How the West steals our food for thought

Even as we look to the West for educational validation, and as privatisation of
education robs us of our ability to produce ‘free’ theoreticians, we need to restructure the system to convert ‘intellect workers’ into ‘organic intellectuals’

By Prabhat Patnaik

Any social formation requires a set of intellectuals for it to function efficiently. A major objective of the education system within such a formation, particularly higher education, is to produce such intellectuals. By the same token, when a new social movement emerges on the horizon, it requires for its sustenance and advancement a new set of intellectuals with a different outlook. For instance, if the education system visualised by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) had as its objective the production of a set of intellectuals that would serve the colonial order, Mahatma Gandhi's call for a rejection of the colonial education system, and the setting up of various vidyapeeths, could be considered an embryonic attempt to produce a new set of intellectuals.

Thus, the system of higher education in post-Independence India clearly had to have as its major objective the production of a set of intellectuals who could sustain the new decolonised order. True, since the freedom struggle was a national movement involving many classes, there could not be a single vision of the profile of these intellectuals: but, notwithstanding their internal diversity and heterogeneity, it was necessary that a sufficient number of intellectuals should be engaged with the sustainability of the development trajectory that enjoyed popular support. Borrowing the Gramscian term, I would call them ‘organic intellectuals’.

Producing these ‘organic intellectuals’ should be the basic objective of the system of higher education of any country, especially ours. Today, we face an unprecedented assault on the system of higher education, whose objective is precisely to preclude the creation of such intellectuals. A form of attrition is the denial of public resources to higher education on the grounds that it is a luxury. Many argue that institutions of higher education are a drain on national resources, which can be better deployed to promote elementary education.

This argument is fundamentally flawed. The mistake is in believing that an absolute (or even relative to GDP) curtailment of expenditure on higher education is necessary to overcome these failures. The shortage of resources that is usually cited is an alibi: at no stage during the post-Independence period has India spent an adequate amount on education. In fact, the proportion of GDP that the White-supremacist South Africa spent on education of the Black majority was higher than the Indian state has ever spent. The matter is one of priorities—any government that has the political will to eradicate illiteracy and provide universal primary education will always find the resources without curtailing higher education.

The realm of higher education is the cradle of ideas; the shrinking or extinction of this realm makes a society parasitic on other societies for its ideas—and a parasitic society cannot remain free. Playwright Bertolt Brecht had exhorted the "hungry man [to] reach for the book!" But he has to reach for the right book—one that does not tell him that his chronic hunger is the result of sins committed in some previous birth, but educates him on the social conditions that keep him hungry.
This presupposes that the right book must be available and that the crowd of hungry men must have their own ‘organic intellectuals’, whose ideas must develop independently of those who preside over a social arrangement that keeps the crowd hungry. Independent institutions of higher education are, therefore, essential. Implicit in the above is a whole series of rejections. First, there is a rejection of the view that different institutions of higher learning belonging to different societies can be ordered as being ‘better’ or ‘worse’ along specific axes. But if these institutions are to be ‘organic’ to their specific societies, then each set of institutions must be different from the others.
I often feel amused when I hear comments such as ‘our institutions should enrich themselves by borrowing ideas and faculty from advanced country institutions’, that ‘we have to judge ourselves by how well we are recognised by top institutions in the world’ and so on. This is an approach that sees highly educated people as a homogeneous commodity, of which some institutions are better producers than others.

Second, it rejects the view that the professionalisation of subjects like economics and political science is a desirable process. The developed countries dominate the profession in these disciplines and, therefore, recognition in the profession will necessarily mean sacrificing independent thinking and parroting borrowed concepts. This would not matter if these borrowed concepts were genuinely scientific and not imbued with any ideological objectives. This does not mean that everyone engaged in these subjects is a conscious ideological defender, but that everyone is entrapped by the need to belong to, and to be recognised by, the profession and, therefore, undertakes research within strictly circumscribed limits.

Third, my argument entails a rejection of the attitude that places a special value on ‘recognition’ in the advanced countries, and hence on awards and distinctions bestowed from there. Unfortunately, this altitude of prioritising ‘recognition’ in the West is all-too pervasive. Almost all of us, when we sit on selection committees, prefer a candidate who has published in a Western journal over one who has published domestically, even without looking closely at the quality of the publications. To say all this is not to reject the notion of quality, or to argue that we should not have criteria for judging quality. But these criteria must be our very own.

Allow me an example, drawn from my own discipline, economics. One consequence of the policy of liberalisation has been the relaxation of restrictions on the flow of finance into and out of the country. To prevent the exchange rate from appreciating, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has intervened and, as a result, we currently have exchange reserves of nearly US$ 140 billion.
Now, holding such large reserves is not a sensible thing to do: foreign exchange reserves are nothing but IOUs of other countries; hence, holding them represents a waste of resources that could be more productively used elsewhere. Furthermore, since the rate of return for people sending money into the country is higher than the rate we earn on these reserves, the country is, in effect, borrowing from abroad at a higher rate to lend at a lower rate. This is palpably unwise.
In this connection, suggestions have been made by the Bretton Woods institutions, and by independent analysts, that India should allow its exchange rate to appreciate and that, towards this end, the RBI should stop adding to its reserves and lower them. But, if the rupee appreciates, our goods would become uncompetitive vis-à-vis foreign goods. Also, such an appreciation will not expand total domestic demand. Likewise, our exports will be supplanted by foreign exports. Thus, an appreciation of the rupee will lead to a closure of domestic producing units and to higher unemployment, together with an increase in our trade deficit. We would have unleashed a process of ‘debt-financed de-industrialisation’.

What is more, when the time comes for the foreigners to start taking their money out, we would have no funds to cover the outflow, since these would have been used in financing imports at the expense of home production. Frittering away foreign exchange reserves through an appreciation of the rupee would mean a ruination of the country twice over: through de-industrialisation and unemployment now, and bankruptcy later.

It is to oppose demands like this, to avoid such double ruin, and to protect our sovereignty and freedom, that it is essential that there be people within the country who think independently. Of course, simply having institutions of higher education does not mean this need would automatically get fulfilled. A whole range of measures have to be undertaken to ensure that these institutions play the role that they should; but that is a separate, albeit vital, issue. Not having such institutions forecloses the possibilities of independent thought.

In addition to the pressure for ‘professionalisation’, two other specific factors have emerged in recent years that work in the same direction. The first is the tendency towards privatisation, which has gathered momentum on account of the State’s fiscal crisis. This crisis existed even earlier, but it has become greatly accentuated by the pursuit of neoliberal policies at the behest of the Bretton Woods institutions, policies that have resulted in a curtailment in total government expenditure, with particular impact on social sectors like education and health.

Many have missed the implication of privatisation, which introduces the profit motive. If education becomes a business, then it loses its capacity to produce ‘organic intellectuals’. Education is not a homogeneous good, which can be produced by the public and private sectors alike. Education is fundamentally heterogeneous. Education that enables a person to get a well-paid job in the existing market is not the same as education that produces ‘organic intellectuals’.

It is a distinction that is analogous to the one that the late Paul Baran drew between the ‘intellect worker’ and the ‘intellectual’. Thus, while imparting education to enable persons to obtain jobs and serve as ‘intellect workers’, education must simultaneously ensure that they also become ‘intellectuals’— ‘organic intellectuals’. The privatisation of education produces exclusively ‘intellect workers’ and no ‘intellectuals’.

But, then, how can we ignore altogether the dictates of the market? In the era of the IT revolution, we have to have people with IT expertise. The market is a signalling device that is in indicator of changing demands, which are by no means socially irrelevant. Ignoring the dictates of the market, therefore, is a perilous venture for any society.

The objective of higher education that I have been outlining is perfectly compatible with the other purpose that education serves—to impart skills, the nature of which changes with changing technology. Sensitivity to the latter is not synonymous with the commoditisation of education. The point at issue is the exclusive determination of educational priorities by the market: the privatisation of education has a tendency to lead to such exclusive determination, not just in the privatised segment, but also in the whole range of higher education through the pressures it brings to bear on the non-privatised segment.

Some contend that if the State is afflicted by a fiscal crisis, it implies that the people are not paying for producing ‘intellectuals’ for their own cause. Not much tears, therefore, should be shed over this fact when the people themselves want it this way. But, while the tax concessions have gone in favour of the rich, the ordinary people have suffered from the effects of deflation through unemployment and cuts in social expenditure. They are not the votaries but the victims of these cuts.

In this context, privatising higher education has the effect not only of excluding them from its ambit, but also of muting whatever intellectual opposition exists against the policies that victimise them. The need to nurture such intellectual opposition arises neither out of charity nor out of a mere transcendental commitment to democracy and egalitarianism—it is essential for social peace, and for the social sustainability of the development trajectory.

Another factor that enfeebles the generation of ‘organic intellectuals’ is the increasing sway of communal and obscurantist forces. These forces often claim to be fighting Western influence, but, paradoxically, end up strengthening this very influence. Their attempt at introducing courses to turn out purohits and astrologers is as much a ‘commoditisation’ of education as the demand focapitation fees and the substitution of basic disciplines by more marketable subjects.Likewise, their attempt to change textbooks to make them conform to the prejudices of some is antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry, without which there can be no ‘intellectuals’, let alone ‘organic intellectuals’.

If, at a political level, communalism and fundamentalism divide the people and contribute to a weakening of the nation, at an intellectual level, too, they make a contribution by obliterating the intellectual capacity to see through the machinations of this symbiotic evil. The opposition to the ideology of imperialism was provided by an inclusive Indian nationalism that was secular, democratic and self-confessedly socialist.

Communalism, whether of the Hindu or the Muslim variety, never had an anti-imperialist thrust. Should it come as any surprise, then, that the emergence of communal politics also paves the way for the reassertion of the hegemony of imperialist ideology?