and therefore to restrain, in the framework of the private property and the market relationships, the demon capitalism has liberated itself (inventing, for example, new ways to prevent the free copy of digital information)? (Zizek, 2000)

Such questioning shows evidence of the irrational and contradictory nature of the capitalistic production. On one hand the owners of capital frantically produce –through the economical exploitation of the working class, the ones who actually produce are the workers-- products or commodities, only to obtain personal benefits or the owners and shareholders of their corporations. But when society uses such products and commodities –information and knowledge are not consumed, it is only used by its internalization in the human brain through the senses, mainly sight, and since Sumer via the reading process--, stopping capitalist directors in the process, from exacting any profits out of that production, then the role of those capitalists' alter ego, the corporate State, should come to the attack in order to try to expropriate such human beings' sensory capabilities, depriving them from accessing such information and knowledge by means of their subduing processes of keeping an elitist, selective, and excluding use to those who cannot afford to buy the private symbol of its access. Such expropriation goes along the lines with keeping intact the vertebral column of its nature: copyright laws, patents, and so on.



The industrial, or commercial or financing corporations of information and knowledge – which also possess psycho-pathological characters like all kinds of corporations-- just have the goal to achieve the bottom-line goals of their owners and associates, regardless the social good or the ecology. As it has been discussed before, the corporate State is only good for preserving the private property of corporations, including that of the plundering of information and knowledge. But citizenship within the public domain mainly looks after the common good of all the public, and the balance between the public and the environment through politics. Thus, the organizations and institutions which overtly or covertly seek for the private appropriation of the public, or the co-existence between privateers and the public, they show evidence of their class character against the public domain and its democratic principles.



4. Information and knowledge for what?

Regardless of the purposes of information and knowledge, the conception we have about them depends on our world-view, cosmogony, and finally of our position of social class:

“Knowledge is mediated by the individuals who produce it, therefore, there is no neutrality, neither in the way to know, nor in the knowledge being produced. ... This knowledge is partial since it comes from particular positions and articulations, and in constant transformation. From the different positions of an individual, different realities can be seen.” (Montenegro Martínez, 2001, 271, 279)

1.

Information and knowledge for the welfare of all or only for a few elites?

This questioning can have as many answers as many human beings may express themselves. Einstein (1949) criticised that in the capitalistic system of production, given its internal logic, social information and knowledge for the development of technologies, systems, products, commodities, etc. were arranged with the unique purpose of the dominating classes owners of capital (corporations) and their State representatives to maintain their political power and control workers. As it can be read below, information and knowledge for workers only meant that as much information and knowledge were applied, it only meant more unemployment for many, more curtailing of their freedom, and in general more alienation:

“Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labour, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism.” (Einstein, [1949], 1995: 15-16).

Thus, apologists of the “information and knowledge societies” advocate side by side with the dominant capitalistic classes for the fattening-up of the loins they would ride. In other words all of them advocate precisely for the sophistication of control technologies and mechanisms created precisely for the domination, subduing, and alienation of the producers of information-knowledge.



Traditionally universities were the major centres for the transformation of information and knowledge with the socially ethical aims to solve the problems of our world and all of its species including ours. But along with the advent of the Universities, Inc. & Ltd., the alliances between the corporate State and universities, the contradictions are more evident. As it has been analysed, the bordering line between corporations and the State has been blurred. This State compromised mainly with the interests of its corporate patronages, takes by assault universities. These Universities, Inc.& Ltd., accordingly, carry on research based on the agendas of the corporate or State businesspeople, and they try, contrary to their ethos of respecting the democratic rights of freedom of expression, precisely to censor to the public their research publications. (Dyer-Witheford, 2005)


But not all researchers have been subdued to this post-modern oppressive inquisitional machine of the corporate State. Such is the case of the scientist Ignacio Chapela, who was working at the University of California, Berkeley, which is associated with Monsanto and Syngenta (Novartis) corporations. He discovered that the the technologies for Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) have represented grave dangers for the maize farming in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico (Quist, D. & Chapela, 2001). With such scientific research, published in Nature, the Mexican government has stopped the implementation of such GMOs in national lands and waters and it is assessing to issue bills and regulations that prohibit definitively such applications. Chapela openly is alerting the scientific community and the Mexican government not to allow passing any bill on GMOs, since the masterminds of such a bill are precisely the corporations associated with UC Berkeley: Monsanto and Syngenta, besides Dupont and the Mexican Seminis/Savia; which in addition will be the only beneficiaries by selling GMO technologies to the businesspeople from within and outside the Mexican government. (Chapela, 2004).


Thus, as it has been analysed, corporations only care about getting their bottom line goals: profits, greed, and they do not care, like in this case, if due to the application of GMOS to maize –basic food for the Mexican and Latin American diet-- people's health will result irreversible damaged, or if all the lands and waters from Oaxaca, Mexico wide, or the whole world would result damaged as well. In response to Chapela's scientific discoveries, the University of California Berkeley sacked him from his post in December 2004 without any reasonable explanation. So, he thinks that Monsanto and Syngenta are the masterminds behind UC Berkeley drastic decision (Science in Society, 2004). The list of these kinds of post-modern oppressive inquisitions is long, consider for example the monstrous tobacco company, and so on.



4.2. Information and knowledge for the welfare of humans and the ecological balance or for the destruction of humans and the environment?

The ethical foundations of what it is considered scientific research should be re-stated by the international labour community. It is not ethical that in the name of scientific research be built all types of weapons for the destruction of the species by the dominant social classes invested in the individuals who hold the power of States, governments and corporations who lack of any moral and border in a hypocrisy proper of psychopaths. It suffices to watch, listen to, or read in any medium of communication of the criminally deadly use of information and knowledge –general intellect-- crystallised in all sorts of armament employed, by means of any propagandistic sophisms, to murder other human beings, or to destroy our human civilization, or vast areas of our planet. An Australian critic , Brian Martin, in his book Information Liberation: Challenging the Corruptions of Information Power, elaborates on that:

“Military research is a big proportion. Here the aim is to develop more powerful weapons, more precise guidance systems, more penetrating methods of surveillance, and more astute ways of moulding soldiers to be effective fighters. For the researchers, the tasks can be very specific, such as designing a bullet that is more lethal--or sometimes less lethal, for crowd control purposes. Many talented scientists have devoted their best efforts to making weaponry more deadly. In most government and corporate labs, practical relevance to the goals of the organisation is highly important. In these labs, the direct influence of groups with different agendas is minimal. ... Overall, university research is less targeted to specific outcomes than most government and corporate research. This is especially true of fields like philosophy and mathematics.” (Martin, 1998, p. 126).



He (Martin, 1998, p. 129) also criticises –see the following table--, in the Australian context, how some disciplines or interdisciplinary fields within the humanities or the social sciences get little funding from governments or universities, whereas applied sciences, managerial and military disciplines obtain plenty of funding:






Plenty of funding


Little funding

Disciplines


chemical engineering, computer science, accountancy, law


philosophy, history, creative writing

Interdisciplinary fields


policy making, military planning, corporate strategies


peace studies, women's studies, political economy



On the same lines, Jennifer Washburn, author of the book University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Washburn, 2005), criticises that the corporations are taking over universities to such extent that universities' ethics is questionable and put in doubt, and that to the whole phenomenon is known as “Universities, Inc.” She, in accord with Martin (1998), criticises emphatically that the consequences of the blurring limits between the academic and corporate scenarios are very serious. She deplores that these corporate-driven universities are pushing out the search for theoretical knowledge and curiosity-driven “blue sky enquiry, to give way, instead, to commercial research, and that whilst some disciplines that make money, study money, or that bring money are showered with resources and laboratory spaces. Whilst physics, philosophy, and other fields that have trouble supporting themselves are left to scrape by (Washburn, 2005, p. 19). She also denounces some examples of how some scientists have abandoned the academic ethics to adopt the anti-social anti-ethics of corporations. Such is the case of some researchers from the University of Utah who discovered a gene responsible for the inherited breast cancer in 1994, and instead of making public their research –which was financed by the public purse with 4.6 million US taxpayers' dollars--, on the contrary, such university patented such gene and granted the monopolistic rights to Myriad Genetics corporation, whose owner was at the same time a University of Utah professor. (Washburn, 2005, p. 19).

She also intends to give some solutions which distinguish or separate the academic sphere from the corporative:

“There's an obvious solution: apply conflict-of-interest rules to all publicly funded scientists. If we wan to rein in the commercialism that is destroying our public research institutions, they must all be held to the same high standards.”(Washburn, 2005, p. 19).



In the UK and Australia, some authors (Slee and Ball, 1999, p. 290-291) criticise that “the aim of research is to produce new knowledge essential for the growing and competitiveness of the nation,” but on the other hand, the paradigms for a research with critical, exploratory, and creative focus and of creativity must wage strong struggles to open spaces and to express in wider publics. They term this phenomenon “the academic capitalism” where research is simply an economical instrument and the researcher is exhorted to become an “entrepreneur” with alliances with the industry to create research agendas which, in turn, demonstrate to be economically productive.


In Mexico exist many cases where the Universities, Inc. & Ltd. Associated with the Corporate State, Inc. & Ltd. and their corresponding Branch governments. The most relevant cases are taking place in the state of Nuevo Leon (state as a political entity not as the State as country), where paradoxically the people of the government of Nuevo Leon has passed a bill promoting knowledge, and also they project the city of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon as the International City of Knowledge. But at the same time, they have dismantled the undergraduate careers of philosophy, sociology, and history, and changed the name to the one of librarianship. (Carrizales, 2005; Galán, 2005). But also, the federal government of the Mexican State (as a national State) through the Ministry of Labour and Social Planning has begun an official crusade to dismantle the careers of philosophy, sociology, and political sciences from all the country's universities. (Martínez, 2004).


The bourgeois State per se is a giant power which the public cannot control, even when there exists laws for that purpose. The capitalistic corporation is another giant power, essentially out of the public's control. As it has been analysed here, with the fusion of such bourgeois State and the capitalistic corporation, it is the latter the ideologue of all public policy. This fusion already poses the most grave dangers against the public domain and nature, as plenty of evidences have been shown here. Furthermore, there exists another major power. The scientific and technological knowledge in itself is a major power for their cognoscenti to explore, exploit, dominate, and control comic and human nature. This totalitarian and anti-democratic fusion of these three powers into a single one is the perfect formula for the advent of a corrupted, neo-absolutist, and monopolistic power to atto and EXA cosmic scales. Never before since the written history there has been evidenced the advent of a power as deadly and destructor as this. At the same time, never before it has been made so imminent and urgent for the political participation of the citizenship in favour of the public domain and the cosmic equilibrium, to dismantle such dangers. These are the grave dangers and their supreme solutions that the age of the advent of the corporate State against the informational and cognitive public domain, and against the terrestrial and cosmic equilibrium. The same dangers that the philistine and fallacious apologists of the “societies of information and knowledge” --among them many librarians-- are incapable to state, debate or contest.

5. The corporate State as a barrier against the access of information and knowledge in libraries and other repositories of public knowledge.



Never since the advent of the Gutenberg print has been manifested more clearly the blockade to access to information and knowledge as in our current epoch. Nowadays the enemies of the public domain have tried to sell us the idea that the electronic networks of information and knowledge would reach all human beings of the planet nearly to the speed of light, and other similar marvels. The reality of things is the opposite, because precisely nowadays is when the production of information has increased to an EXA exponential, but at the same time, the vast majorities of people throughout the planet do not have access to it. Before computer networks, or Internet, it could possibly be justified this due to the incapability of the technologies of communication, information, transport, and other to make possible such access. But today it is unjustifiable. The main cause, as it has been deeply analysed in this study, lies in the evident corporate nature that almost all the nations of the world have transformed into.


That is, the corporations moved by their self interest and greed only seek for profit, the money from those who can buy their legal or illegal commodities. Once corporations have penetrated, permeated, and led the interests of the State, automatically the major goals of what the State was made for have been hollowed-out: those of servicing to the public good above the –individual and particular-- private good. To what Schiller elaborates on this critique:

“The change over now occurring in libraries is not simple a matter of introducing superior techniques and instrumentation which permit all participants in the information arena –providers, users, and the general public—to Benedit. Along with the new electronic technologies come a set of arrangements –social relations if you will. These, as they developed in recent years under the pressure of private interest and deliberate conservative budget-cutting policy, introduce the mechanics of the market to what had been a public sphere of social-knowledge activity. “ (Schiller, 1989, p. 81).

Thus, the members of the library community from all over the world are following this destructive amalgamation of the corporate power plus the State power against the public domain. In this dangerous ideology of the State with corporate and entrepreneurial essence, the public services, in the public domain, such as the free, free of charge, unhampered, egalitarian and democratic access to and use of information and knowledge inside or through libraries and other repositories of public knowledge, do not matter any more. They do not matter any more for all the inhabitants of the world, only for those who can pay for them. Some U.S. critics, from the very scarce few who managed to escape from the propagandistic machine of the Corporate State, Inc. & Ltd. manifested that:

“Transforming information into a saleable good, available only to those with the ability to pay for it, changes the goal of information access from an egalitarian to a priviledged condition. The consequence of this is that the essential underpinning of a democratic order is seriously damaged. This is the ultimate outcome of commercialization information throughout the social sphere.” (Schiller & Schiller, 1988, p. 154).

In the UK, Webster joins to the same critique:



“Fundamental principles, most importantly free access and comprehensive service, are under challenge, threatened by a new definition of information as something to be made available only on market terms. As this conception increases its influence, so may we expect to see the further decline of the public service ethos operating in libraries (users will increasingly be regarded as customers who are to pay their way) and with this its public sphere functions of provision of the full range of informational needs without individual cost.” (Webster, 2002, p. 182).



Also in the UK, Rikowski (2002) shows evidence on how libraries are already being controlled by the global agenda of capitalism through diverse international mechanisms such as WTO (World Trade Organization), GATS (General Agreement on Tariffs and Services) and TRIPS (Trade Related to Intellectual Property Services), and in many of them acquired as subsidiaries of corporations, operating only by interest in profit, money, sale of information, and that this trend is hollowing the library ethos of providing services to users free and free of charge.



In another major research paper, Muela-Meza (2004b) has comprehensively criticised diverse challenges that the libraries and other repositories of public knowledge face before the ceaseless attacks from the plundering and usurping societies of public information and knowledge, the self-called “societies of information and knowledge.” The most remarkable challenge in that study is precisely the economical challenge: the psycho-pathological fact that libraries be charged to access, read, and use information and knowledge.


The corrosive effects of the corporate taking over of libraries and other repositories of public knowledge can be seen openly and in the most blatantly aggressive ways. In Europe, all the members States of the European Union must subscribe to the 1992 EU/Directive where all the library users must pay 1.00 € Euro per each book borrowed to be read at home. In Spain, librarians are fighting and resisting against such a taxation, because if they surrender their struggle and end up accepting it, that will precisely deprive users from accessing information and knowledge in their libraries. (Martín, 2005, p. 6). Furthermore, as Calvo (2005) argues, authors, by the simple fact that libraries stock their works in the stacks, and librarians promote them are already well paid, and they even may end up owing royalties to libraries, librarians and users:

“I am going to take this absurd further: If it is consider normal that libraries pay royalties to authors, then someone should pay royalties to the librarians who manage to lend many books of a given author, and someone should also pay royalties to the users who borrow many books to their homes, and so they generate incomes for the librarians who lend much and for the authors...If that absurd world becomes a reality, do not doubt that it will be a world without library services. Libraries will disappear, they will be lagged behind for a second time in our history in the terrain of dreams.” (Calvo, 2005).

6. Conclusions



Regarding the public domain in general, the major danger is precisely the hollowing-out and corrosion of the democratic values:

“Democracy, on the other hand, is necessarily hierarchical. It requires that people, through the governments they elect, have sovereignty over corporations, not equality with them; that they have authority to decide what corporations can, cannot, and must do. If corporations and governments are indeed partners, we should be worried about the state of our democracy, for it means that government has effectively abdicated its sovereignty over the corporation.” (Bakan, 2004, p. 108).

To give an example to this, in the Mexican scenario, it is evident the worrisome links between the Nuevo Leon state government and the corporations in the recent Act for the Promotion of Development Based on Knowledge which was passed by the majority of legislators of the ruling party in the state government (PRI, Revolutionary Institutional Party). In the first goal this law states the manifested link between the Nuevo Leon state government, among others, with the corporate, entrepreneurial sector:

“To implement mechanisms and instruments to link actions that in the topics of science and technology carried out by the state Government, the corporate sector, the social sector, and the education institutions and research community, that facilitates the promotion, dissemination and application of scientific and technological knowledge.” (Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Nuevo León, 2004, 1-2).



And this is so, because as it has been argued above, “corporations are not democratic institutions –their directors and managers owe no accountability to anyone but the shareholders that employ them.” (Bakan, 2004, p. 151). Thus, the owners, share holders, directors and executives of the corporations cannot be held accountable under the rule of law in case their companies be responsible for crimes against people or ecocides, precisely because the laws from all the capitalist governments protect corporations. Bakan (2004, p. 17) argues that in the first decade of the 20th century in the USA it was very common popular discontent and organized dissent (especially from growing labour movement) against the dangers corporations represented against the social institutions, and that thanks to these struggles social movements achieved government regulation for corporations, and even their dismantling.

On the other hand, Marquand proposes that the public domain must be reinvented:

“Two lessons emerge from the history of the last thirty years. The first is that the public domain cannot be reinvented without halting and then undoing the neo-liberal revolution. The second is that it is equally necessary to make sure that the failings that undermined it in the second half of the twentieth century, and gave the neo-liberals their opportunity, do not reappear.” (Marquand, 2004: p.138).

These are the general strategies to stop and dismantle the “neo-liberal revolution.” Society must search for the mechanisms which allow citizens to begin the process of holding accountable under the rule of law all the human beings of flesh and bones who are the owners, presidents, CEOs, or shareholders of all the corporations (or capitalist companies of any sort), in the same way citizens hold accountable all the elected members of the State or local governments. Thus citizens could bring any entrepreneur under the rule of law, on a personal one to one basis, to respond for any wrongdoings against human life, all species and the environment. In such a mundane fashion like any other particular common individual citizen. This should begin by repealing the impersonal character of such institutions. Also such institutions should be subdued to the opening of the access to the information of their assets. And in the same ways that the States and governments around the world are being forced by the struggles and claims of citizens to free the access to the government public information, corporations should also be forced to open and make 'transparent' the access to all of their information to the public, beginning with all of their scientific research projects. Citizens should force them to do so with the same innovation, quality, efficacy, efficiency, and all the terminology of the jargon of the market imperialism that corporations invented and employ. A more extensive list can be made of the major struggle strategies for the re vindication of the public domain, but this could be a good start.


On the other hand, concretely regarding to the informational and cognitive public domain, this a strategy that goes according with the major strategies analysed all along this paper (those of separating the corporation from the public domain and the State power, and to subdue it to the public control and accountability, and to do the same to all of its members in its domain, States and governments):

“The public services of libraries, as factors of library policy that converges between the cultural policy and the policy of information, are indispensable elements to achieve the common good, that is one of the highest ideals that should keep on guiding the practice of the professionals of the public policies in general and in particular of those of the librarianship discipline, and as well of the whole humankind. The common public good regarding to libraries, by virtue of its bases of liberty, equality, and justice, therefore, of its democratic foundations, cannot and should not be given up to the private good, under penalty of putting in check the State of democratic right, the social State.” (Meneses Tello, et. al., 2004).

This is an introduction to the critique of the advent of the age of the corporate State against the informational and cognitive public domain. This is the starting point to fight for the re-establishment of the once democratic public domain and the common good for the benefit of society as a whole and its environment, or this is the edge to the abyss towards the total destruction of society by the market capitalism and imperialism and its demolishing machine of the corporate State.



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