Why did the rise of modern science and technology go hand in hand with the rise of capitalism?
Why did modern science technology ‘take off’ with capitalism and vice versa?
One basic and obvious Marxist answer is that it was new production technologies (from the steam engine to electricity) that first made capitalist forms of mass production in industry possible - and with them capitalist relations of production.
On a deeper level however, I see a connection between the particular character of modern science and technology and the rise and development of capitalism. In particular, what is notable is that in no earlier, pre-capitalist understandings and uses of nature is there anything remotely resembling the ruling conceptions of modern science - in particular the concept of energy that came to dominate both modern scientific discourse and ‘New Age’ pseudoscience (‘energy medicine’ etc.)
As I have mentioned in several of my books, including The Science Delusion, in his essay entitled ‘Power vs Energy - The Difference Between Dynamis and Energeia’, Johnathon Tennenbaum shows clearly the geo-political use that the ‘energy’ concept was first promoted to serve:
“… the ‘Energeticist Movement’ associated with Wilhelm Ostwald around the turn of the 19th century advocated a World Government based on the use of ‘energy’ as the universal, unifying concept not only for all of physical science, but also for economics, psychology, sociology and the arts … Not accidentally, the Kelvin-Helmholtz doctrine of ‘energy’ became a key feature of Anglo-American geopolitics, from the British launching of Middle East ‘oil politics’ at the beginning of the 20th century … to a new Middle East war.”
Even here however, I believe we are still only touching the geopolitical surface of the question. A deeper connection between capitalism and the concept of ‘energy’ can be found in Marx’s concept of exchange value as an intangible “universal equivalent” relating all commodities - one that has its source in what he called “abstract labour”.
Marx argued that abstract labour - labour stripped of all its concrete, tangible human forms - is the sole true source of economic value in capitalism. Yet the idea of abstract labour is, by definition, an abstraction - a pure ideality - albeit one that has become realised or made manifest in the economic life of capitalism. The Hegelian idea of ‘real abstractions’ - abstractions that take on an actual life of their own in society - can also be applied to modern science. This applies particularly to the abstract concept of ‘energy’ - which also has the character of a ‘universal equivalent’ - since it is seen not only as that which universally equates and relates all natural phenomena, but also as something more fundamentally ‘real’ than all its concrete and sensuous manifestations - for example as heat, light, electricity, magnetism etc., all which are no longer experienced as having any independent soul.
But the rabbit hole linking science and capitalism goes deeper still. For as well as having its linguistic roots in the Greek word for ‘work’, the term ‘energy’ is still defined today as ‘the capacity to perform work’ - exactly the same definition that Marx gives to human labour power. I argue therefore that a principal role played by the concept of energy - in what can well be called capitalist science - is to facilitate a view of nature too, as something that can be made to perform work, i.e. to be quite literally ‘put to work’, ‘set to work’ or ‘pressed into work’ in just the same way as human labour is within the capitalist system (as well as being exploited in the same way as human labour power).
So just as one can talk, in Marxist terms, of wage-slavery and the exploitation of labour, so one can also talk of enslaving and exploiting nature - by setting or pressing it to work through the technologies of capitalism. Similarly, just as, according to Marx, the abstraction called ‘value’ necessarily circulates in a number of different economic spheres of economic activity - production capital, commodity capital and money capital etc. so also is ‘energy’ (and now also ‘information’) seen as circulating throughout its many concrete forms of manifestation in nature.
What also unites ‘energy’, ‘abstract labour’ and economic ‘value’ is, of course, that they are purely quantitative abstractions - and that their ‘working’ (Greek energeia) is essentially heedless and even destructive of all their sensuous, qualitative forms - for example by undermining the concrete, sensuous labour of the artisan or through the despoliation of the earth. The notion that what is ‘real’ is only that which is quantitatively measurable has a long history going back to Galileo, but it found its most developed expression in the philosopher of capitalism par excellence - John Locke. For it was he who reduced all immediate sensuous qualities dimensions of human experience to a mere by-product of measurable quantities such as mass, motion etc.
Marx saw also how the human activity of pressing nature into work through production technologies went along with the pressing of human beings into work as mere servants or “appendages” of these technologies.
“All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.”
Here we see a convergence of Marxist and Heideggerian thinking on the question of modern technology and its ‘sciences’ - which, as Heidegger points out, are themselves already based on the use of technical apparatus. Heidegger also emphasised strongly how science and technology force nature to reveal itself (theoretically and in practice) solely according to modern scientific preconceptions. In doing so however, nature does not actually reveal its essential nature or ‘truth’ to humanity, but rather is forced to conceal its essential truth or innermost soul - like a slave being ordered to mutely obey its master’s commands - or a victim of torture being forced to ‘confess’ under interrogation something which has nothing to do with truth at all - a truth which remains all the more hidden and concealed the more successful the torturer is in forcing a confession of falsities.
Besides speaking, as Marx did, of commodity-fetishism, I think there are good grounds for speaking also of the techno-fetishism of modern capitalism. It was this techno-fetishism, along with the concept and geopolitics of ‘energy’ - that first led Heidegger to see technology as turning the planet into nothing but “a giant gasoline station”. It is the same fetishism of technology that sees it as holding the answers to all the world’s problems - but without so much as asking (as both Marx and Heidegger did) what the deepest questions are that lie behind these problems.
The biggest question has to do with capitalism itself, and in particular its innate need for the infinite self-expansion of abstract economic ‘value’ - at the expense of all authentic human values. That is why, as the globalisation of capitalism across the planet advances to its ultimate limits, capitalism now seeks to use technologies of space-travel to the moon and other planets as offering new, trans-terrestrial sources of value exploitation and expansion to save itself from collapse. Yet the in-built necessity for the growth and self-expansion of economic value is never questioned - instead it is just meekly accepted as a ‘law of nature’ that corporations have to record an expansion in their sales and profits.
At the beginning of this essay I mentioned that the ruling concepts of modern science and technology had no place in pre-capitalist cultures and civilisations. And yet what monumental ‘technological’ wonders did they accomplish, achievements which were not measured by their exchange value or even by their use-value alone - but also by their beauty (such as the beautiful Indian temple complexes carved entirely out of and within a single rock face). Today we content ourselves with megacities characterised by totally soulless steel and glass skyscrapers - and all our technologies together seem incapable of creating anything of authentic beauty - anything with soul. It is also standard for the monumental megalithic works of earlier civilisations - such as the the pyramids of Egypt and South America to been seen simple as a work of hordes of slaves. Yet how can this be, since even today there is still no existing human technology that can come even close to achieving the precision of cutting and drilling of granite that we see in many of the temples, tunnels and dug out rock chambers of early Mesoamerican and Egyptian - to mention but two. So instead of speaking of concrete and ‘concrete labour’ we might better speak of ‘granite labour’ and of granite - which seems to have been cut, drilled, shaped and sculpted to impossible perfection in the past - as if it was butter and not one of the hardest of rocks.
From this and many other forms of evidence available I believe we can come to no other conclusion than that many of the monumental works of prehistoric civilisations were indeed the work of those ‘gods’ which so many ancient myths report as coming down from ‘the skies’ or ‘heaven’, i.e. advanced extra-terrestrial species of consciousness who were understandably worshipped as ‘god-kings’ - and which seeded all great historic civilisations. True, these god-kings, as a ruling elite, were given a portion of the surplus created by the otherwise free productive activity of their peoples (what Marx called ‘The Asiatic Mode of Production’). But the people in turn got something back from their ‘god-kings’ in the form of practical use values of immense importance such as irrigation systems of the most sophisticated sort. For as elites they were, at least at the start and for a time, true cognitive elites - until they degenerated into decadent royal dynasties or ruling class parasites resting their authority on ‘the divine right of kings’.
Looking back into prehistory then, it is as if, through its techno-fetishism, today’s global capitalism is, in effect, attempting to catch up with what was once a global network of prehistoric civilisations sharing technologies far more advanced than our own. What these ancient peoples knew, we have long forgotten - so blinded have we become by the products of our current science and technology, all of which are commodities produced to feed the endless spiral of value creation, and not created as use values to serve human material and spiritual needs. True, the peoples of prehistoric global civilisations did not have gadgets like cars, televisions, smartphones or drones. On the other hand, it is likely they had no need of them - for human consciousness itself still had highly developed capacities of distance vision, and a level of empathic-telepathic resonance with others of a sort that made any need for ‘messaging’ redundant. There is ample evidence also that is was not ‘energy’ but sonic resonance - realised through music, tuned chanting and singing - and amplified by natural piezoelectric materials - that was the essential ‘scientific’ principle of those prehistoric and pre-capitalist societies and technologies, used for example, for the sonic drilling, carving and acoustic levitation of huge blocks of stone. In contrast, today’s technologies however largely substitute for or simulate what used to be natural powers of resonant human consciousness and communication - although technologies of sonic drilling are now industrially produced and applied - and the possibility of sonic levitation has been laboratory proven. (see the YouTube channel called Ancient Architects).
As for the true purpose of today’s newest, latest and most heavily funded technologies - such as AI-driven Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics (GNR), what will they be capable of creating for humanity? Nothing but tools for both the military-industrial complex and the medical-industrial complex, with its promise of genetically eliminating diseases which in reality are created by the alienation of labour - by capitalism itself. And what could be more obscene than use of technologies to replace human-human relations, including sexual relations, with human-robot relations. Yet already we see the development and marketing of robotic sex partners - and even robotic parenting products - ‘cute’ robots that will sing bedtime songs to children and act as their principal playmates.
Finally we have the sinister ideological phenomenon known as ‘trans-humanism’, with its intentional purpose of using GNR to technically ‘upgrade’ biological human beings to the supposedly ‘higher’ status of cyborgs and ‘spiritual machines’ through technologies of so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ - something which, in reality, bears no relation to conscious human ‘intelligence’ at all - let alone anything resembling human subjectivity - but takes the form only of ‘quantum computing’ and its higher capacities for pure and impersonal calculation.
The in-built dynamic of capitalism requires, as Marx saw, an endless self-expansion for its own sake of abstract economic ‘value’ - itself seen as an impersonal driving ‘energy’. This capitalist ‘law of value’, is today being realised through new technological commodities which increasingly serve no meaningful human use value at all. It also stands in stark contrast to what Marx envisaged as the free self-expansion of human human subjectivity and consciousness in a post-capitalist era.
“...it seems as if modern humanity were rushing headlong towards this goal of producing itself technologically. If humanity achieves this, it will have exploded itself, i.e. its essence qua subjectivity, into thin air, into a region where the absolutely meaningless is valued as the one and only ‘meaning’ and where preserving this value appears as the human ‘domination’ of the globe.”
Martin Heidegger
Further reading:
Heidegger, Martin The Question Concerning Technology
Wilberg, P. The Science Delusion
Wilberg, P. From New Age to a New Gnosis - towards a new gnostic spirituality
Wilberg, P. The Qualia Revolution - from quantum physics to cosmic qualia science
For a further critique of the ‘energy’ concept see my essay on Matter, Energy and General Relativity
Images thanks to Paul A Philips
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