The world's largest green hydrogen project, which generates hydrogen from solar and wind renewables without emitting carbon dioxide, produced its first batch of "green hydrogen" on Thursday in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it’s hard to predict when it’s going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they’re going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don’t like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn’t tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do ‘knowledge exchange’ work. It’s all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of ‘transparently’ and ‘rigourously’ giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it’s too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won’t even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you’re interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
Right, pretty much all the basic research is publicly funded everywhere because it’s the only way it can work. Of course, thanks to decades of brainwashing, a lot of people in the west now think that real innovation comes from the private sector.
I think another aspect we can look at is the type of technological we see happening in the west with it being mostly around software, and frivolous things like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, in China, a lot of the technological development is very practical like bullet trains, nuclear power, and so on. It’s just another example of how state directed research ends up producing more meaningful results than the private sector.
And yeah sure, send a link that sounds like a fun read.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it’s hard to predict when it’s going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they’re going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Spot on.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don’t like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn’t tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do ‘knowledge exchange’ work. It’s all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of ‘transparently’ and ‘rigourously’ giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it’s too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won’t even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you’re interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
Right, pretty much all the basic research is publicly funded everywhere because it’s the only way it can work. Of course, thanks to decades of brainwashing, a lot of people in the west now think that real innovation comes from the private sector.
I think another aspect we can look at is the type of technological we see happening in the west with it being mostly around software, and frivolous things like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, in China, a lot of the technological development is very practical like bullet trains, nuclear power, and so on. It’s just another example of how state directed research ends up producing more meaningful results than the private sector.
And yeah sure, send a link that sounds like a fun read.