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When the discussion began, Dr Milos Macura immediately injected several tangible economic and demographic considerations, beginning with the fact that the economic gap between the rich and the poor countries now stands at 12 to 1. This gap has increased by one-third in the last thirty years, and "the present world economic system is much more hostile to the poor nations than the former colonial system was". While the process of capital accumulation at a world scale was responsible for this differential pattern of economic growth, technology was, in fact, "the instrument" which allowed it to be put into effect concretely.
As a consequence, "in 1975 there were about 300 million people unemployed or underemployed in the world". Ninety-five per cent of those people live in the poor countries, and "40 per cent of the total labour force" in those countries was touched by various forms of unemployment. Meanwhile, by the year 2000, "8 million workers will be added to the current manpower of the world; seven-eights of those will be in the less developed countries". It can thus be calculated that by the turn of the century the less developed countries "will have to provide... about one billion working places" if they are going to solve this problem.
Modern technology, of course, is a very impressive force for the transformation of the world; but in evaluating the roles which technology will play in this transformation, we must be realistic. Any institution "behaves according to the needs of those financing it", and modern technology is no exception. Since the end of World War 11, there has, in fact, been a "tremendous shift in the sources of financing". The governments of the industrialised countries have become the most important source financing technological development; the large corporations taken as a whole come second, and all other sources then follow. Consequently, the aims of scientific and technological development have been threefold: "First, it was geared towards the production of armaments and military machinery. It was [also] geared towards space programmes and other prestige projects which are indeed very useful, but don't help the developing nations." And finally, "profit was the underlying consideration" for the global direction of development. ("This U Thant used to term the 'blind forces of economics'.")
It is thus not surprising to consider the main characteristics of modern technology: It "consumes a large quantity of energy. It rejects manpower...; it produces goods of short duration rather than ones which can be used for a long period; and, finally, it is expensive, which is especially important in regard to the less developed countries", since they can thus afford to buy modern technology only in very limited quantities. Making a point that would be taken up by Dr Furtado in the discussion of the third session, Dr Macura said that "not only the economic gap but also the technological gap... in production is widening".
In this situation the great challenge facing science and technology today and in the future will be that of developing an "appropriate technology" whose "basic considerations" must be "the creation of a much more productive employment... and the mass production of the goods and services - including health and education - necessary to meet the growing needs of populations in the third world". Such technologies should be inexpensive, and they should conserve energy and natural resources. "And finally, it seems to me that new technology must be devised so as to make it possible for a society to be egalitarian... in terms of providing employment to everyone, in terms of satisfying the basic needs of the entire population, and in terms of establishing productive relations which will diminish existing social differences."
It is difficult to say whether it will be possible to develop such technologies. So far, China is one of the few countries which has experience in this direction. "At the Vienna conference I recently met my colleague from China and asked him what their experiences were with appropriate technology in that country. He said, 'we have failed at steel production and fertiliser production but have many good experiences in other fields'. Will China and other poor countries be willing to continue the development of appropriate technologies? Will it be possible to solve the purely scientific and technical questions that will allow the development of technologies which are inexpensive, labour-saving and yet productive?"
Throughout his intervention Dr Stuart Holland emphasised that the world seems to be coming to the end of a long economic wave, and he stressed the importance of understanding the key factors which differentiate conditions today from those prevailing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dr Holland pointed out that the face of British capitalism described by Karl Marx in the middle of the last century was one characterised; by far-reaching process innovations, i.e. especially technical innovations in the production process and a rising organic composition of capital. Such innovations, in other words, greatly increased production in existing sectors of the economy while at the same time displacing large numbers of labourers who had previously been necessary for the maintenance of a given level of production. From the 1870s onwards, however, the labour force thus displaced was reabsorbed on the basis of a "broad wave of product innovations" which gave rise to entirely new industries (the chemical-, oil- and electricity-based industries and their derivatives in transport) in most of the countries that were pursuing capitalist paths of development. New industries based on product innovations (in the automotive, aeronautical and atomic energy sectors) continued to match process innovations throughout the first half of the twentieth century, with the result that both investments and job-places tended to increase. Yet "in the present situation it does seem clear that we are at the end of a long phase of development where the industrial innovations which took place have tended to be labour-displacing and job-creating and where, in the developed capitalist countries in particular, the unemployment created in industry was largely absorbed into the service sector". With the introduction of the cluster of new technologies built around the micro-processor, however, an analysis of conditions in the United States, France, West Germany and Britain indicates that "we are now in a situation... where massive displacement of labour in the service sector is likely if these technologies are fully employed". This phenomenon indicates "not only a crisis in the developed capitalist countries of weakening capital accumulation, but of process innovations... which are not offset by major product innovations employing large numbers of people". Looming on the horizon is the threat of massive unemployment.
In response to this situation the developed part of the world "is not adapting in anything like a rational manner". A proper adaptation would be to "relate the enormous potential increases in productivity to the distribution of resources"; but, instead, the application of technology where it can create employment is seen not as an advantage but as a disadvantage - and (according to what one really must qualify as a rather dubious analysis by Dr Holland) this mentality follows from people viewing work as "good in itself because it is a means [sic] to cash earnings which are necessary for personal security or personal consumption". Surely people view personal well-being as the "good in itself", and they would welcome technical innovation if it were implemented in such a way as to enhance rather than degrade their living and working conditions!
Dr Holland thought that "in practice... it is unlikely that we will create work for the thousands of millions of people in the world who need that work. But we have the capacity nonetheless to resolve many, if not most, of our problems by a rational use of technology.... We have the capacity. We have the power, and yet it is not applied. And here I think it is very important to reintroduce the economic elements of the analysis into the context of social psychology, of social values, of ideology in the widest possible sense - not simply the framework of ideas but of values, assumptions, of presumptions, preconditions and plain prejudices of the way in which people view the world.
"What we have to avoid is divergencies that lead to major global conflict. This includes the whole area of arms expenditure, technology and defence." And a conference of this sort must especially seek "to point out... the complement tarities, the interdependence of any feasible kind of development on a global scale rather than simply the areas of problems, the contradictions which are likely to arise".
Dr Pandeya then took the floor and pointed out that while at the economic level there is a "12 to 1 ratio between the overdeveloped and the developing world", it is even more striking to notice that in the knowledge industry, considered by itself, "the imbalance... between the developed North and the underdeveloped South is of the order of 30 to 1". At the present time, and according to the most conservative estimates, the place occupied by the knowledge industry in the economies of the United States, Western Europe and Japan ("the trilateral club") has undergone a tremendous growth since the end of World War 11, and by the year 2000, "the share of this knowledge industry in the US economy alone would be around 75 per cent".
What have been and are the implications of this explosion? Dr Pandeya said that in 1947, at the time of Indian independence, "we in the knowledge industry were still operating in terms of our indigenous... free sources, textbooks and problematique". But today, thirty years after independence, the knowledge industry has been completely modernised and incorporated into the international division of labour; it has been fitted out with an entire distribution network providing everything from textbooks and journals to software and models for developing future options.
"The transfer of knowledge-industry technology is so wholesale that now we have the privilege of conducting our scientific education in the basic sciences, in the engineering sciences and in the social sciences in terms of nearly 8000 textbooks which are obsolete" in their original place of production, the USA.
Responding to Dr Macura's position concerning the need for appropriate technology, Dr Pandeya said that he had to "repudiate this approach totally" and that he was "sick of being told that the solution for this three-fourths of humanity... is to confine ourselves to the recommendation of the World Bank, to confine ourselves to certain areas of... basic production" (agricultural, extractive minerals, etc.) and "to a continued utilisation - on a dependency basis - of surplus and obsolete technologies which now become, by a semantic trick, appropriate for us.
"... No country that wholesale goes after this package of recommendations will ever be liberating itself from the present hegemonic centres of global political, military and economic control. It is an invitation to perpetual slavery of an ever-increasing intensity.
"We do not accept the implication that it is good for the North to keep on exponentially increasing its productivity while all of the dirty manufacturing (and other obsolete) technology would be the exclusive preserve" of the peoples in the developing countries. Experiences of the past three decades have shown that "this is no future for us"; and unless developing countries are in control of "the basic infrastructure" for generating the highest levels of modern science and technology by their own efforts, it will not be possible "to convert the rest of our garden into a human society with any future for our millions living and to be born".
Commenting in his intervention on what he termed Dr Barel's "wonderful diagnosis" of the conditions of contemporary scientific practice, Dr Pecujlic elaborated on some of the ways in which the individualistic norms now prevailing in this practice actually serve to furnish "ideological legitimation" for the reproduction of the dominant economic system. In medicine, for example, this "strictly individualistic approach... creates the feeling [and] the appearance that it is your own fault that you are ill"; and the tacit assumption always seems to be that "the system is all right".... "The collective conditions of work such as labour intensity, etc., and the collective conditions of urban living... remain out of sight in this approach to medicine", despite the fact that it is "exactly those conditions which perhaps most affect health". The "connection between medical science and research [on the one hand] and the mode of production and conditions of work, etc. [on the other] is cut off"; and this is "not by chance", but the result of "a systematic approach" which likewise pervades attitudes towards such phenomena as social mobility and access to the university.
Under an "economic system based on the profit motive or on bureaucratic power", the role of medicine is simply "to repair the human cog in the machine" and to maintain and reproduce the status quo in social and economic relations; but because the narrowly individualistic approach to medicine in fact conceals some of the most fundamental problems, it eventually "comes into a very sharp conflict with the health of the people", which cannot be preserved in this way. Opposition to this orientation consequently arises, as we can now see, for example, from the sharp demands formulated by the working class movement in Italy: slogans such as "health is priceless" and "prevention is revolutionary" express the demand for social responsibility and control over basic living conditions. Such struggles can, in turn, influence the character of technology, as we can see from the introduction of X-ray quality control equipment in the Alfa Romeo factories. Technologically, this equipment was very progressive; but in its original form it also happened to be very dangerous to the health of the people. They demanded a change, and new equipment was thus developed which incorporated remote control mechanisms, etc., and preserved quality in performance while eliminating health hazards. What conclusion can be drawn from this? That "only out of social struggle... can there be born a technological innovation which both promotes production and preserves health.... Not without that. That is my opinion on the question of alternatives."
Addressing himself to some of the questions raised by Dr Macura and Dr Holland concerning the reciprocal impact which technology and unemployment will have on each other, Dr Vladimir Stambuk recalled that unemployment is the product of capitalistic ways of production and that in that sense "the question of whether society will be able to employ more or less people is very much related to the kind of society which will be dominant in the future".
Concerning the question raised by Dr Barel and Dr Lefebvre about relating the changes in technology to forms of self-management, Dr Stambuk posed the question of whether a particular new path of technological development alone is to be scrutinised or whether it is the entire industrial system which has been dominant for the last 150 years that must be called into question. In any event, on the question of alternative technology Dr Stambuk agreed with Dr Pandeya that "even 'alternative technology'... produced elsewhere and not in the country itself... will perpetuate domination and will not help liberation". And although small countries may have definite problems of economic efficiency in producing new technologies, they will in the future find themselves in "a very difficult position if they fail to take a course of technological self-reliance".
Dr Stambuk also noted that there have been recent discussions in Yugoslavia about the possibility of developing a specific technology proper to the system of socialist self-management. It seems that most people who have considered this question do not think it valid to characterise a technology as specific in this sense. On the other hand, however, there is also a keen awareness that any given society or group of societies must succeed in developing an endogenous technology "really related to their cultural, ideological, political and social needs", if they are going to avoid slipping back into a "framework of domination and exploitation".
At that point Dr Macura once again took the floor in order to respond to the objections voiced on the subject of appropriate technology. Dr Macura said that it is necessary to come to grips with some very fundamental questions; and, appealing directly to Dr Pandeya, he asked "What would you like to do?... Would you like to reconstruct the world by copying capitalist development, by creating a consumer society, by establishing a technology which would once again lead to differentiation in the world? Or would you like to rethink thoroughly what should be done and design a technology which would be appropriate for a better world and for man as a human being? That is the basic issue", and it will not be solved by "copying a consumer society with high productivity, all the gadgets and all the problems which Mr Holland has... mentioned". Dr Macura considered such problems most pressing for countries of the Third World, because they possess '`the world's main unemployment problem"; but "the developed countries should also very seriously rethink the paths of technological development upon which they have embarked".
As for the relationship between technological development and employment, Dr Macura said that he was willing to work for only half-an-hour each day, provided that income distribution is egalitarian - "not only at the national level... [but] at the international level as well".
During the next intervention, Dr Le Thanh Khoi considered the problems of science and technology within the broader perspective of culture and cultural domination. Working from the position that culture in general is composed of four main elements (education, science and technology, culture in the narrow sense and communications), Dr Le Thanh Khoi treated each of these successively, with an eye to the situation today in countries of the Third World.
First of all, in the field of education, quantitative increases in scholarisation cannot be depreciated, but the most important consideration is "the nature of the education and of the ideology which are inculcated by means of textbooks, teaching methods and the contents of educational programmes". Within this perspective, it is all too obvious that in many developing countries education unfortunately still remains not a process for enhancing indigenous culture, but a means for propagating foreign systems of values.
Secondly, mastery of modern science and technology can be analysed in regard to three distinct aspects: the production of knowledge the diffusion of knowledge and the application of scientific and technical knowledge. "In these three areas, countries of the Third World remain dominated... because they are still not up to producing types of knowledge that are suited to their own context." Ninety-five per cent of research carried on in the world is concentrated in the developed countries, and the governments of developing countries are often content with simply importing the results of such research. Likewise, the diffusion of knowledge is often carried out through the mediation of the developed countries, and systems of research and of prices are often such that it is very difficult for Third World countries to exchange knowledge among themselves. In the light of these facts, it is not surprising that the application of knowledge is often no more than a "mechanical transfer" which is "a negation of all endogenous creativity". In general, one can say that the types of knowledge coming from the industrialised countries are riddled by ethnocentrism.
Thirdly, in the realm of 'culture' narrowly defined, it will be recalled that colonialism tried to persuade the subject peoples that they had either no culture or at best one vastly inferior to European culture. Unfortunately, many leaders in the Third World still continue to think that western culture alone is valuable, and they fail "to seek in their own traditions that which can contribute to another culture, to a new culture". Meanwhile, however, "cultural aggression from outside takes on multiple forms...".
Fourthly, there is the field of communications, which "has become an extremely powerful instrument of domination". "Sixty-five per cent of the information in the world today is produced in the United States and then spread to the other parts of the globe, where the press agencies of the underdeveloped countries often simply reissue the same messages without questioning either their exactitude or their ideological content." [To supplement Dr Le Thanh Khôi's point about the power of the modern mass media, one can consult, for example, the recent two-volume work by Noam Chomsky and E. S. Hermann, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Spokesman, London, 1979.]
In summary, Dr Le Thanh Khoi said that it did not seem possible to him that any genuine development whatever could be accomplished without that endogenous creativity which is able to rethink all problems and to seek solutions to these problems not only on the basis of one's own experience, but also by learning from foreign experiences and by adopting foreign solutions to one's own conditions.
In the final intervention of the evening Dr Kinhide Mushakoji said that there did indeed seem to be problems not only with technology and the uses to which it is put, but also with science itself. Probably the chief reason for this lies in the fact that demands for new technologies exert a strong influence on directions taken by scientific research, while the economic utilisation of technology is itself determined by profit motives. It is thus necessary now "to develop a new type of science", and this new science should be influenced both by what Dr Pandeya termed "revolutionising science and also "by the wisdom... which existed and exists in the Third World, so that the Third World should not just be the recipient, but should also consider itself as an emanator of new scientific knowledge...".
Of course, the tremendous development of the informational technologies has greatly enhanced the possibilities both for centralisation and for decentralisation in the world today. If these technologies are, in fact, not being developed in directions which will foster forms of self-management and independence, this is because of "the power base which is orienting and twisting the whole direction" of development. Raising the theme to which the next morning's working session would be devoted, Dr Mushakoji said that in order to challenge the dominant relations of power it would not suffice simply to deplore the fact that the Third World is the periphery in the present world system. Instead it is necessary to have a much more active strategy of collective self-reliance by Third World countries.