The whole kind of story of technology as it's told in Marx's capital is very much about the
coercive laws of competition forcing individual capitalists constantly to search out new
technologies in order to gain technological advantage in profit making. That is, if you like,
the story. And in Marx's time ,you might say that was an adequate kind of story to tell.
I've often thought to myself in our times that's not quite enough. There is another
form of technological dynamism which is very, very important and which is in some respects
perhaps even outgrown the sort of nature of capital technological dynamism that we've already
described. This form of technological change is a problematic for one very significant reason,
and that is that in this case, we're not looking at the coercive laws of competition between
capitalists. We're looking at the coercive laws of competition between states. In other words,
instead of thinking about rivalries between firms, we talk about rivalries between states. Now,
when did rivalries between states start to pick up? In 1648, there was something called the Treaty
of Westphalia, which in western Europe set up a situation where there was an agreement amongst
everybody to accept the sovereignty of the state and to accept the given borders of the state.
So, this treaty of Westphalia basically said to all the European powers, "Okay, we've now got a
fixed set of states. We all should acknowledge the sovereignty of that state. And we should
also respect the boundaries of that state." Now, you can see this is a very important, significant
situation right now because we have a country, Russia, which is not respecting the borders
of Ukraine and which is not respecting the sovereignty of Ukraine. It is in violation,
in a sense, of the treaty of Westphalia. But here is something terribly important theoretically.
Which is, to what degree is competition between states somehow rather related, tightly related,
to the competition between between capitalists? And to what degree does the technological
change- which comes about through the competition between states- to what degree does that
involve major, major forms of technological reconfiguration? And what is the relationship
of that to the whole dynamics of of capitalist development? There is a school of thought
that says that the origin of capitalism depended upon the creation of an interstate system.
Many of the features of capitalism were widespread around the world. You could find them in imperial
China. You could find them in the Ottoman empire. You could find them in the Mughal empire.
But you never got capitalism coming out of it because capitalism was not able to
actually develop in the way it did. The only place in which it could develop in the way it
did was where there was a vibrant interstate system. Therefore, the interstate system
in western Europe was the the birthplace of capitalism as we now know it. And it was
this interstate system where interstate coercion and competition was a very important feature.
What were they competing about? They were competing about, of course, wealth and power.
And to some degree to right to this day, we find the state very much involved in trying to support
high tech in such a way that the United States maintains its technological advantage in
in artificial intelligence or in other areas. Therefore, technological advantage is terribly
important to the relative well-being of the states themselves. What we will find is the
the support of private industry and state support of private industry. If you take something like
pharmaceuticals, the pharmaceutical industry in this country rests very much upon money which is
channeled to them from the states through the National Institute of Health. Therefore,
the state is actually subsidizing technological development because it knows that if you have
major drug companies which are in your midst, then you have a technological advantage as a country
in terms of trading with the rest of the world. Indeed, there is a direct way in which the state
becomes involved in support of various forms of corporate capitalism. And we've seen those
forms of corporate capitalism in agriculture. We've seen them in the United States. We've seen
them in agriculture. We've seen them in energy. We've seen them in pharmaceuticals and so on. The
state is heavily involved. And if you're a poor state, you can't do that. It's only a very rich
state that can afford enough money to maintain its technological advantage, but technological
advantage means that you get a super amount of surplus value flowing in to your country. So,
technological advantage is terribly important to the relative well-being of the population
of the United States and the well-being of the corporations that work here within the United
States. Technological advantage then is something which the state is obviously involved in.