What does it mean for something to be intrinsically capitalist? What does it mean if these were funded by the government for largely military purposes? Is it a capitalist purpose just because the economy of the country is largely capitalist (or, as the FS at the time would have called it, State Capitalist)?
> Yes, science and technology are instances of labour under capitalism
> and everything is produced by labour, not capitalists. If capitalism
> is so all powerful at subordinating labor, which isn't even a category
> without capitalism making it one, how can this 'labour' produce
> scientific and technological innovations outside of it? Furthermore,
> Iike I said, how do you parcel out the historical influences of
> capitalism on past innovations which are the basis of further
> innovations?
This is a good question, which highlights the other thing that I was pointing out in my overly long clusterfuck of a response last night: namely that if the question is the way knowledge is produced and disseminated (which is basically what you mean here by building on previous innovations) then it is even harder to parcel out all of the influences of past innovations on capitalism than the other way around--not to mention knowledge and innovations that were developed in non- or pre-capitalist formations.
Even if the Rev. Bell invented the reaper by tinkering
> around and not directly because his means of self reproduction were
> under pressure to innovate, how do you incorporate the prior
> developments in iron, the machine press and other things necessary for
> him to make his innovation, which did occur because of capitalist
> pressures?
fair enough: how do you incorporate the fact that he knew that wheat was a good thing to grow and had a sense of how to use that grain to make flour, bread, etc.? Was the growing of wheat for food and the use of flour in making bread a capitalist innovation? Do we have to check out the composition of every invention to decide if it's definitely free of any "capitalist" influence? I will say I'm glad to see you being at least somewhat curious about the possibility that technological innovation might have existed before the nineteenth century, even if it's from a negative direction.
I will grant that specific instances of scientific and
> technological innovation happen without direct pressure to compete
> caused by capitalism, or that they aren't 'the sole preserve of that
> mode of production'. This though does not undermine my claim that
> capitalism did play a role in its development and the argument that
> these innovations would/could have occurred without capitalism just so
> much wishing that it hadn't happened as it did. Yeah, maybe they could
> have occurred otherwise, but they didn't. That's the point.
Not really. There's no logical conclusion here: all you can say is that they had a correlation. From the other direction (which is where Harvey is coming from) you can say that technology is essential to the development of capitalism (though, as Harvey points out in Limits, the curious thing is how it also limits technological innovation to secure the investment in fixed capital). But that doesn't mean that capitalism is essential to every kind of technology or innovation--muchless that it is, itself, responsible for every technology or innovation.
>
> Sean claims that to recognize the positive attributes of capitalism is
> boosterism or bourgeois.
No. I claim that it is boosterism to say that anything positive (in this case, suspiciously labeled as any technological innovation: I'll let Alan handle the ethical and epistemological problems with this) is necessarily the result of capitalism. It may be, but a blanket statement about every tech. innovation being a direct result of the economic system seems a bit, well, economistic. It also seems like a relatively pointless thing to argue. Why try to make this point anyway? Who does it serve to prove that every contemporaneous innovation is necessarily *caused* by the economic system? And what kind of analytical apparatus do you think you're developing when simple contemporaneity is all that's needed to prove your hypothesis?
> But that is not the case at all. Bourgeois
> economists don't claim that capitalism is responsible for the bad
> things, just the good. I, and Marx by the way, think capitalism is
> responsible for some good and mostly bad.
I'm not talking about good or bad: I've said that several times but you seem unable to get this through your stubborn head. I'm just saying that correlation and contemporaneity are not evidence of causation. But it is always good to know when your interlocutor has an endorsement from the Old Man himself.
s