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Currently, at least in the US academia, scientists are fiercely competing with one another at the individual level. In order to set up a lab, they need space at a university, which requires competing with each other for tenure track faculty positions. These are usually granted according to some fetishized metric of productivity, such as h-index, and their demonstrated ability to secure grant funding. They also need to compete with each other to secure that funding, which is often determined by the prestige of the scientist (i.e. h-index) and by the alignment of the grant proposal with the funding agencies goals. This places a great deal of competition between scientists and it tends to be alienating. Science is a social process that involves the communal development of the general intellect–it’s not driven by individual geniuses slaving away under isolated, alienated conditions.
Another area of competition is that over graduate students and post-docs who do much of the crucial work needed to run the lab. Scientists are constantly competing with each other over the best students and post-docs. However, universities have been making this easier by accepting too many grad students than what can be funded, which makes things easier for the scientist, but forces intense competition onto the grad students. Likewise, there is a systemic over-production of post-docs, which makes it easier for scientists to hire quality post-docs at cheap rates, but it likewise forces post-docs into intense competition as well. This penny-pinching over grants and the competition over students changes the scientist-student relationship from its historic master-apprentice form to the employer-employee form, which means that the scientist becomes less invested in the development of the student. Obviously this is bad because, scientists must not only produce scientific knowledge, but they also need to train the next generation.
And then there are the funding agencies–the NSF, NIH, Department of Defense, and in some cases the private sector. They parcel out grants according to their budgets received from Congress. The money goes towards scientists and projects that are aligned with their goals, which under an Imperial capitalist nation-state, are aligned with national defense and private accumulation of monopoly capital. And then there are the universities themselves which are increasingly run as businesses. And then there are the scientific journals, professional societies, conferences, etc. All these things have been corrupted in some form by capitalism and will change under socialism. And that’s not even getting into systemic issues of race/gender/class.
So, under socialism, I think science would be organized in a way that limits the alienation of scientists, students, technicians, etc. The goal of research institutions would be to foster a research community rather than attracting a handful of superstars who are constantly wary of one another and trying to elbow each other out of the way, and who are forced to exploit the students/post-docs/technicians who work in their labs. Likewise, access to resources shouldn’t be granted on an individual basis according to some fetishized productivity metric. For example, the Soviet bureaucracy parceled out scientific resources at the institutional level rather than the individual level. Furthermore, the scientific institutions should value scientists on their mentorship/teaching ability in addition to their research productivity, rather than valuing them solely on their ability to attract grant funding. Finally, the focus of scientific research can be turned away from imperial domination and monopoly profits towards socially beneficial programs like green energy, green infrastructure, space exploration, the automation of work, etc.
I often think about how the capitalist model of “infinite growth” has caused scientists/researchers to assume there is unlimited truth that can be uncovered and accordingly the number of journal publications per year has increased hyper-exponentially. We are currently evaluated primarily on quantity of output rather than quality, which I hope would change under a socialist system with different assumptions about what “scientific productivity” is and means. I would also imagine shifting away from quantity-output based evaluations would benefit most fields, since it would help prevent the necessity to constantly re-invent and fragment existing constructs and theories in the name of “novelty”.
Also, socialist science ideally would open the door to more people and different groups of people being able to become scientists and non-scientific researchers, which would only expedite our progress and generation of knowledge. Increased social and geographical representation could help bypass a lot of wasted time and resources spent on research based on biased/incomplete/faulty assumptions that people from different backgrounds would be able to more readily inform.
I’ve been thinking about this to some extent lately as well. Part of the issue with figuring this out is that there are two main functions of academic science that are purposefully confused in a capitalist global system. The first is that which is attributed to the university, but is also largely manufactured consent when it comes to STEM in the 21st century: science as an academic pursuit of our interests. Time is allocated for pursuit of individual academic interests and tangents and the workers are able to investigate science outside of their own silo. The second and now much more common purpose is the corporatization of academia. The worker is relegated to the exploited position of a poorly paid skilled laborer. The faculty are chosen to be scientists who for the most part only want to narrowly pursue one or two interests. Graduate students, i.e. the vast majority of the workforce, are relegated to wage slavery. Academic pursuits are reduced to corporate skills like coding, debugging electronics, or sitting in clean rooms doing fabrication. The development of an assignable curiosity and a specific set of skills is emphasized over the freedom to pursue other academic interests.
So, to some extent, the socialist lab ought to take into account these dual functions. The most immediate change applies to both roles, which is to make payment for graduate workers in either teaching or researching positions much higher and guaranteed. Similarly, lab hiring, spending, and general goals can be much more democratic. The hierarchy is real, and faculty do have much greater institutional knowledge in many cases, but in actuality grad students are often knowledgeable enough to be a part of these discussions and decisions. They actually often are involved in discussing these decisions, there just isn’t any openness or accountability from faculty. There also must be democratic ways to address the real issues of toxicity, hostility, and lack of intersectionality in STEM. Giving grad students actually voting powers would go a long way in holding faculty responsible.
As much as I dislike the corporate academia, it’s probably necessary in a socialist state as a way to produce technological advances more equitably than private industries. In many fields, this is already a role being fulfilled. I think there just needs to be much more intellectual freedom for workers to develop knowledge about topics that interest them, without the massive wage pressure to choose a group with funding in order to not starve.
Agree particularly with your point about treatment of graduate students and the systematic devaluation and reduction of their skills.
Chiming in to add that not only do graduate students often have sufficient knowledge to participate in lab direction and administration, they often have different skills or knowledge that are still valuable to the lab which a professor or senior researchers may not have (e.g. digital outreach and science communication, which undergraduate research assistants are the most reliable, how to use certain equipment, etc)
That’s a good point. I think the faculty role is often more one of continuity than maintained technical skills. My advisor does not really code anymore, nor does he work in the lab, nor does he remember all of the technical details. What he does know is why something is the way that it is because he was doing the work to develop it a decade ago. That’s a valuable thing, but the extent to which that, along with grant writing and teaching skills, is highly overvalued relative to the worker’s skills is rarely discussed.
Read an interesting bit on A.I and may be applicable to this. Utilizing computer and algorythim to determine efficiency and importance.
“Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile was interesting. The Venus Project is interesting. SingularityNET is a blockchain project by leading Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) researcher Ben Goertzel which is interesting, and goes in line with decentralisation nicely. Goertzel identify as an anarchist and tend to have ideas compatible with anarchy. It works like this: anyone in the world can put an AI into his decentralised system. The near-time goal of the platform is to make it into a connection of specialised AIs working together to solve the problem you give it, which could be more general. Using a platform like this, you could have an interchangeable, democratic human council to prompt questions (“where is it optimal to grow crops in this instance”, “make a full city plan for this area” etc.). The platform could be used as an expert advisor. There’s another long-term reason to pursue decentralised AI solutions identified by Goertzel: whatever AIs we create today will eventually morph into infants of the human-level AIs of tomorrow. Our best expert estimates give 25 years to human-level AI, and 55 years to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Today, almost all resources going into AI are in the four areas: spying (“surveillance”), killing (“military”), gambling (“stock market predictions”) and brainwashing (“marketing”). If we birth general AI with these value systems, we’re essentially creating a psychopath savant. If instead the AI brain is organised in a decentralised way, we create something more humane.”
