In a review of Cuban scientist Agustín Lage Dávila’s new book “The Knowledge Economy and Socialism,” Renato Flores reflects on the role of science and knowledge production under capitalism and socialism, asking how knowledge workers can be incentivized differently under socialism.
Monthly Review’s new release The Knowledge Economy and Socialism: Science and Society in Cuba is a collection of essays by Agustín Lage Dávila, a leading scientist from Cuba. Even if the title makes it seem like the book would be akin to Loren Graham’s histories of science in the USSR, but for Cuba, Lage has produced quite a distinct work. As the introduction reads, this book is on “how to think, plan, organize, and start a coherent and sustainable organizational system utilizing multi-sectoral collaboration, including the contributions of technological institutes, vocational schools, and universities.”1 And its self-introduction is not very far off the mark: Lage’s book does feel akin to a management manual written for scientists who combine research and managerial tasks and which gives an insider view on how Cuba’s biotechnical science complex can be both cutting edge and operate within a socialist society. Unfortunately, this means that at first, the collective of people who could find this book useful is extremely narrow, as it reads similar to management books which are only insightful after one has had management experience.
Indeed, at many points, Lage seems to be specifically writing for this audience, as when he cites people alien to the socialist tradition like Peter Drucker or Alvin Toffler.2 However, this choice should not distract from the profoundness of this book on the history and present of socialist science. Cuba is a worldwide leader in the biomedical field. In total, there are over 1,900 patents which cover Cuban health-related inventions, including the meningitis B and Haemophilus vaccine. It provides these products to a worldwide market, both successfully competing against capitalist products or providing solutions capitalism has abdicated on researching due to predicted low profitability.3 Lage’s book is an attempt to describe the organizational and technological structure behind these successes, and to explain how the Cuban technostructure manages to surpass the problems with innovation that “actually existing socialist” (AES) states such as the USSR have historically struggled with. Because of this, as the introduction states, this is a work which even “those who desire the failure of Cuban Socialism”4 will be very interested in reading–and I would agree that they probably would be, much more than the average socialist. Even the magazine Nature has recommended this book as a top scientific pick.5
So why should a socialist, or a socialist scientist, pay attention to this book? I am someone with a work trajectory who could find this collection extremely insightful, having had experience with scientific management, as well as having thought on and struggled with how to deal with the contradictions between the university-society-[military]industrial complex triad and my politics. However, Knowledge Economy’s utility for me is rather limited as I am not at present in any governing body, nor am I dictating scientific policy at any major institution. And even if I, or someone with a similar trajectory reading this review, were to somehow find themselves in that role, unless a thorough change of affairs occurred it would be hard to emulate the Cuban model. At the same time, I think Lage’s book can be read (albeit with some effort) through other lenses which can demonstrate that unlike what capitalist critics love to point out, many of the problems actually existing socialism has had with technological innovation are not inevitable. By discussing the strategy of Cuba and its biomedical sector, Lage makes us think through what a high-tech socialist science could look like with concrete examples such as Jayuguay’s Technical Pole, a center where high-tech manufacturing firms and other knowledge institutions are agglomerated. It is my hope that this review brings attention to this work, and contributes to the digestion of these lessons.
Lage and Marxist Philosophy of Science
Before addressing the book itself, we have to briefly discuss why Lage’s approach is somewhat novel in the Marxist canon. Even if Marxism is no stranger to debates on knowledge, science, and Philosophy, texts in the Marxist canon often seem quite bizarre to people working in the scientific world. Take for example Mao’s On Contradiction, which states that Lenin illustrated the universality of contradiction with examples from physics (positive and negative charges) and mathematics (positive and negative, integration and differentiation). From here a straight line is drawn to the contradiction present in class struggle, which is supposed to be illustrated by the above examples. While one could understand this as a sort of poetic license, in the original text Lenin insists that the above contradictions are part of a universal law of cognition,6 which tends to leave the mathematician wondering what arithmetical operations have to do with the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Should the proletariat differentiate the ruling class? And what mathematical operation comes next?
Indeed, Lenin is no stranger to scientific polemics. His statements about knowledge and philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism have found about as many detractors as supporters, including among Marxist scientists.7 But perhaps the most important aspect of its legacy is the idea that there are reactionary and idealist ways to look at science, and materialist ways to look at science, and that this divide reflects the class struggle. This idea, especially in a vulgarized manner, had rather devastating consequences on scientific research in AES countries–the example of Trofim Lysenko and his followers banning genetic research as a “bourgeois” deviation being the most prominent example.8 Today, it is alive in more subtle forms around the question of whether “Marxism is a science,” to more ridiculed claims such as the Big Bang being an idealist deviation.
However, there is little in this high-level debate that prescribes how AES science should look, except that it should be materialist and proletarian. To answer these questions, we turn to a second recurring theme. Returning to Mao, one can also find On Practice, a text that stresses the role of doing in revealing knowledge. This thread of Marxist philosophy of science can also be traced back to Marx, and especially to Engels in his works Anti-Duhring and Dialectics of Nature. This thesis can be read in many ways. Because it highlights that science is the product of human labor, rather than the work of high minds thinking about ideas with no foothold in the real world, it serves to demystify science. Like Mao did, it can be used to recover the role of folk knowledge and make science walk on two legs to better serve the people. A more negative reading of this thesis would separate science into unreliable or false knowledge produced by the bourgeoisie’s hands, and true knowledge produced by the proletariat’s hands. This reading is understandable, given the class bias of the knowledge worker especially in earlier centuries.9 However, it does a disservice to the idea that a new world must be built on top of, and through, the old world, rather than starting from an empty slate. In the present, a reflection of this idea is seen in the distrust of technology by many leftists, who, starting from valid instincts, proceed to disregard present-day technology. While this is preferable to blind techno-optimism, it fails to analyze where the class values enter in the design of technology, and is unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, forgetting that Soviet and Chinese technoscience was a mixture of low- and high-tech solutions for addressing the needs of citizens.
While the two recurring themes of the Marxist philosophy of science mentioned above are not exclusive to each other (and indeed most Marxist texts insist on this), people tend to momentarily gravitate towards one of those two poles when thinking about science: either a more universalizing and theoretical dialectical-materialist view or a more concrete and practice-oriented view. One could use the word dialectical and say that science is both of these things, but in my opinion, the d-word is often used when one wants to shortcut an explanation and often allows the silence to be filled by cherry-picking and widely varying ‘common sense.’10 To state the problem clearly, this duality essentially comes about because it is very hard to adequately define what science is, aside from noting that it is something that people do to relate to the world within the socio-economic conditions in which we live. From here also comes the ambiguity of what being a knowledge worker has historically meant and what class position they occupy in an economic system.
This description of science not only means that certain “development of the means of production” is needed to be able to grasp and develop certain laws of nature, but that, as Richard Levins states, science has a dual nature: it is both an episode in the growth of human knowledge in general, and a class-, gender-, and culture-bound product of Euro-American society in particular. As Marxists, we might feel unsatisfied with such statements and demand that science fits into one of the models given to us, so rivers of ink have been spent on the question, reaching no satisfactory answer. Below, I give my thoughts on the problem–but now we return to the book.
Lage’s approach to the question of science belongs to the more ‘practical’ pole, but his work is rather refreshing as it describes a modern and technologically advanced situation, rather than more improvised science taking place at the margins.11 His philosophy appears deeply influenced by Jose Martí and Fidel Castro: he cites them approvingly to expose his thinking throughout the entire book. Lage appears to think of science in a Promethean manner, stating that “the idea of socialism was born and was always linked to the aspiration of scientific and technological progress,”12 but he also recognizes science’s dual role as “a threat to development and social justice aspirations, as capitalism tries to privatize knowledge, but it also can be an instrument of liberation and development insofar as the attempt to privatize knowledge makes capitalism’s contradictions more evident.”13 This largely follows Martí’s writings on science, as he remarked that “[it] must be erected as the religion of the new age,” while at the same time expressing the need to link it to social practice.14
From these passages, and similar ideas found elsewhere in the book, it seems to me that Lage is working with an unstated assumption that socialist science is a force for good, and that Cuban science is socialist because Cuba is socialist and Cuban science is used to advance the socialist project. With this approach, he sidesteps more profound questions in philosophy, while grounding himself in practice. By doing this, he is able to remain within the confines of a Marxist analysis and still be able to appropriate concepts from ‘capitalist’ knowledge sciences. However, by grounding himself in managerial practice, he also leaves out the large problematic of the social relations of [knowledge] production, and does not address whether the Cuban lab reproduces laboratory life under capitalism,15 something which we will return to at the end of the review.
Lage on the Knowledge Economy
Having briefly discussed Lage’s philosophy of science, we can return to the book. It consists of an introduction, a series of chapters that correspond to individual articles, and a final chapter which is a Q&A with the author. The articles can stand alone, so reading through the entire book can become quite repetitive as the same points are stated more than once. Hence, this review focuses on a few key points and chapter-articles, rather than on every single chapter.
Lage is conscious about the deep links between science and society, and also of the particularity of the Cuban experience. Lage states that his project with this book is an attempt to “capture and systematize what [the Cubans] have learned, separating the essences of conjunctural phenomena, and putting these intellectual tools at the disposal of those who will come next to continue and perfect (including criticizing) what is constructed in this stage.” To do so, he focuses on biomedical knowledge generation, the field he is deeply familiar with, and focuses on the role of institutions and how they can incentivize and facilitate the production of knowledge which can later serve people’s needs. He keeps this essential aspect, without going into a more capitalist view of medical knowledge, where the truth of a product (and increasingly, of Science itself) is evaluated by its profit margins.
The second chapter is titled “Property and Expropriation in the Knowledge Economy.” Lage explains the use of the knowledge economy as a concept which “seeks to capture a set of phenomena that denote the increasing importance of knowledge in the functioning and development of the systems producing goods and services.” Lage distinguishes the knowledge economy from its predecessors by stating that “the novelty [of it] lies in expanding industries and entire branches of the economy, where knowledge is the ‘limiting resource’ and not land, raw materials, or even capital.” He continues by discussing the problems with capitalist knowledge generation, before reaching a key point when he states that “when we view knowledge as a productive resource, we see that having this resource is one thing and investing it properly to obtain an economic return is another. This immediately leads to the idea that having a science and technological innovation system is one thing, and intelligently and efficaciously connecting it to the productive apparatus is another.” Tangentially, here Lage makes reference to a large problem seen in the Soviet Union and the wider Eastern Bloc: the disconnect between high-tech knowledge in the military-industrial section, and translating it into use-values for people. Save for some exceptions in certain industries, the Eastern bloc failed to transition from an industrial to a more complex economy that provided high-tech goods on a mass scale.16 The ways in which Cuba addresses this divide will appear several times during this book as discussed below.
Lage continues by enumerating the dysfunctionalities and unfairness of capitalist science production before discussing the economies of scale of knowledge. Here, he reaches another key point: scientific research is no longer the purview of an individual. In the present economy, the many acts of individual creativity are incorporated into a massive standardization which requires many tests and where “the individual scientist loses control over the process and even becomes disposable. The company, with its resources—that is, capital—assumes the job.” He states that the problem is the manner of accumulation of knowledge and that Cuban institutions are very different from capitalist companies, promising to return to this, before turning to the role of regulations and brain drain. This subsection “A Global Problem” is a very refreshing read. I could not avoid nodding and saying to myself that Lage definitely gets it when he discusses creativity and the role of diversity, interaction ,and recombination of ideas in knowledge production. However, as stated earlier, no real attempt is made to discuss the ways that knowledge production in the Cuban system may look different to knowledge workers, i.e. addressing the common critique of alienation, in other words, that ‘from below’ life in AES countries did not look that different to capitalism.17
Lage returns to Cuba in the subsection “Building The Alternative,” stating that “four topics immediately emerge when reviewing the experience of these years.” The first is the people who create knowledge, and he mentions the “high numbers of scientists and technicians who are well-trained, motivated, and committed to the social project of which they are part constitute a powerful force for reversing the worldwide tendency to concentrate both the generation and use of knowledge.” That is, despite the attractiveness of other options, Cuban scientists resist “brain drain” better. The second is the “design of knowledge’s productive apparatus: the collectives and institutions,” with a tighter integration between knowledge and the production of goods and services. The third is integration into the worldwide flows of creation and circulation of knowledge. Due to Cuba’s smallness, it must be part of these circuits. The subsection “The Whole Cycle: Resources-Knowledge-Resources” deals with the fourth and final point, “the economic realization of knowledge,” or “how […] knowledge is captured and incorporated into negotiable assets.” Lage devotes significant attention to this last point, which is extremely important for Cuba, a country under sanctions attempting to survive in the present world and for which their biomedical products provide a crucial commodity to sell in international markets. A country that has to make ends meet while keeping its own ethos not only in knowledge generation, but everywhere.
This subsection exudes Fidelismo. But despite the rather novel ideas in this last point, I would state that the second point, i.e., the tight coordination between knowledge and production of goods and services, is where the practical differences between Cuban Science and the science of the Eastern Bloc are best seen. The USSR did not have brain drain, at least at incapacitating levels, and it was definitely integrated into the worldwide scientific community. It was able to realize some negotiable assets, especially in the shape of weapons. But it is in the second point where it failed, the oft-mentioned barrier present in the USSR: the two independent worlds of the military-industrial complex and consumer goods, and at the same time a love of gigantic projects criticized by the Chinese Maoists.18 The USSR was often able to produce high-tech weaponry but failed to transition the Soviet Internet from a military project to public infrastructure.19 The Cuban example in biomedicine, which provides vaccines and high-quality healthcare to a worldwide population shows that this barrier was surmountable, and it is this point which is particularly interesting even if the fact that Cuba is able to provide its knowledge and derived products in a more fair manner is also important.20
Lage on Science and Culture
The third chapter, “Science and Culture: The Cultural Roots of Productivity,” attempts to describe the cultural roots of Cuban science with a synthesis of Jose Marti’s thought and Marxism. In the first half, Lage proposes his vision of a Science for the People, a universalization of the scientific method (understood as something recent, and mainly Western) to democratize science by teaching people how to acquire knowledge on their own. In this process, science will become a part of culture and both will change each other. Science will lose its western bias and become less reductionist, while culture’s role in accumulating knowledge will be recognized. Scientific knowledge will become easier to transplant as cultural particularities are reckoned with, but more importantly, each culture will be allowed to conduct science in its own way, enriching scientific discovery. Again, these pages are an invaluable testimony of an extremely successful scientist from the Global South, and are a worthy read for anyone interested in the role of diversity in knowledge production.
The second half begins in a subsection called “The Science-Culture-Economy Triangle.” Lage incorporates the knowledge economy into his analysis, returning to his earlier thesis that “when the speed of the practical application of knowledge was low, it was the determining factor of the whole process. But in an age when knowledge is applied to production almost instantly, the determining factor and the competitive advantage lie in the generation of knowledge.” Here is a variation on an earlier theme: it is not just important to be able to apply knowledge, but to encourage its rapid generation to keep up the pace with the current world. Lage again cites Toffler and mentions that in the present day, the trend is towards a civilization in which “the most basic raw material of all . . . is information; including imagination.”21
Lage follows by adopting Michael Porter’s thesis of competitive advantage, stating that each nation “should find its zone of competitive advantage and maximize its exploitation without seeking to compete in all sectors.” He first asks which nations would be competitive in knowledge generation if science was solely a “rational, objective, extra-cultural, and supranational phenomenon of linear accumulation.” He says that in this case, developing nations would always be at a disadvantage, because the accumulation of knowledge would only depend on the investment in human and material resources, offering “few opportunities for small countries struggling for development.”22 However, Lage does not believe this to be the correct approach to the matter, because science is something else, namely “a component of the complex process of grasping and representing reality, integrated with many other components of culture.” Therefore, Lage believes that depending on the culture of a country, some less developed nations could find competitive advantages due to the many inputs that go into producing knowledge. For this, “the cultural system should provide a framework that supports motivation, boldness, and tenacity; offers points of reference in the national cultural and scientific tradition; recognizes tacit knowledge and analogous situations on which to base creativity; considers alternative approaches to the same problems investigated by other scientific groups; and communicates with other sectors of social activity to extract problems and ideas and effectively apply results.”23
One could do much with this statement. I would paraphrase it as ‘different people ask different questions, depending on their needs, and learn different things depending on what they do.’ Read this way, Lage touches on another failure of Eastern Bloc science, one which was not replicated in China: the inability to harness the internal drive and creativity of its citizens to drive society forward.24 While the Great Leap Forward is often talked about as a disaster, economists such as Chris Bramall have highlighted the fact that enormous amounts of knowledge were accumulated during this period,25 which prepared China for indigenous industrial development. Bramall also states that this is probably one of the crucial differences between the Chinese and Vietnamese transitions to the market, where the latter did not have this experience and hence has struggled harder to build a domestic industry without relying on external partners.
Lage reads this advantage into the Cuban biomedical sector and implies that the Cuban medical program, working with both an internationalist outlook and one which has a different kind of resources available to it, is able to generate biomedical knowledge with a distinct flavor because it is faced with very different questions. Hence, it is able to compete on a global stage against companies from the Global North. One could very well be impressed by his argument, but still feel that something is missing. Is it only Cuban culture that we are talking about here which gives Cuban biomedicine the edge? While anecdotal evidence seems to support the fact that Cuban doctors are valued worldwide due to their expertise, there is no evidence provided here to suggest that Lage’s universalization of the scientific method has taken root on Cuban soil at a much larger scale than in other countries. A counter-example could be provided by KSSP, the popular science movement of Kerala which counts over 50,000 members but has not led to any significant competitive advantage for the state of Kerala. The points raised in this chapter merit further discussion, but evidence is lacking.
Lage on Cuba
In the next chapter, Lage turns toward the institutions of Cuban knowledge generation. He mentions the ample human resources available in Cuba, giving the number of three scientific researchers per every thousand economically active people, a number comparable to Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands, and how this has been a conscious Cuban decision since the Revolution. He then turns to how Cubans integrate scientific research into value-chains, giving some data on what Cuba has been able to achieve. Remarkable here is the fact that most biotechnology companies are in the Global North but only 20% of them can finance themselves through sales–the rest being funded through venture capital or the stock market. Meanwhile, Cuba manages to do better despite its disadvantages as a less industrialized country under a US blockade. Lage highlights the role of the state’s investment and the defense of its social property in developing the Cuban technological parks, as opposed to the usual recipe of technological parks in the Global South being guided by foreign investment and only containing a part of the production process with the valorization stages all localized in the Global North.26
In the subsection “The Underlying Process,” Lage goes into these points in more depth. He reiterates the fact that in Cuba the research-production processes are integrated and contain the whole value chain. Unlike other Global South countries, it does not cede commercialization to the Global North. And unlike countries in the Eastern Bloc, discussions and decisions on commercialization are public and open, removing the barriers between scientific institutions, factories, and commercialization, and allowing for close collaboration between knowledge workers in all of these departments. Lage then mentions the role of exports in financing the operation of the Scientific Pole, while acknowledging the complexity of “maintaining market relations abroad and socialist distribution relations within.” Interestingly, he writes that this is “precisely a complexity that we need to learn how to manage, for it contains the seed of a superior form of communist distribution of the results of social investment in science and technology.” This will come about with more fair agreements and cooperation such as the one between Cuba and Venezuela. Finally, he mentions the need to treat knowledge as an investment for the future.
Lage then describes models of tacit knowledge which seem to take a page out of The Knowledge-Creating Company, mentioning how socialism is better equipped than capitalism to thrive in this economy due to the role of the people. He briefly states the difference between Cuba and European socialist countries: even if the latter produced good science, it failed to make a connection between the economy and science. Meanwhile, the Cuban strategy “includes bringing higher education to every territory where the real economic life of the country takes place. We also have recognized the need to create new organizing forms to catalyze the integration of scientific research with producing goods and services.”27 Again, the critical role of bringing the people into the economy-science relationship appears but an analysis of the knowledge worker is missing: there is little discussion on the specific shape of the organizing forms and how the knowledge worker will be incentivized differently from capitalism.
This chapter then reads increasingly like a business management book. The rest of the book largely treads over the same ground, restating points on the knowledge economy and going into more depth into some institutional characteristics of Cuba and the scientific pole of Yaguay. Lage is optimistic that Cuba can keep up with the global pace in the biomedical sector, and highlights the role of the Cuban Scientific Pole in sustaining the economy and being a critical source for exports to the world market and hard currency.
An interesting note is a discussion of negotiations between Cuban biomedical industries and the World Trade Organization and the US over the export of Cuban products. Lage has a negative opinion of regulations, which he calls “technical barriers to trade.” These are “a document that establishes a product’s characteristics or those pertaining to its production processes and methods, including applicable administrative provisions to which compliance is mandatory.” Lage claims that the fixed costs for Global South companies to comply with, in his opinion largely unjustified, standards are enormous, and that their only purpose today is serving as a sort of “tariff” that keeps Cuban and other Global South products out of Global North markets. While this is an understandable complaint, he does not posit many alternatives, except noting that the balance between too little and too much regulation is uneasy to strike.
Lessons for the Future
One of the core messages from this book is that high-tech science can be made to work, and can be put in the service of people (over profit) if an adequate institutional framework can be developed. The proof is in the pudding: Cuba does this successfully so this is possible. However, I think some caveats to this message should be added. Cuban success happens in the biomedical field, where the use-value of a product can be posed in a neater manner than other fields: does it have a positive impact on public health? In the absence of money, it is somewhat easier to measure the success of a medical product than how to evaluate whether a smartphone is better, worse, or even useful for society to produce. And as one moves towards less applied science, it is very difficult to produce adequate metrics, or to discuss what sort of intermediate deliverables satisfy intermediate goals and are ‘useful’ to society or to individuals. Looked at this way, the Cuban success story in biomedical research might just be a mirror image of the successful Soviet military exports.
However, this is not only a problem of socialism. Scientific productivity and creativity are hard to measure, and capitalism is struggling to do so without falling victim to Goodhart’s Law28 where metrics that recognize success like citations and papers published are first made a target and then cease to provide a good measure of the quality of science. In the present-day capitalist world, the monetization of science has reached a point where science is evaluated by the amount of funding it can attract, through either VC-funded spin-offs, industrial collaborations, or research grants. This can be seen as a reflection of the transformation problem: under capitalism, everything is measured in money, so it becomes natural to want to measure knowledge as money. But knowledge generation does not fold to this command easily, leading to many problems in modern science, such as the crisis of reproducibility where people are incentivized to publish results as soon as possible with little verification, which can later be translated into more grants. This aspect goes beyond what Lage calls the contradiction between “the social character of production and the private character of appropriation,”29 and would better be stated as the fact that capitalism is failing to make many branches of the academy undergo ‘real’ subsumption and become fully capitalist and rationalized. Instead, knowledge generation is only formally subsumed to the capitalist system in which it operates. In this process, capitalism’s logic and failures are severely disturbing the process of knowledge generation in universities where the end product is not simply a product, with cutting-edge applied research increasingly taking place in companies.
With this, we arrive at the main gap of Lage’s book: the role of the knowledge worker in Cuban society is not really acknowledged properly, instead being dissolved in the general Cuban society. However, in the present day, this is an aspiration, as most Cubans are not knowledge workers. Thinking about how a ‘fair’ and ‘socialist’ science could look like is no easy task, because it is no easy task to define what science is or how knowledge workers produce knowledge (or even what knowledge is, and who precisely is a knowledge worker). Philosophers of science such as Kuhn or Lakatos have given comprehensive statements on how science works, but have never been able to adequately respond to an anarchist epistemology of “anything goes,” such as that presented by Feyerabend in Against Method. While I cannot give a definition, I think any characterization of science should include some of the following points:
(1) Science as a process which through human labor, both mental and physical, unfolds and categorizes Nature/the Absolute [Hegel] while simultaneously developing the tools necessary to further unfold it [Ilyenkov]- e.g., inventing more precise tools needed for our labor helps us do larger scientific experiments which reveal new concepts and “desacralize” phenomena. Developments in glass fabrication lead to better lenses, which lead to the microscope and telescope allowing progressive breakthroughs in biology and astronomy.
(2) Science as a process of (negative) dialectics [Adorno] where concepts are explored until their limit and found to give way to more detailed concepts – e.g., how investigation of the indivisible “atom” gave way to electrons, protons, and neutrons, which upon further investigation gave way to quarks. This also roughly maps onto Kuhn’s concepts of normal and revolutionary epochs of science.
(3) Practice and peer evaluation as a truth criterion: knowledge generated is shared with society, and only kept around if it is useful in some way. I can come up with a theory, but I must come up with some predictions/use for the theory and show it to people in the hopes they also find it useful. Otherwise, it is useless. In the same way, inventions only become commodities when they are able to solve social needs. The market and peer evaluation serve similar purposes.
(4) Limits: while science constantly demystifies phenomena, there is a kernel of nature that is inaccessible to science, which will never be “desacralized.” It is in this kernel where philosophy-religion lives and always will. I do not think science will ever answer the question of “why are we here?”
Beyond this digression, I have to recommend Lage’s book due to its innovative and rather different message. Despite the critiques presented here, he is still giving us a good roadmap for how to build new scientific infrastructures from the old. Other options, such as a retreat into “pure theory” are not possible nor desirable. The modern university is not an ivory tower and it does not need to be sustained as one. Knowledge workers must be deeply conscious of the society they live in. Even the most “pure” mathematician or physicist who refuses to collaborate with the military-industrial complex is still teaching students that will work in it. In this aspect, and returning to the role of culture, it is not a coincidence that Cuba’s biomedical success is related to the internationalist role that Cuban medicine has played since the advent of the revolution, providing education for free to members of the Global South, being among the first responders to many disasters worldwide, and now manufacturing their own products to build a better world. It is a legacy of a previous era which will be hard to imitate, let alone surpass.
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In the foreword by Nestor G. del Prado Arza. See: Agustín Lage Dávila, The Knowledge Economy and Socialism: Science and Society in Cuba, (New York, NY: Monthly Review, 2024), 13.
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Something quite remarkable is that under the European Medicines Act, a drug orphan is not only associated with rare diseases, which are unprofitable to research, but also any disease unprofitable to research: the EMA “qualifies a drug as orphan if – without incentives – it would be unlikely that marketing the drug in the EU would generate sufficient benefit for the affected people and for the drug manufacturer to justify the investment.”
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Andrew Robinson, “Sparrow massacres and Cuban vaccines: Books in brief,” Nature 630, June 20, 2024, https://www-nature-com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/articles/d41586-024-01725-x.
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Vladimir Illyich Lenin, On the Question of Dialectics (Moscow, RU: Progress Publishers, 1976), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/misc/x02.htm.
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For example, a negative opinion is given by the astrophysicist Anton Pannekoek in Lenin as Philosopher, while the crystallographer J. D. Bernal commented more favorably on it in Engels and Science.
- Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
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The term “knowledge worker,” rather than scientist, is used here to retain some ambiguity over who produces knowledge in a society. It is not just scientists who produce knowledge. Meanwhile “knowledge economy” is a more technical term, which Lage tries to define in the book.
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Even if addressing mainly capitalist/bourgeois ideology, Louis Althusser’s Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists is a wonderful reference that explains how much unstated ideology permeates debates of science especially when silences are present.
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For examples of this, see Alondra Nelson’s Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, which describes the Black Panther Party’s efforts to diagnose sickle-cell anemia in black communities using affordable technology.
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Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
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Robert Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
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Miklós Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker’s State: Piece-rates in Hungary (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1978).
- E.L. Wheelwright and B. McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of the Cultural Revolution Paperback (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
- Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
- Another example of a country that managed, albeit temporarily, to break this barrier was the Bulgarian computer industry, detailed in Victor Petrov’s Balkan Cyberia. For a counter-example of how these barriers stopped progress see Benjamin Peter’s How Not To Network a Nation (despite several issues with the book).
- Lage, 65.
- Ibid, 65-6.
- Ibid, 66.
- Soviet citizens had a drive that served to make the system work for them and prevented the system from a wider collapse. However, these ‘fixes’ did not have a feedback mechanism which allowed the Soviet system to absorb the ‘fixes’ and make the system more functional. See for example Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism, or Xenia Cherkaev’s Gleaning for Communism for examples on this drive.
- Chris Bramall, Chinese Economic Development (London, UK: Routledge, 2008).
- See for example Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism for detailed studies of how the Global North exports only intermediate stages of the supply chains to the Global South.
- Lage, 96.
- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
- Ibid, 43.