Is Technological Innovation Being Intentionally Restricted?

In the following lecture, David Graeber advances the provocative thesis that the reason we have witnessed a reduction in truly revolutionary technologies in recent decades may be because elite interests (both state and corporate) are intentionally investing in more modest projects. Graeber believes that the bourgeoisie may have discovered that an exponential rise in the organic composition of capital would generate an unbearable decline in the rate of profit, and, consequently, decided to avoid such a scenario by ensuring that investments in automation are restricted—contrary to what one would expect from the iron law of competition. State officials (the representatives of capital), according to Graeber, likewise fear the social consequences and emancipatory potential of certain technologies.

In Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, David F. Noble chronicled the many ways in which the bourgeoisie has manipulated the trajectory of technological change by primarily investing in technologies which reinforce corporate bureaucracy and hierarchical social relations at the expense of workforce autonomy. Graeber's thesis follows in this vein, highlighting just how much of a reactionary force capitalism has become.



Any thoughts in agreement with or opposition to Graeber on this subject?

We see amateur innovators march onto TV shows displaying their stitches to everyday hassles. What becomes of their work? I think the answer is glaringly apparent.

I wonder if this young lad's new humanitarian invention will experience any prosperity at all:

I have long assumed that a latent suppression of revolutionary technologies is underway, applied by private corporations and the governments which serve their interests. There are numerous ways by which to privatize innovation, from patent secrecy to lack of funding, but the end result is the same.

Monopoly capitalists simply insist upon producing obsolete and inimical commodities, including fossil fuels, automobiles, airplanes, and certain medical treatments, due to the continued profitability of such and their fear of displacement as a result of an innate inability to concentrate upon long-term, efficient development. In the same breath, they redirect investment from genuinely emancipatory technologies to those that further serve their logic of accumulation (i.e., those which reinforce the bureaucratic structure necessary to compel labor). The state, as a consequence, must pursue policies that are designed to advance the interests of capital, but as the executive committee for the entire bourgeoisie, it must, to an extent, consider the long-term survival of its class system. The Soviet Union, unconstrained by mindless market imperatives, was capable of directing production toward "great works" instead.

This notion conveniently ties into the hysteria surrounding "job creation" whenever capitalism experiences a periodic crisis, during which time public officials desperately scramble to encourage the creation of millions of vacuous and rote positions to occupy the labor force and thereby curb rising unemployment. Rather than praise job destruction via continually rising organic composition so as to emancipate labor, the contradictions of capital demand that a certain amount of unemployment be maintained as an industrial reserve whilst simultaneously necessitating a sufficient degree of employment in order to avert social unrest.

Graeber's analysis is interesting, but it follows from Marxism. Marx and Engels analyzed a youthful, competitive capitalism, and so their thought reflects that dynamic, but I would argue that the senile, reactionary capitalism of today is predicted by their theory. One aspect of the Marxist theory of history is that the transition from one class society to another occurs when the forces of production develop to such an extent that they begin to conflict with the existing relations of production. At such a time, the further development of the productive forces is contingent upon an agency capable of executing a revolutionary transformation of society. This is no less true for capitalism as the systems which preceded it, except that capitalism represents the final class society before the advent of socialism and communism. It is inexorable that, if not some ecological catastrophe or other disaster resulting from its logic, open source technologies will sound the death knell of capitalism, as they are simply incompatible with the market. We already witness this with digital media and the pitiful attempt to enforce intellectual property "rights."