Quote of the Day

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jun 13 11:21:21 PDT 2001



> > In any case,
>> having social interests -- including an interest in profit-making --
>> is not necessarily contradictory to effective knowledge production.
>> Evaluation of the quality of knowledge cannot be reduced to the
>> identification of knowledge producers' non-cognitive social interests.
>
>> Yoshie
>
>Speaking truth to . . . um, something, I'm sure.
>
>DP

For instance, AIDS cocktails (as well as nearly all other drugs we may make use of) have been invented & marketed by corporations, drawing upon research subsidized by capitalist states. Corporations have primary interest in making profits & capitalist states have primary interest in supporting the conditions of capital accumulation. Does that mean we should reject AIDS cocktails (and other drugs that have been found beneficial sometimes) as hopelessly "bourgeois" & therefore necessarily harmful? Your doctor has an interest in getting money from you or your insurance company or the state. Does it necessarily make his or her diagnosis, prescription, etc. always wrong, since s/he is "petty-bourgeois," interested in money-making?

We are not against effective knowledges that have been produced by scientists, nearly all of whom have been either directly or indirectly employed by corporations or capitalist states; we are against intellectual properties & the capitalist system of production that make only the privileged few beneficiaries of science. The distinction is crucial.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list