michael a. lebowitz wrote:
Here's an excerpt from my "knowledge of a better world' which appeared in Monthly Review last summer and which will be a chapter in the MR book I'm now finishing, 'Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century' (due out this summer):
Thank you for taking time to point out this article. I found it valuable and a good place to start answering my question.
The existence of institutions which make knowledge property and a source of private gain, then, are contrary to the concept and ethos of knowledge and demonstrate the social irrationality of those institutions. Take the grading mechanism in many universities, for example. It is a common practice for professors in North America to grade according to a normal statistical curve--- so, many A’s, B’s, C’s. etc to F’sregardless of over-all student performance. What kind of behaviour does this make rational for those who function within such a structure? Clearly, it is to keep knowledge to themselves (or to a small subset of friends). The more other students know, the lower are one’s own chances for a good grade. (In fact, it makes rational giving other students /false/ information.) The structure in this case puts students in competition--- a situation that Robert Wyatt, the British singer, once sang about with the line, ‘How can I rise, if you don’t fall?’ This artificially created structure produces a zero-sum game in the case of knowledge which, by its very nature, is /not/ zero-sum. Thus, whereas ideally a university might be viewed as an environment dedicated to the fullest possible development and dissemination of knowledge--- something which a collective learning process would encourage, we can see that the creation of an environment which rewards private ownership of knowledge is contrary to the idealised concept of the university.
