Rikowski, Ruth. Globalisation, Information and Libraries. Oxford: Chandos, 2005.

xxvii, 336pp., 337-393 Bibliography and Index. ISBN 1 84334 084 4 (pbk) £39.00; 1
84334 092 5 (hbk) £59.95

As I write, ‘aid or trade’ is the big topic in the news, and the G8 leaders are preparing to
meet at Gleneagles under one of biggest mandates for change ever delivered. Billions
worldwide have already voted with their ears for debt cancellation, the doubling of
development aid and for trade justice by listening to the Live8 concerts in 10 cities across
the globe. While it appears that the first two demands may be met, it seems unlikely that
world trade will see justice in the foreseeable future. Giving away wealth isn’t a problem
- if you control the means of creating more to replace it.

It is the fundamental role of trade in human society – and the apparent ease with which it
can be manipulated to the advantage of the few - which is the enveloping theme of Ruth
Rikowski’s book. However, it is not so much the inequitable control of trade which is her
main focus here, as what, exactly, is traded. Forces, for the most part unseen and
unheard it seems, are planning that the very channels through which much of our common
heritage is made accessible to all, should become ‘tradeable commodities’ like cabbages
or carpets, thereby placing their control in private hands.

The problem the author sees may be fairly simply stated. The framework for ‘liberalizing’
trade currently being developed by the World Trade Organization (WTO), has moved on
from the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) which focused on trade in goods,
to the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services), and TRIPS (Trade-Related aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights). In the GATS in particular, the categories of services deemed
appropriate to be opened up to competitive trading include ‘Recreational, Cultural and
Sporting Services’.

While that may sound harmless enough, the source of the author’s concern is that this
category includes a sub-category for ‘Library Services’. And indeed, there are other GATS
categories which could be interpreted as including library or related services. By quoting
the observations of various professional bodies around the world with an interest in such
issues, the author convincingly identifies a growing consensus that GATS does indeed
include library services, both private and public, as legitimate targets for competitive
trading. Once private capital is involved in providing public services, she argues, it is
inevitable that there will be calls to reduce public subsidy. This could represent the thin
end of a wedge which could result eventually in the ousting of the public service ethos in
favour of a mindset where only commercial considerations matter, taking our professional
standards with it in the process.

In support of her case, the author also examines a number of examples where public
library and related services in the UK have already been partly ‘privatized’. In doing so,
we learn how insidious the process can be. The problem is not simply one of
‘privatization’, i.e. the complete takeover of control by private interests. There are
problems of commercialization and capitalization too. Examples of commercialization
cited by the author include the donation of £2.6 million by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which was used to expand the People’s Network. Capitalization on the other
hand, she describes as occurring “over time with libraries becoming sites for capital
accumulation and profit making.” It is the increasing commodification of libraries and
library services which results from commercialization and privatization working covertly
together, and the businessification resulting from capitalization, which the author sees as
major threats to an ethos of public service from which democratic societies have derived
such great benefit.

The author’s case against TRIPS is less straightforward in the summarizing, unless one
knows already the basic distinctions which national copyright laws and supranational
agreements and conventions make among different modes of copyright. Librarians already
know those distinctions and the problems they cause, but acknowledge that a balance
must be sought between the public right to access and creators’ ‘moral’ right to
attribution and ‘economic’ right to due recompense.

While this particular debate quite properly continues, it may be taken as indicative of the
author’s concern that TRIPS recognizes only the economic rights of copyright holders.
Rikowski suggests that this conveniently suits its own purposes, since TRIPS is only
interested in turning copyright into a tradeable (economic) commodity, and not at all
concerned with any notion of ‘moral’ (human) rights of creators or public rights for free
access. She emphasizes this point convincingly by discussing how ‘Traditional Knowledge
Systems’ are regarded as fair game by TRIPS, where knowledge acquired over centuries by
indigenous societies living in harmony with Nature, can be appropriated, packaged and
marketed at will by corporations with the necessary financial and political global presence.
There is no ‘moral right’ in TRIPS’ eyes; it sees only ‘marketing rights’.

If the problems Rikowski perceives in the GATS and TRIPS may be summarized fairly
readily, that is certainly not the case when it comes to the arguments behind them and the
evidence adduced. This is scattered around in all manner of primary and secondary
sources, from official publications of governmental, supra- and extra-governmental
organizations (such as various national governments, the UN, EU bodies and of course the
WTO itself), newspapers and journals, professional associations (e.g. IFLA, CILIP, the ALA,
Australian Writers Guild etc.), and the writings of individual commentators. As a result of
this scatter of sources and of the complex inter-relationships involved, any text
synthesized to represent them will tend to be complex itself.

The author however, has matched her obvious talents for scholarly research, collation and
analysis, with an equal ability to structure her content in a logical and readable fashion.
Thus, within each of the four Parts, she uses a two-level heading structure employing a
single numbering system extending throughout the book, complemented by a Contents
table reflecting that structure. The text includes many references both to other
subsections and to the documentary sources listed in full bibliographic detail in a
concluding Bibliography section. With the inclusion also of frequent recapitulation of the
context where this has been covered elsewhere, the book is surprisingly easy both to read
and to use for reference.

Readers will however, soon discover that this is no ordinary text book, since it has one or
two unusual features. Firstly, in places, the author talks about herself, her history of
involvement with library and public service issues and how she came to write the present
book. Some might be a little startled by this departure from convention, but I found it
rather charming, and certainly preferable to the ‘disembodied intellect’ type of identity
which academic authors usually seem to adopt. Then there is the author’s analytical
perspective, which she describes as ‘Open Marxist’. Given the theme of the book, it
should come as no surprise that it is but a short step from a critique of commercialization
and commoditization to a critique of the underlying cause - capitalism itself.

The core of the problem, Rikowski claims, lies in the amoral foundations and structure of
global capitalism, which is incapable of pursuing any other agenda than the appropriation
of all that might be tradeable into private hands, corroding any ethos of the public good
and debasing any collective dimension to our behaviour as it does so. Has Western society
really unleashed such a predatory juggernaut? Well, though no Marxist myself, I have long
had my suspicions that indeed it has.

Inevitably, the author’s solution is an Open Marxist solution. And for those readers who
might flinch at this for whatever reason, we should remind ourselves that diversity of
viewpoint and opinion and a constructive debate among them are the foundation of any
free society. Dominant socio-economic power structures, whether on the ‘right’ or on the
‘left’, tend to discredit and denature dissenting viewpoints, and one of the duties of all
professionals committed to truly human and societal value is not to dismiss them without
due consideration.

In a way, Rikowski makes this last point herself when she comments that society as we
know it is a product of pure evolution, implying that our failure to engage with the project
of building a different, better, kinder and fairer social, economic and political system
results in us getting the system we deserve. This raises all manner of interesting
questions. Are we the slaves of evolution, or should we (can we) intervene? If
interventionism is valid, then how do we ensure that its agents have the common, and not
a sectarian, interest at heart? Where does beneficial interventionism end and social
engineering begin? How do such questions stand up against what we now know about
complex adaptive systems, attractors and disruptive interventions? While the answers to
such fascinating questions are outside the scope of this book, we must surely be grateful at
least that it has stimulated the asking of them.

This book encourages us to think ‘outside the box’ in a number of other ways too. It is one
of the few major texts (of which I am aware) seriously to question the way that western
capitalist trading policies regard anything and everything as fodder for conversion into
tradable commodities. From a Marxist perspective, this translates into value being
extracted from labour which, embedded in tradable commodities, is traded on for profit,
scant amount of which will find its way back to the originator. Although she reserves her
analysis for a future book, Rikowski sees the knowledge economy as a natural extension of
this cynical paradigm, where intangibles such as knowledge and intellectual property rights
become tradable commodities like any other, complicated by a growing divide between the
intellectual and manual forms of labour which can only further weaken the latter’s
position.

Her discussion of balance in copyright, as currently understood, reveals that this is an area
which is in dire need of clarification. While creators’ rights may be readily balanced
between the moral and the economic, what, she asks, might be an equitable balance when
it comes to the rights of the public to access and benefit from the collective fund of
knowledge to which creators contribute? Although presumably too recent a development
to be included in this book, the extended range of rights afforded to users of copyrighted
works by the Creative Commons licencing schemes may go some way to resolving these
issues.

This is a powerful and thought-provoking text book of encyclopaedic proportions,

competently researched and written, which deals for the first time with issues of
globalization we might never otherwise have suspected could pose a threat to the public
right of access to information. Each reader will, of course, judge for themselves whether
the threat is really as serious and immediate as the author claims but I, for one, am
persuaded. Opinions will differ also on the author’s proposed solution, but that is only to
be expected. What really makes this an important book is that the basic issues and a
wealth of supporting material are gathered here, organized and annotated ready for
further analysis and interpretation. If this book is not destined to become a standard text
for staff, students and academics alike in the LIS, media studies, or even economics fields,
then there is even less justice in the world than I thought.

Bob Bater
InfoPlex Associates
2005-07-06