Is capitalist power built on social sabotage?

Blair Fix

<strong>
 James McMahon and Blair Fix
</strong>
<em>
 The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not.
</em>
— Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler  A key aspect of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’ is that it treats property not as a productive asset, but as a negative social relation.

In Search of Sabotage

Björn Brembs

[*During my [flyfishing vacation last
year](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n862.html), pretty much
nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I've migrated the blog to
WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I'm not
even at the computer. I'm using this functionality to re-blog a few
posts from the [archives](http://blogarchive.brembs.net) during the
month of august while I'm away. This post is from [September 30,
2010](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n669.html):*]{style="font-size: 12px;"}

I've been
[contemplating](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n597.html){target="_self"}
the current competitive state of science here
[before](http://blogarchive.brembs.net/comment-n594.html){target="_blank"
rel="external"}. The gist of it was that science may be suffering from
too much competition, leading to an increasing incidence of misconduct,
such as falsifying or omitting inconvenient data. In this week's *Nature
appeared* a
[news-report](https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100929/full/467516a.html){target="_blank"}
which tells me that apparently the pressure cooker which is our
scientific community apparently has been set to a notch hotter recently.

The article is about the sentencing of a postdoc who has been sabotaging
the work of a graduate student in his own lab for several months. The
postdoc has admitted -- after being caught on secret camera -- to have
poured ethanol in the culture medium for the cell culture of the
graduate student as well as contaminating Western blots of the student.

In my previous posts I speculated that fraud and other, related
misconduct may be on the rise as more and more trained scientists are
faced with less and less positions for which they compete. I did not
expect this form of misconduct and neither did anybody else: sabotage is
not officially part of the canon of research misconduct and thus no
federal agency was able to prosecute the perpetrator.

As all of the cases which make it into the media, this is another
anecdote and the plural of anecdote is not data. Nobody knows if the
frequency of misconduct is rising or if the publicized cases simply come
with the growth of the business. Nevertheless, this form of direct
sabotage of researchers by researchers seems to be a novel quality of
competition-induced research misconduct.

What will we see next?

Hot on the heels of the stunning sabotage case comes a seemingly
unrelated [report in The
Scientist](https://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57728/){target="_blank"}
that US libraries are forced to cut scientific journal subscriptions by
the thousands due to budget cuts:

> <div>
>
> New Mexico State University (NMSU) library announced the cancellation
> of over 700 journal and database subscriptions, the result of a
> perfect storm of rising journal prices and a slashed materials budget.
> \[...\] A [2009 global
> survey](https://www.ebrary.com/corp/collateral/en/Survey/CIBER_survey_2009.pdf)
> of 835 libraries in 61 countries found that nearly one-third of
> academic libraries saw their budgets reduced by 10 percent or more
> that year. And journal subscriptions are taking the brunt of that
> loss: The University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) cancelled
> [118 print and 115 online
> subscriptions](https://www.library.ucsf.edu/help/scholpub/cancel/2010)
> for 2010, as well as several databases (including [Faculty of 1000
> Medicine,](https://f1000medicine.com/) publisher of *The Scientist*).
> Last spring, the University of Washington announced cuts of [1,600
> print and electronic
> journals,](https://www.lib.washington.edu/dean/budget.html) databases,
> and microforms. The University of Virginia library sliced [1,169
> journals,](https://www2.lib.virginia.edu/press/budgetfaqs/2010JournalsnotRenewed.pdf)
> the University of Arizona downsized by [650 print and electronic
> titles,](https://www.library.arizona.edu/spendingReduction/) and
> Georgia State University cut 441 and is now considering the fate of
> [another 1,092.](https://homer.gsu.edu/journalcancellation/list.php)
> The list goes on and on.
>
> </div>

While on the surface these two reports seem unrelated, they in fact
demonstrate the coming scientific system: too many highly trained
scientists competing for a position in a system that is so cash-strapped
that even access to the literature is threatened. Access to the
literature is the most basic prerequisite for doing science. One of the
quotes in the article demonstrates that: "I need the EBSCO databases
like I need air or water!"

[Just as now access to drinking water is a human right, access to the
literature should be a scientific
right.](https://friendfeed.com/brembs/2d8613b7/just-as-now-access-to-drinking-water-is-human){target="_blank"}

German psychologist Bally in the 1940s and later ethologist Hasenstein
in the 1970s coined the term "eased-up field" (entspanntes Feld) for a
situation where all the basic needs are satisfied. They found that
exploratory or playful behavior decreased in virtually all subjects
tested, be it human or animal, whenever the animals were not in an
eased-up field. Currently, science almost on a world-wide scale is
heading towards a situation in which each scientist's livelihood is
threatened as well as one of the basic prerequisites for doing science,
access to the literature. Neither of these trends alone bodes well for
the quality of future science, but both trends together serve to
basically block the emergence of the creative genius required for major
scientific breakthroughs.


<em>
 During my flyfishing vacation last year, pretty much nothing was happening on this blog. Now that I’ve migrated the blog to WordPress, I can actually schedule posts to appear when in fact I’m not even at the computer. I’m using this functionality to re-blog a few posts from the archives during the month of august while I’m away.
</em>

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

In Search of Sabotage

Science, red in tooth and claw