----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 2:15 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Who Will Do the Science of This Millennium?
> A fascinating headline on the front page of the New York Times > announces: "U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences" > (William J. Broad, March 3, 2004). Yes this too caught my eye, republished in this morning's International Herald Tribune in London. It is hard to know when a wobble is a tipping point, but this too might be a tipping point of world historical dimensions. Fundamentally it is about the battle between living labour and dead labour, as the means of production develop on a global basis to produce an intelligentsia numbered across the world in hundreds of millions of people. And scientific technology is crucial in capitalist competition to win relative surplus value by reducing the labour content of commodities. In the earlier nineties the US fear was that Japan would master the software of what was then called the fifth generation of computers. In fact US software companies moved ahead and companies like Microsoft and Google are close to global monopolies. Another crucial area is in bioengineering which is heavily dominated by the US in a field of commodity production that will grow in relative size by comparison with the total superfluity of commodities, because to the importance of health options in individual choices. However the simplistic mechanical dream of monopoly powers arising from patenting genes has proved illusory. More fundamentally the massive concentration of capital, of dead labour, in the USA is on the ebb, with the dollar only likely to stabilise at a lower exchange rate than in the 90's relative to other currencies - a very damaging trend which essentially devalues US labour power in the world. The US has no future in trying to undercut the wages of other countries. So it is not surprising to see the statistics in this article that the "brain drain" to the USA is faltering, as the mass of capital is presumably not massive enough to provide the only pre-eminent highly-paid monopoly centres of good research. And in the battle between living labour and dead labour, living labour is always decisive. Capital has to restabilise always on the basis of living labour not of dead labour, if it is to continue to accumulate. And here we see the massive social capital of the ancient civilisations of Asia coming into its own.(And, yes, Ben Fine and Juriaan Bendian notwithstanding I consider social capital compatible with a marxist analysis of the productive forces). The riches of these societies in their complex human intelligence are now fully engaged with modern global communications. The great majority of the best workers by brain from these countries do not need to travel to the USA to excel. That is the crunch. So yes indeed these phenomena may be a tipping point and not a mere wobble. Civilisations and Empires come to an end through their own contradictions. We may, please God, yet see the old world, for all its own painful contradictions, stepping forward to redress the balance of the new. Revolutions as well as wobbles are the norm in nature. Chris Burford London
