and profit’ argument come from the world of computers, with its egalitarian, collaborative origins and continuing culture. This has even inspired a wave of wishful thinking, to the effect that computers herald a new, egalitarian age. The social-science writer David Berreby has described computer programmers as ‘The hunter-gatherers of the knowledge economy’19 and identifies a long list of similarities between the new knowledge-workers’ behavior and value systems, and those of the hunter-gatherers described by anthropologists such as Christopher Boehm and Marshall Sahlins. ‘Can we win the joys of the hunter-gatherer life for everyone?’ he asks, ‘Or will we replicate the social arrangements of ancient Athens or medieval Europe, where freedom for some was supported by the worst kind of unfreedom for others?’
Technology’s history makes more sense if we recognize it as a constant, global, human activity, unconcerned with corporate or national boundaries, or the status systems within them. But as technologies became more powerful, elites became increasingly aware of them as threats or opportunities, and either suppressed them, or appropriated them and tried to channel their development in directions they found acceptable.
This fits better with innovators’ own experience. One hardly ever hears of an important innovation emerging from a boardroom or a chief executive’s office. Usually, the innovation emerges from an organization’s nether regions, or from outside any recognized organization. The innovator must laboriously build up evidence, gather allies, pay court to financiers and backers, and only then, on a good day with a following wind, perhaps attract the boardroom’s attention. Then, perhaps, the organization will adopt the innovation and perhaps, after modifications and compromises of various kinds, sell it to the world as yet another great product from Apple, Canon, or whoever.
More often than not the innovation is used, but without much appreciation. When the first, small capitalist states arose in 16th-century Europe, major innovations had quietly been emerging from within European towns, or making their way into Europe in informal ways, from China and India, for several centuries. The merchant elite did not acknowledge them officially until 1474, when the state of Venice started granting its first 10-year patents. To those who only look at the official record, this has suggested the start of a period of innovation, but 1474 more likely marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s great period of innovation – mostly achieved by anonymous, federated craftworkers. In a major study of medieval industries published in 1991, Steven Epstein wrote:
More than five centuries of increasingly effective patents and copyrights have obscured the medieval craft world in which such rights did not exist, where, to the contrary, people were obliged to open up their shops to guild inspection and where theft of technology was part of the ordinary practice of business.20
This allowed a capitalist myth to flourish, that there was no progress at all in either technology or in science in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Lynn Townsend White, who became fascinated by this ‘non-subject’ in the early 1930s, wrote in 1978: ‘As an undergraduate 50 years ago, I learned two firm facts about medieval science: (1) there wasn’t any, and (2) Roger Bacon was persecuted by the church for working at it.’21
But between the 10th and 15th centuries, the stirrup, clockwork, glassmaking, the windmill, the compass, gunpowder, ocean-going ships, papermaking, printing and a myriad other powerful technologies were introduced or invented and developed under the noses of European elites, and were adopted and used by them greedily, ruthlessly and generally without comprehension. Many modern technologists and technology workers would say that little has changed.
Despite the contradictions, modern society is permeated by a belief that capitalism is pre-eminent when it comes to creating new technologies, and that computers and electronics have proved this beyond doubt. Even people on the Left say so. The sometime-socialist economist Nigel Harris has written of ‘the great technical triumphs of capitalism – from the steam engine and electricity to the worldwide web, air travel and astronauts’.22 He laments the environmental damage that seems to come with them, but he concedes that ‘markets and competing capital have a spectacular ability to increase output and generate innovations’.
An eminent Marxist, the geographer David Harvey, says: ‘The performance of capitalism over the last 200 years has been nothing short of astonishingly creative.’23 A moderately left-of-center commentator, Jonathan Freedland, argues that, even though capitalism has led to the climate crisis,
we would be fools to banish global business from the great climate battle… Perhaps capitalism’s greatest contribution will come from the thing it does best: innovation.24
The idea is even, apparently, central to the theories of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Their Communist Manifesto of 1848 contains what a highly respected Marxist scholar, Michael Burawoy, calls ‘a panegyric to capitalism’s power to accumulate productive forces’. The Manifesto says:
Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?
But are Marx and Engels telling us that capitalism is a Good Thing? Of course not. They hated capitalism and expressed their hatred for it with vigor, relish and creativity. Marx continually alluded to its vampiric qualities (inspiring Mark Neocleous to call capitalism ‘the political economy of the dead’25). Marx often depicts capitalists as almost comical victims of circumstances. Capitalism, for Marx, is something like a natural phenomenon that hubristic entrepreneurs unleash but can barely control, still less understand. Marxism’s own parallel success story since 1848 surely stems to some extent from the way its explanation of grandiose capitalist behavior has rung so true, capturing the experience of so many millions of workers in so many different working situations.
But whatever Marxists think, conventional wisdom nowadays has it that capitalists are very wise, and that market competition between firms spurs innovation.
WHAT CAPITALISM CANNOT DO
A reputation for innovation started to become a valuable corporate asset around the time of the Second World War, and it has become almost an article of faith since then that modern, profit-driven capitalist firms, with their teams of highly motivated researchers, are the supreme exponents of technological innovation. Nonetheless, governments have occasionally felt the need to find out whether this really is the case or not.
A 1965 US Senate committee invited a succession of the leading authorities from all areas of industry to give them the benefit of their research into innovation, in an effort to decide whether the government should channel more of its research funding to large firms rather than small ones, and encourage business to concentrate into larger units, to foster a greater rate of innovation.26
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, by no means an uncritical supporter of unfettered capitalism, had written not long before that ‘A benign providence… has made the modern industry of a few large firms an almost perfect instrument for inducing technical change’. Other eminent experts, such as the education theorist Donald Schön, disagreed, citing a major study called The Sources of Invention by a British research group headed by the Oxford economist, John Jewkes.27 This had seriously challenged the credibility of the corporate approach to major scientific challenges, with its emphasis on teamwork and targets – an approach equally prevalent both in the USSR and in the capitalist countries. Jewkes examined industries such as radar, television, the jet engine, antibiotics, human-made fibers, steel production, petroleum, silicones and detergents. The USSR came out badly from Jewkes’s study (no important innovations in any of the areas examined) but then, so did capitalist firms. In every area studied,
