Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (15 page)

Technological changes within capitalism, to which capital contributes and upon which capital voraciously feeds, derive, in short, from the activities of several different agents and institutions. For capital, these innovations create a vast domain of ever-changing possibilities for sustaining or increasing profitability.

The processes of technological change have altered their character over time. Technology became a special field of business. This first clearly emerged in the nineteenth century with the rise of the machine-tool industry. Generic technologies, like the steam engine and its offshoots, were developed in a way that could be applied across multiple industries. It was the profitability of the steam engine makers rather than that of the different industries using steam power (for example, transport, cotton factories and mining) that mattered, though plainly the profitability of the one could not be achieved without that of the other. The search for ever-newer and better forms of not only the steam engine but also energy and power application quickly followed.

The search for generic technologies that could be applied almost anywhere – in recent years think of fields such as computers, just-in-time delivery systems and theories of organisation – became important. A vast business of invention and innovation catering to all and sundry sprang up, providing new technologies of consumption as well as of production, circulation, governance, military power, surveillance and administration. Technological innovation became big business, not ‘big’ necessarily in the sense of some vast consolidated corporation (though examples of that sort now abound
in fields like agribusiness, energy and pharmaceuticals) but ‘big’ in the sense of multiple firms, many of them small-scale start-ups and venture enterprises, exploring innovation for innovation’s sake. Capitalist culture became obsessed with the power of innovation. Technological innovation became a fetish object of capitalist desire.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, this fetish drive for new technological forms come what may also promoted the fusion of science and technology. These two thereafter developed in a dialectical embrace. Scientific understandings had always depended upon new technologies, such as the telescope and the microscope, but the incorporation of scientific knowledges into new technologies has lain at the heart of what the business of technological innovation has been about.

This vast business became more and more adept at imposing sometimes costly technological innovations on reluctant customers, often aided by state regulation that tended to favour large firms rather than small because the costs of regulatory compliance usually diminish with scale of operation. EU regulations have, to take one example, forced small shopkeepers and restaurants to adopt electronic machines for cash transactions for tax and record-keeping purposes, putting them at a cost disadvantage relative to chain stores. The diffusion of new technologies occurs through a mix of consent and coercion. The development of military technologies, on the other hand, has become nothing short of a scandalous racket, whereby a vast military industrial complex feeds endlessly at the trough of public finance while innovating for innovation’s sake.

The path of technological evolution has not been random or accidental. As Brian Arthur points out in
The Nature of Technology
, new technologies become building blocks ‘for the construction of further new technologies. Some of these in turn go on to become possible building blocks for the creation of yet newer technologies. In this way, slowly over time, many technologies form from an initial few, and more complex ones form using simpler ones as components. The overall collection of technologies bootstraps itself upward from the few to the many and from the simple to the complex. We can say that
technology creates itself out of itself.’ Arthur calls this process ‘combinatorial evolution’ and I think that is a good name for it. New technologies are, however, ‘created mentally before they are constructed physically’ and when we look at the mental and conceptual processes involved, we see technological evolution as mental problem solving put into practice. A problem arises and is identified, a solution is demanded and the solution invariably combines earlier solutions to other problems in a new configuration. The new configuration often has spillover effects elsewhere because it creates what Arthur calls ‘opportunity niches’ – arenas where an innovation from one place might be meaningfully applied in another.
¹

Spontaneous development of innovation centres (some regions, cities and towns have a remarkable record for innovation) occurs because, as was long ago noted by commentators such as Jane Jacobs, the fortuitous co-presence of different skills and knowledges of the sort that Arthur regards as necessary for innovation to occur is more likely to be found in a seemingly chaotic economy characterised by innumerable small businesses and divisions of labour.
²
Such environments have historically been far more likely to spawn new technological mixes than a single-dimensional company town. More recently, however, the deliberate organisation of the research universities, institutes, think tanks and military R&D units in a given area has become a basic business model through which the capitalist state and capitalist corporations pursue innovation for competitive advantage.

But what is strange about Arthur’s otherwise informative presentation on the logic of technological evolution is his avoidance of any critical discussion of the range of human purposes that technologies are supposed to serve. He waxes lyrical, for example, about the design sophistication of the F-35 Lightning II aircraft without any mention of its relation to warfare and the ‘human purpose’ of geopolitical domination. To Arthur the aircraft merely presents a particular set of difficult technical challenges that needed to be solved.

Similarly, there is no critique of the specific capitalistic form the economy takes and certainly no questioning of the purposive drive of capital to maximise profits, facilitate endless capital accumulation
and reproduce capitalist class power. Nevertheless, Arthur’s theory of relatively autonomous technological evolution has deep implications for understanding how the economic engine of capital functions. It sheds considerable light on the contradictions that technological changes now spawn for the perpetuation and reproduction of capital. There are some important transitions occurring.

The shift from a machine to an organic model of the economy has implications for economic theory. ‘Order, closedness, and equilibrium as ways of organizing explanations are giving way to open-endedness, indeterminacy, and the emergence of perpetual novelty.’
³
Arthur here instinctively echoes Alfred North Whitehead’s astute observation that nature itself (and human nature is no exception) is always about the perpetual search for novelty.
⁴
As a result, Arthur continues, ‘technologies are acquiring properties we associate with living organisms. As they sense and react to their environment, as they become self-assembling, self-configuring, self-healing, and “cognitive,” they more and more resemble living organisms. The more sophisticated and “high-tech” technologies become, the more they become biological. We are beginning to appreciate that technology is as much metabolism as mechanism.’

This shift from a mechanical to an organic (or chemical) metaphor is significant. The ‘new economy’ that Arthur sees appears more natural than the mechanical rationality superimposed on the world from the Enlightenment onwards. This is nothing short of a reversion to (perhaps ‘recuperation of’ would be a better phrasing) more ancient ways of understanding the relation between technology and nature. But it is not backward-looking or nostalgic and it eschews the sentimentality and mysticism of so-called ‘new age’ cultural thinking. The ‘new principles’ that must enter into economics, Arthur implies, are organic and process-based forms of thinking and theorising. Ironically (and Arthur would doubtless be shocked to hear this), this was the form of political economy that Marx long ago pioneered in
Grundrisse
! Only in this way, Arthur suggests, will we be able to grasp the ‘qualities of modern technology, its connectedness, it adaptiveness, its tendency to evolve, its organic quality. Its messy vitality.’
⁵

The implications of this analysis of technology for how we understand the evolving character of the economic engine that is capital are profound:

The coming of new technologies does not just disrupt the status quo by finding new combinations that are better versions of the goods and methods we use. It sets up a train of technological accommodations and of new problems, and in so doing it creates new opportunity niches that call forth fresh combinations which in turn introduce further technologies – and further problems … The economy therefore exists always in a perpetual openness of change – in perpetual novelty. It exists perpetually in a process of self-creation. It is always unsatisfied … The economy is perpetually constructing itself.
⁶

New technological configurations displace the old and in so doing initiate phases of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously dubbed ‘gales of creative destruction’.
⁷
Whole ways of life and modes of being and thinking have to drastically alter to embrace the new at the expense of the old. The recent history of deindustrialisation and its association with dramatic technological reconfigurations is an obvious case in point. Technological change is neither costless nor painless and the cost and the pain are not evenly shared. The question always to be asked is: who gains from the creation and who bears the brunt of the destruction.

So what role do the distinctive needs and requirements of capital play in this process? Curiously, Arthur ignores the specificities of this question in his otherwise perceptive study. There are within the history and logic of capital, I would argue, five dominant but overlapping technological imperatives. Let us consider these briefly.

1. The organisation of cooperation and divisions of labour in ways that maximise efficiency, profitability and accumulation. From simple beginnings in Adam Smith’s example of the pin factory, this has over time grown to encompass much of what is now covered in management and organisation theory, as well as in the articulation
of techniques of optimal corporate management. The increasing complexity and fluidity of which Arthur speaks are here everywhere in evidence and the technologies involved are in perpetual flux, with increasing emphasis upon the software and the organisational forms assumed by contemporary forms of capital. The mix of command and control and market coordinations is unstable but effective.

2. The need to facilitate speed-up and acceleration of capital circulation in all its phases, along with the need to ‘annihilate space through time’, has spawned an astonishing range of technological revolutions. Shortening the turnover time of capital in production and in the market and shortening the lifetime of consumer products (culminating in a shift from the production of things that last to the production of spectacles that are ephemeral) have been imperatives in capital’s history, largely enforced by competition. It is here that technology’s relation to the production of nature becomes most clearly apparent as sheep are bred to yield lamb in one year instead of three and hogs breed at an accelerated rate. The increasing speed of transport and communications reduces the friction and barrier of geographical distance, making the spatiality and temporality of capital a dynamic rather than a fixed feature of the social order. Capital literally creates its own space and time as well as its own distinctive nature. The mobility of the different forms of capital (production, commodities, money) and of labour power is also perpetually subject to revolutionary transformation. We will return to this topic later (see
Contradiction 12
).

Revolutionary transformations in the means of communication have paralleled those occurring in transportation and in more recent times have accelerated beyond belief. Instantaneous information and news availability make this a potent force for affecting policies and politics. Control over the means of communication has become a vital aspect to the reproduction of capitalist class power and the new media technologies (the social media in particular) have potentialities as well as pitfalls for the dynamics of class struggle, as has become all too apparent in recent uprisings in Cairo, Istanbul and other cities around the world.

3. Technologies of knowledge production and dissemination, for data and information storage and retrieval, are crucial for the survival and perpetuation of capital. They not only provide the price signals and other forms of information that guide investment decisions and market activity, but also preserve and promote the necessary mental conceptions of the world that facilitate productive activity, guide consumer choices and stimulate the creation of new technologies.

Capital’s memory bank is indispensable. It is already vast. Its exponential growth has to be matched by the exponential growth of sophisticated technologies to handle, process and act upon it. The basic information contained in land registers, contracts, legal judgments, educational and medical records etc. has long been crucial for the functioning of capital. Information of this sort provides, in addition, the raw data out of which a working (but in many respects fictitious) model of a national economy can be built. This data (joblessness, trade deficits, stock market gyrations, growth figures, manufacturing activity, capacity utilisation and the like) permits the health of the national economy to be assessed and provides a basis upon which strategic decisions of both businesses and state agencies can (for better or for worse) be based. Agencies like the World Bank and the IMF at times seem to be drowning in the mass of data they produce. A whole host of ‘experts’ come into being to help us to understand the trends. The introduction of new information-processing technologies, such as computerised trading on Wall Street (and the more recent turn to nano-technologies), has had immense implications for how capital operates.