The Wales-Wide Web

Back on line after a three week break caused by a broken computer (after its car crash I talked about previously, the iBook kept going for another ten days, then expired quietly with a power management failure).

I write a monthly column for the Welsh socialist newspeper, Seren. Here is this months contribution.

A belated happy new years greetings. Its good to be back. Whilst I would really like to talk about football (courtesy of the winter mid season break, Werder Bremen have been top of the Bundesliga for the last five weeks!) there are an awful lot of politics going on at the moment.

For the last five months the students have been protesting against attempts to impose fees for courses. There have been strikes, occupations and numerous demonstrations with many of Germany's leading universities now on strike until the end of the semester in February.

I think the students are right. The fees may look minimal by UK standards but as students in England and Wales have found to their cost, its the principle that counts. Once the idea of fees is established then they can quickly be increased.

It is striking how the issue of student fees is so contentious throughout Europe. Ok, it could be explained by the influence of what are known here as 'old 68ers'; as the parents of the present generation of students. The press tries ot explain it as a "middle class revolt". I do not find either of these explanations convincing, even though they may contain a grain of truth. I think that at the heart of the protest lies far more important issues - the question of whether learning and by extension, knowledge, are a public right or a private good.

Putting it bluntly, what is going on throughout Europe is an attempt to privatise education, with market forces determining the level of fees and parental and student income depending the quantity and quality of education available. Forget all that nonsense form Blair and Schroeder about access - its just a smokescreen. The German government showed its true hand last week when the education minister published proposals to establish elite universities. Even the EU's leading education bureaucrat, Commissioner Vivienne Redding, was led tyo comment that Germany should sort out the basic problems with its education system before thinking about elite universities. Even more strangely, Bild am Sonntag, Germany's equivalent of News of the World, carried a full page interview with Redding!

It is not just university education that is effected. The European Commission has set in train a series of meetings between European education ministries through something known as the Copenhagen process with the overt aim of harmonising Europe's vocational education and training systems. Once more the real intent is to liberalise education and training provsion and open up the market for private training providers.

But privatising education is only part of the battle. The real fight is over knowledge. Before you rush to say the idea of private knowledge is stupid, think of how the idea of private water must have seemed a couple of hundred years ago. With capitalism ever more dependent on the knowledge and skills of employees as part of the process of producing surplus value and productivity, they desperately want to treat knowledge and skills as a commodity, to be exchanged on the market as any other. Witness the attempts to patent the human genome.

It is not all doom and gloom though. The emergence of open source software has shown the possibility of other collective models of development and licensing. At the same time the widespread use of file sharing programmes on the internet has shown that people are not prepared to pay rep-off prices for music . Music is a form of human expression, just like speech, and cannot be treated as just another commodity.

That's it for this months rant. As ever I would be delighted to hear back form any of you. Keep up the protests. But before I go I cannot resist telling you the latest German football story. Werder Bremen have asked FIFA to extend the half time break to allow fans more time to purchase and consume Wurst (sausages) and Bier (beer). That's one change I do support.