Technology Sector

The application of technology is a distinguishing feature of modern capitalism and thus a universal subject in all disciplines, including global studies. Control over science and scientific activity through incessant technological change enabled the capitalist system to overcome its most significant barrier: the limitation of the working day. This resulted in a reliance on the transformative power of technology, leading to the persistent theme in literature and other art forms of the mastery of machines and the enslavement of humanity, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. Further intensification of control over the labor process necessitated control over knowledge, which was materialized in technological change and thus transformed material life itself.

In the context of capitalism, the significance of technology has to do with transcendence of the “limitation of the working day,” when the limits of physical and moral endurance on the part of workers had to be overcome to create a mode of production immune from such “natural limits.” The universal effect of the cheapening of the labor power, beyond the domain of individual capital (or a particular sector of production), is evident in the rising overall productivity of labor and thus the widespread transformation of ever-larger [Page 1624]quantities of raw materials and means of production into ever-cheaper quantities of commodities across the world economy.

Therefore, relying on “cheap labor” (an external untapped source) is a limited argument for the globalization of capital—an evolutionary stage in the development of capitalism worldwide that indeed thrives on the cheapening of labor power through technology. Here, the centrality of development of the entire mode of production from within, and its self-generating evolution in conjunction with ceaseless technological change, should take precedence over reliance on an ad hoc, transitory, and preexisting factor such as cheap labor. As Joseph Schumpeter (1942) observes, the underlying drive in the evolution of production in modern capitalism is but “the same process of industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within; incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one” (p. 83, italics in original). With remarkable insights into the dynamics of chaotic production in capitalism, Schumpeter has placed technological change within the core of reproduction and its organic relationship with everyday exchange in the marketplace. Decomposition of the exchange value of technology is a form of destruction in which the entire line of products, the particularities of the labor process, the configuration of existing skills, and the organizational structure itself depend on it. This is how the fast-paced, hyper-competitive globalized technology creates new products as fast as it can make them in little time every day across the transnational markets. This antithesis also concerns the simultaneous skilling and deskilling of labor (technical, mental, and manual), across the board, in conjunction with a preemptive change in technology.

“Destructive creation” thus reverses the order and direction of the structural causation, from destruction for the sake of creation (as in Schumpeter) to creation for the sake of undermining the value of products while leaving the use value intact. In addition, as Karl Marx aptly pointed out, in competition everything appears in reverse. Technological change in capitalism is not only reflective of “creative destruction” but also a manifestation of “destructive creation.” The synthesis of creative destruction/destructive creation embarks on capturing technology's twofold character in the domains of skill formation and preemptive technological change across the world today.

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