Prometheus Completely Unbound: What Science and Technology Could Accomplish in a Socialist America
Clifford D. Conner
The Greek Prometheus myth has often been invoked as a metaphor for the inhibition of scientific and technological progress by social forces hostile to change. The myth credited the demigod Prometheus with empowering the human race by teaching us astronomy, mathematics, architecture, navigation, metallurgy, and medicine. That greatly upset the god-in-chief, Zeus, who had wanted us mere mortals to remain stupid, docile, and no threat to his power. As punishment, Zeus had Prometheus chained to a pillar in the Caucasus Mountains and left him there for a long, long time.
Human creativity could never be entirely squelched, but progress in science and technology throughout most of human history has been held back by traditional cultures in which the abundance of slave and serf labor gave no incentive for inventing “labor-saving” devices. Like Zeus, the ruling classes of those societies often discouraged scientific creativity because they feared its socially disruptive consequences. (The best-known example in the West is the persecution of Galileo for championing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun.) The rise of capitalism in early modern Europe, however, brought forth a new social system that at first strongly encouraged innovation and invention.
In the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, an unprecedented burst of technological progress known as the Industrial Revolution transformed the world. Historians have called it the era of “Prometheus Unbound.” And from the steam engine to the iPad, the parade of innovations has been spectacular. Airplanes! Television! Computers! Space exploration! If there is one way in which Homo sapiens can be said to have made progress over the past two centuries, it would seem to be in the conjoined areas of science and technology.
At the beginning of the capitalist epoch, the competition between small producers spurred creativity and innovation, but now a handful of “too big to fail” conglomerates dominate the economy, which tends to stifle that competition. The production-for-profit system has forged new chains for Prometheus—or at least put him under house arrest. Rather than being free to benefit the human race as a whole, science and technology have been forced to serve the private interests of giant corporations.
From its origins in the Industrial Revolution, the progress that the profit motive stimulated was directed toward enriching an economic elite—the owners of capital. New inventions and techniques were promoted as labor-saving devices. But in practice, these innovations did not decrease laborers’ working hours or lighten their burden in any way. Instead, they gave manufacturers the ability to turn out more products with fewer workers, which meant that a major consequence of technological advances was layoffs. These inventions would be more accurately described as “labor cost saving,” because they have primarily benefited the factory owners by decreasing their payrolls.
Planned obsolescence is another way the profit motive distorts technological progress. Rather than applying their ingenuity to creating things that resist deterioration, researchers have often been paid to do the opposite: to design products to wear out so that consumers will be compelled to replace them sooner. Reorienting researchers toward improving consumer goods—toward building them to last—would go a long way in freeing Prometheus from his chains.
Among the most familiar examples of the way corporate dominance of research has afflicted science and technology is Big Pharma—the monopolization of medicines and research on medicines by a handful of multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers. The fruits of Big Pharma’s laboratories are treated as business secrets, which violates a basic principle of good science: that knowledge advances when it is freely exchanged. Because Big Pharma’s primary concern is profit, it would rather develop drugs for relatively minor conditions that affluent people must take regularly for years than work on medicines to treat diseases that mainly afflict poor people, such as malaria. Also, if research indicates that its drugs might be ineffective or dangerous, it often sweeps those results under the rug.
Science for War
In the United States since World War II, the corporations have joined together with university laboratories and government agencies to form a single entity known as Big Science. The main source of Big Science’s research funding has been the federal military budget. Much other science spending has been war research in disguise. The US space program, for example, was largely motivated by its potential military applications.
Big Science began with the Manhattan Project, which created the means to vaporize the human population of two Japanese cities. During the Cold War, massive military spending fed the growth of the military-industrial complex, the web of the Pentagon and large corporations such as aircraft and electronics manufacturers that built its ever more sophisticated weaponry. This did not change after the Cold War ended. The American economy has become hopelessly addicted to war spending.
As a result, science and technology in the United States have been firmly oriented toward destructive and antihuman ends. Some of it is patently useless, such as the billions of dollars spent on the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars—a wacky notion that a shield could be constructed in outer space to protect the United States from incoming missiles.
Yet the weapons that do work are a bigger and more destructive waste. From nuclear weapons to the development of remote-control war, wherein drone aircraft operated from computers in Iowa rain death and destruction on rural Pakistan, a huge part of the United States’ scientific endeavors in the past seventy years has been devoted to finding more effective ways to kill people.
Spitting Into the Well We Drink From
There is one major area in which the consequences could be even more dire than those of war. The reckless growth of industrial production has damaged the environment in ways that threaten the existence of the human race, if not all life on Earth. It pumps tons of poisons into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil in which our food is grown.
It seems utterly irrational that a society would spit into the well from which it drinks, but the decision-making process that allows it to happen is controlled by corporate interests rather than by the society as a whole.
Two of the most environmentally destructive energy technologies are legally shielded from paying the costs of the damages they cause: fracking and nuclear power. Fracking—shorthand for hydraulic fracturing—is a technological marvel, a way to extract natural gas from deep underground by injecting fluid under high pressure to break up the rock layers that contain the gas. The toxic fluids used in the process poison underground sources of drinking water. But the private corporations that extract the gas don’t have to pay for the increased medical costs, illnesses, and deaths caused by polluted water.
Nuclear power plants, even when they operate “safely”—that is, if they don’t have spectacular accidents like Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011—release radioactivity that causes cancer and birth defects into the Earth’s atmosphere and waters. Yet the American government still promotes nuclear power, props up the industry artificially with huge subsidies, and limits its liability from lawsuits if a major accident occurs.
Big Oil and its political allies have paralyzed efforts to confront the threat of global warming, whether by reducing carbon dioxide emissions or by developing alternative technologies—especially the conversion of solar energy to electricity. They finance think tanks that produce pseudoscientific reports denying climate change, and they fund the campaigns of legislators who defend their interests.
Can Science and Technology Thrive Without the Profit Motive?
It is often alleged that the creativity necessary to advance science and technology cannot exist without the monetary incentives provided by the free-market economic system. But the experiences of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba reveal that science and technology can not only exist without capitalist incentives, they can thrive.
The Soviet Union transformed itself from a scientific backwater to a great power in the world of science within a few decades. In 1957, it became the first country to launch an artificial satellite, and in 1961, it became the first to put an astronaut into orbit. Its success derived from the ability of a centralized economy to marshal and organize resources.
The Soviet Union’s large-scale technological feats—hydroelectric power plants, nuclear weapons, earth-orbiting satellites, and the like—were spectacular. But in spite of all that, its record was ultimately disappointing. Given the immense size of the Soviet science establishment, its achievements fell short of what might have been expected of it.
China’s experience was similar. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution brought to power a government that, despite the country’s poverty, had the will and the ability to create institutions of Big Science. The Soviet Union provided more than a model. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists and technicians participated heavily in the construction of science in the new China, and they created it in their own image.
But in 1960, the Soviet Union abruptly withdrew its support. Thousands of Soviet scientists and engineers were called home immediately, taking their blueprints and expertise with them. In spite of this devastating blow, China accomplished some remarkable achievements in nuclear and space technology—another testament to the power of a planned economy to mobilize and focus resources. The country tested its first atomic bomb in 1964 and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967, and it launched its first satellite into Earth orbit in 1970. In 2003, it became one of only three nations to launch an astronaut into space.
The Chinese science establishment, however, remained highly bureaucratized and focused on military and big industrial projects at the expense of research aimed at improving the lives of the nation’s billion-plus people. Most Chinese endure a standard of living far below that of the people of Europe, Japan, and the United States.
That an orientation more centered on human needs is possible has been demonstrated by the revolution that occurred in 1959 in a much smaller country: Cuba. Once the leaders of the Cuban Revolution were in command of a fully nationalized economy, they enjoyed the same advantages that had enabled their Soviet and Chinese counterparts to develop powerful science establishments. Cuba, however, is an island with only about ten million people. There was no way it could compete with the United States in the field of military technology. Instead, Cuba would depend on diplomatic and political means for its national security—that is, on its alliance with the Soviet Union and on the moral authority its revolution had gained throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. That allowed its science establishment to focus its work on other fields.
The USSR and China had both sought to build powerful, autonomous economies that could compete head to head with the world’s leading capitalist nations. They aimed their science efforts at facilitating the growth of basic heavy industry. The Cubans, by contrast, oriented their science program toward solving social problems. Universal health care was assigned top priority, and it became more important when the harsh economic embargo imposed by the United States compelled the Cubans to find ways to produce their own medicines. They met the challenge. The upshot was that Cuba, despite its “developing world” economic status, now stands at the forefront of international biochemical and pharmacological research.
In the 1980s, a worldwide biotechnological revolution occurred, and Cuban research institutions took a leading role. Among the most noteworthy products of Cuban bioscience are vaccines for treating meningitis and hepatitis B, the popular cholesterol-reducer PPG (which is derived from sugarcane), monoclonal antibodies used to combat the rejection of transplanted organs, recombinant interferon products for use against viral infections, epidermal growth factor to promote tissue healing in burn victims, and recombinant streptokinase for treating heart disease.
The Cuban biotech institutes focus their attention on deadly diseases that Big Pharma tends to ignore because they mainly afflict poor people in poor countries. An important part of their mission is the creation of low-cost alternative drugs. In 2003, Cuban researchers announced the invention of the world’s first human vaccine containing a synthetic antigen (the “active ingredient” of a vaccine). It was a vaccine for preventing Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b), a bacterial disease that causes meningitis and pneumonia in young children and kills more than five hundred thousand people throughout the world every year. An effective vaccine against Hib had already been proven successful in industrialized nations, but its high cost sharply limited its availability in the less affluent countries.
The Cuban revolution’s scientific achievements testify that important, high-level scientific work can be performed without being driven by the profit motive. They also show that centralized planning does not necessarily have to follow the ultra-bureaucratic model offered by the Soviet Union and China, where science was used more to strengthen the state than to meet the needs of the people. Cuba’s accomplishments are all the more impressive because it has a relatively small economic base and has also been handicapped by a US economic embargo that has prevented the importation of medicines, medical technology, and even routine medical supplies. A 2010 Amnesty International report concluded that despite Cuba’s advances in the medical field, the US blockade has endangered the health of millions of Cubans.
The Cuban experience has come closest to demonstrating the possibility of a fully human-oriented science. Although Cuba’s small size limits its usefulness as a basis for comparison, its accomplishments in the medical sciences certainly prove that science on a global scale could be redirected from its present course as a facilitator of military power and blind economic growth and instead be devoted to improving the well-being of entire populations.
Removing the Roadblock to Genuine Progress
Even with Prometheus under house arrest by the American war machine, many technological marvels have been produced. But their primary purpose has not been to improve the human condition. The innovations that have been beneficial, such as radar and the Internet, have for the most part been by-products of military research.
The change in priorities accompanying a socialist transformation of America would redirect an immense amount of scientific talent and resources toward conquering hunger, poverty, and disease throughout the world. Socialized research and development—democratically controlled and centrally planned—would remove the obstacles that private interests have placed in the way of the free development of science. Who can imagine, for example, what medical science might accomplish if liberated from the clutches of Big Pharma and the financial predators of the insurance industry?
In a society geared toward serving human needs, labor-saving technology would not lead to workers losing their jobs but to reducing their working hours without a reduction in pay. And by not ignoring the social costs of technological progress instead of greasing the slippery slope to environmental destruction, new technology could actually help pull us out of the mess capitalism has created.
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