physics of oppresion, an intro

this week was a strangely busy week with less science and more politics. we had, as astronomers, two evaluations in heidelberg. one for our relatively new astronomy institute and the other for the doctoral program.

what was amazing was the involvement of the students, while in once they had the urge to only nod, in the other evaluation people were more active.

yet again i am cryptic.

let's go back to the basics. everything started on last sunday, gisella called on my bullshit about oppression (based on my lord of the rings analysis), and then i had to really conceptualize.

the temporary employment of the science workers is the basis of the class struggle.

PhD students and postdocs are the workforce of the professors and directors of institutes who are more involved in delegating work, administrative efforts and fund finding.

i first enunciate the problem with the analysis that is the directors do not directly own the means of production, but the access to the means production. computing facilities, high quality data, access to collaborators and most importantly the credibility embedded inside the community or the specific "highly regarded" institute.

before i become highly relativist and holistic, i just say that the increase of huge project demands the employment of the low level scientists to do the fordist production line type of work like coding data analysis pipeline, building instruments and varying the physical parameters of a code for specific problems.

this industrious productive nature alienates the majority of the young researchers from physics and/or astronomy. whom work with the desire that one day they will be professors and good scientists, and the only reason they are disillusioned with their work is that they are not smart enough they are not hard working enough. post-docs/proletariat live with the dream that one day they will become professor/bourgeois themselves.

the simple statistics show that there is not enough permanent position for each post-doc. hence we move with the mobility scheme (again one of the aims of the bologna process) from one job to the other, so that the our bosses can tap into the competitive international market of educated workforce. and we "the educated" don't even have the collective bargaining rights of a common factory worker, because science is such a fucking individualist/competitive enterprise. the nature should be investigated via collaboration, not by competition. that's why our papers are publicly accessible, unlike the patents of the pharmaceutical companies.

the point was, is and will be raised that as the educated class of the society with relatively high wages we can not be oppressed. i will make a loop argument, pointing out the comment i face everytime i propose change:

"our director cannot change anything because it is university rule."
"the university cannot do anything because it is national policy."
"the ministry cannot do anything because it is a european policy."

this kind of empathizing with the position of power really pisses me off. especially if it is argued to curb the action for demanding the rights, no matter how trivial this may look to "the hunger of manual laborers."

i will rather prefer if freire finishes instead of me by the pedagogy of the oppressed:

"The “fear of freedom” which afflicts the oppressed, a fear which may equally well lead them to desire the role of oppressor or bind them to the role of oppressed, should be examined. One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription.

(...)

"The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion."

-Paul Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 1

Call to the Proletariat of the Space

Rocket take off is not a spectator sport but still not only thousands watched it live[0] on 14th of May but also it was broadcasted as such. With such informative intermissions, state of the art visual effects and split screens with qualitatively instructive graphs. The dream of any real geek, it was the perfect combination of decade second long attention span with the deliverance of such specialized information that can only be accumulated from years of introversion. The arianespace live feed programme delivered the entertainment, the message and most importantly built the tension up till the climax, in which two old white males hug. Yes you guessed incorrectly these two white men were hyper managers of space/science/industry; ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain and Arianespace Chairman/CEO Jean-Yves Le Gall[1].

What is the problem, and what is the message that was conveyed. Our scientific discovery and exploration goals and aspiration of our society is in the hands of the industrial type managers, which end up in their position just because an ambiguous system of meritocracy dictated so. But what happened to the workers who put their labor into the construction of the scientific probe and the rocket, whatever happened to the software developers who designed and coded painstakingly the data acquisition, telemetry and even preliminary data analysis software. Even the Star Trek movies start with Enterprise being built in the Space dock, with the friendly worker in space waving hands.

Of course this question begs another one, why should the objectification of labor be any more apparent in space related labor than in any other industrial production? First of all, even with the highly specialized mode of production the commodity is not mass produced. Years of labor is spent on designing, testing and perfecting one specific part of the final product, be it the detector, impulse nozzle or trajectory correction software. This kind of collective labor towards the individual commodity, especially with the input not only from the producers but the "consumers" i.e. the scientists, most closely resembles the pre fordist mode of production. This reality is evidence for the dichotomy inside the space industry. This interplay of industrial hierarchical structure with knowledge/research development is very much apparent through the very special alienation that happens in this industry but nevertheless these issues are outshined by an even bigger problem that is the fact that research related production is motivated by exploitation.

Only when the laborers take control of the production, the science itself can be the main goal rather than natural resource exploitation to fuel conspicuous consumption in the world of economy of scales. "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere[2]." And now the natural course of events dictates the expansion of this chase out of the globe and unleash it to the outer space. This shameless ideology of exploitation is embedded into the discourse of space flight guru and mogul Burt Rutan[3], and even in the hype behind the exo planet research. The public debate on space exploration circles around the resources (e.g. water) on Moon and Mars hidden as the discourse on logistics, but not scientific incentive.



A closer view on a capitalist distopia in the near future about space production and exploitation is surely the widely acclaimed Planetes manga and later anime series[3], which tells the story of the crew of the DS-12 "Toy Box." The crew works on the Space Debris Section of a corporation, to clean the orbit of earth and moon to prevent possible damage or destruction of satellites, space stations and spacecraft. The plot progresses towards the latest flight to Jupiter for future possibilities of Helium extraction for energy. The series describe a society which is very much alike ourselves, with socially stratified, multiple tiered structure and corporate driven.

For most of us(you?) capital driven science is a good thing. Science should bring prosperity and profit. But as most of us(this time us) know, the surplus generated by the "efficient" production goes nowhere else than the pockets of the bourgeoisie. Even if we put this fact aside, science is not a commodity and is not a property. It is a human activity that by self definition is an important aspect of "humanization[4]" as Paulo Freire would put it. If I could obscenely simplify Freire's concept of humanization as to have the ability of and the freedom for critical thinking, we could say science is the most concrete form of this activity. To criticize the contemporary view of nature and reality is the core of scientific discourse. The attempts of privatizing and corporatizing the science and the institutions of science (which are unchallenged hence successful[5]) is destroying this critical core of it. Science is moving from being the base of change to maintaining and supporting the dominating exploitative market oriented ideology.

This regression is rationalized by pseudo scientific lingo such as information society[6], and knowledge management. Which these concepts help further the myth that orthodox definition classes did cease to exist. This commodification of knowledge as information, and application of industrial/corporate hierarchical system inside university is the attack on the last bastion of critical thought and education.

But as the cliche goes, the best defence is offense. The space and research industry is as i have discussed, where the usual labor/capital/commodity relations do not apply and human activity of exploration and science dominate over these relations. It also constitutes a great danger for the future of our society as it aims to expand the boundaries of resource exploitation obscenely. Both of these facts and prospects, call for only one action that is the organization of the workers in the space and science related research industry, the space laborers. Only through controlling the means of production, the workers can implement the environment of critical thought of science into the space industry and stop the exploitation inside the workplace and start producing and creating for pursuit of knowledge rather than profit and conspicuous consumption.

This, more importantly, includes the scientists with flexible labor contract, devoid of any kind of organization and class consciousness. They live with the hope of one day becoming a bourgeoisie of the science (i.e. directors)themselves, while their labor constitute the main source of scientific production.

Hence welcome to my popular culture infested world of science and politics, to the perspective of a near Ph.D. astrophysicist. But more importantly:

Proletariat of the space, unite!

[0] My ass, 2009, Springer, Heidelberg
[1] 3:33 of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGCylzbZRHM&feature=related
[2] Marx Karl, Engels Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
[4] Freire Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
[5] Of course i mean the Bologna Process.
[6] The concept knowledge society, ironically, goes back to a Czech Marxist Radovan Richta, and Richta report of 1971.