Knowledge as Commons is an ambitious title for a collection of fascinating articles which does deliver many important insights and fresh perspectives on several issues, finds Kevin Crane

The so-called ‘information age’ we’ve spent over two decades being told we should be excited about is plunging into a deep crisis. It’s far from the only facet of a whole world of emergencies that make up capitalism’s problems with basically everything, but it’s not a minor one. It is therefore correct to say that we can hardly have too much discussion about technology and its relationship to the economy, and it’s no bad thing that publishers are bringing out books to attempt to do just that.

This offering has a surefire title: Knowledge As Commons ticks a lot of boxes for key words a lot of people on the left are thinking about at the moment, and also comes from a place that we in the West simply do not hear enough about. Prabir Purkayastha is a left-wing activist and engineer, with strong knowledge both about technology and social and political struggle, which is a little novel anyway, but he’s also active in India rather than the Global North. This certainly made me keen to read the book, as I often feel we criminally overlook goings on in that massive country that is unquestionably the home of the world’s largest organised working class.

Knowledge As Commons is not, however, a single whole book with a throughline: it’s very much a compendium of the author’s articles, and although they are thematically grouped to an extent, the focus is somewhat broader than the book’s title suggests. The eleven essays are grouped in four sections but, like the book itself, these are giving headings that don’t quite give a flavour of the content.

The first section, ‘Knowledge for All: Capital Versus the People’, is really about intellectual property rights. Purkayastha is pretty knowledgeable about this field, and some of the background he gives here is genuinely interesting, such as the bitter irony that patents for inventions were actually introduced to prevent society from losing access to those inventions. In earlier times, when someone created a previously unknown technology, it would essentially be a trade secret that they would either take to their graves or that would be held under lock and key by some semi-clandestine craft guild. Patents incentivised inventors to publish technologies, thus allowing wider society to benefit from them. The author is keen to point out that the system was always flawed under capitalism. He has some really good stories about the struggle between Cornish miners and the patent holders of steam engine technology, for instance. However, things have gotten a lot worse since the locus of invention moved from the workshop to an increasingly corporatised, but often publicly funded, university sector which then funnels patents into the hands of rent-seeking businesses. Thus, patents have ended up working against social good.

Technology and development

As this part of the book moves on, the author concretises the discussion, and also brings it much more into a specifically Indian narrative, by talking about the fight over pharmaceuticals. Although it’s not his professional field of expertise, Purkayastha has a lot to say about biotechnology, its global role within capitalism, and its national position as one of the areas where Indian state policy has done more good than harm.

For me, some of this stuff could have been edited down; I think the target audience for this kind of writing do understand that the Bill Gates Foundation has hurt the people it claims to champion in the name of profit, but still, some of the facts are astonishing. I did not know until reading this, for instance, that the American pharmaceutical sector has not produced a single malaria treatment since the US army pulled out of Vietnam fifty years ago! Fighting that disease was, clearly, only a requirement of fighting a war.

The second section ‘Paradigm Shifts in Technology’, deals a bit more with the history and theory of technology, but it’s also got a lot of detailed discussion about the development of different aspects of Indian technological development. As with the biotech stuff, the history is interesting, but there really is way too much detail. In fact, I think Purkayastha actually caught himself going on too long at one point after talking about telecommunications for several paragraphs and then saying, ‘Nuclear power needs a separate discussion to itself’!

If it feels like I’m being very critical of the editing here, it’s because I found it a bit frustrating that some genuinely interesting ideas were getting a bit lost in the woods. The discussion of telecoms in India is relevant, when you understand the context that it has been an area where Indian economic policy began to go severely the wrong way: the huge state struggled, for practical reasons, with the job of getting old-fashioned analogue telephone infrastructure across its massive territory and technology overtook physical progress. The rightward moving political establishment of India was sweet-talked by the US into allowing more private-sector operators into the country as a way to speedrun into the digital age, but this meant that the state was no longer keeping the economic benefits of increased connectivity as a source of reinvestment or enhancing its own technical capabilities. A mild bit of amusement, however, can be derived from it not being American corporations that got that economic benefit and make India dependant on them: it was mostly Chinese and Korean ones, states that resolutely ignored American advice on how to modernise.

Purkayastha also has some more theoretical ideas that I honestly think are worth chewing over. A concept he returns to at several points is that science and technology, while not being the same, both suffer if they are kept in isolation from each other. Quoting Engels, he says, ‘If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities’ (p.152). What he means by this is that elite learning only stifles itself by becoming separated from the practicalities of work. He provides numerous historical examples to support this, such India under the caste system making educated people and craft workers live in parallel societies segregated from each other (though some of the examples he cites from European history do not actually hold up under scrutiny). Conversely, Purkayastha believes that where learning and practical innovation are brought together, both advance and can benefit society.

The author fears that an increasingly unequal global society will create these harmful divisions between science and technology again, but he also applies his analysis to modern society in South Asia to test his theory. The last two sections of the book, ‘Mapping Public Interest Science and Technology’ and ‘Planning a Republic of Reason’, arguably contain less crucial information than the first half, but honestly, I enjoyed them more because they have some really fun, and to me very novel, discussions of the relationship of the radical left and reactionary right in the region.

Science and infrastructure

Chapter 8, ‘The Untold Story of the Left in Indian Science’, is a really nice run through of the role socialists played in trying to steer the developmentalist policies of the newly decolonised country. During this, Purkayastha manages to make use of the tragedy of Indian partition because Pakistan works as a real-world example of what happens without any vestiges of progressivism in the project of state building: in India, elites were corralled (in however a flawed a way) into a project of building an infrastructure for a country that had been subject to hundreds of years of anti-development by the British. In Pakistan, elites decided not to worry about it and let the USA advise them on everything. The result was two countries that were going in very different directions by the late twentieth century.

Unfortunately, of course, India’s politics have changed, and Purkayastha’s discussion of the new reactionary order in India is scathing, but also pretty amusing. When it comes to science, the far-right BJP government is every bit as cranky and irrational as Western institutions like the US Republican Party or the Daily Mail. In the same way as Western reactionaries talk uneducated rubbish about the Bible and the Ancient Greeks, Hindutva bigots in India make absurd pronouncements based on lazy readings of ancient Hindu scripture that literally make people who absorb them more ignorant.

The author’s very nice potted history of the origins of science, and India’s role within it, make clear that this nonsense ironically disrespects the real contribution that Indians have made to the development of the sciences through the ages. He also drops in some really interesting critiques of the Western conception of science, as an outsider, that I found fascinating. For instance, it had always struck me as odd that Albert Einstein did not actually receive his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity: Purkayastha asks us if an attack on the concept of absolute linear time was just a tad too unsettling for very endpoint-orientated Western intellectuals.

However, as regards India, he is also clear that bad science from the political right is having real-world impacts. Successive liberal and reactionary governments have turned away from the socially planned policies of the early Indian state, allowing rampant free marketeering to make a minority of Indians very rich. What Indian elites fail to see, however, is that they have been coasting off generations of infrastructure building that has been abandoned, and this is not at all sustainable. One possible future for India is Germany writ very, very large as the good times end and the social and economic deficit becomes unavoidable.

I found Knowledge Is Commons to be a mixed bag: it’s really nowhere near as focused or deep to satisfy the promise of its title, and definitely some long sections seriously needed to be squashed down. I suspect a lot of readers of this book would much prefer to dip in and out of it to get to the more intriguing content. Which, to be fair, it does have, and I am glad I read those aspects. Certainly, I think it’s refreshing to get a distinctly Global South take on some of the issues that this book touches on, and even if you don’t find yourself agreeing with all of the writer’s takes, they are mostly sufficiently interesting to be well worth your time considering.