Neoliberalism and Technoscience

Critical Assessments

Marja Ylönen, Luigi Pellizzoni, Marja Ylönen, Luigi Pellizzoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138253766
• eBook ISBN: 9781317089018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the connection between processes of neoliberalization and the advancement and transformation of technoscience. Drawing on a range of theoretical insights, it explores a variety of issues including the digital revolution and the rise of immaterial culture, the rationale of psychiatric reforms and biotechnology regulation, discourses of social threats and human enhancement, and carbon markets and green energy policies. A rich exploration of the overall logic of technoscientific innovation within late capitalism, and the emergence of a novel view of human agency with regard to the social and natural world, this volume reveals the interdependence of technoscience and the neoliberalization of society. Presenting the latest research from a leading team of scholars, Neoliberalism and Technoscience will be of interest to scholars of sociology, politics, geography and science and technology studies.

PART 1
Neoliberalism, technoscience and late capitalism

Chapter 1
Neoliberalism and technology: Perpetual innovation or perpetual crisis?

Laurence Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski

Introduction

The neoliberal era has often been imagined as a period of intense technological revolution. The goal of a high-tech ‘knowledge-based economy’ (KBE) of perpetual innovation has been elevated into a key guiding principle and salvationary strategy for advanced capitalist economies. Innovation is held up as the solution to multiple problems that became apparent in the 1970s, including the crisis in capital accumulation, the globalization of competition and the rise of environmental degradation. Since that decade we have been dazzled by a seemingly escalating proliferation of innovations, from information technology and mobile telephony through to biotechnology and nanotechnology. Yet, at the same time, there is also a sense that the high-tech promise of the 1970s, of a ‘space age’ where robots would replace workers, or the later prediction of a ‘biotech century’, have somehow not been realized. ‘Tomorrow’s world’ never quite came about.¹

Sceptical commentators have questioned the idea of the technological fecundity of the neoliberal period, arguing instead that the last quarter of the twentieth century and after has been a ‘great stagnation’, where we have reached a ‘technological plateau’ (Cowen 2011). A popular trope, deployed by both Gordon (2000: 60) and Cowen (2011), has been to compare the dramatic changes in everyday life that resulted from technological transformations during the first half of the twentieth century with the much more modest changes experienced since then. Save for the Internet and mobile telephony, the basic technological infrastructure (based on cars, oil, etc.) has seen little radical transformation. In this trope, our contemporary experience is indeed one that looks like a plateau when compared with the radical techno-social change that someone reaching old age in the 1960s would have experienced over the preceding half century.

We will explore this apparent paradox in this chapter, with our main focus not on the innovation of new consumer goods, but on what Marx called ‘the forces of production’. It is useful here to introduce Marx’s own distinction between goods produced for ‘Department One’ and those for ‘Department Two’, where the former denotes products that are means of production, and the latter consumer products. Our task therefore is to interrogate whether the period emerging from the crisis years of the early 1970s that has come to be called ‘neoliberalism’ saw the assemblage of a new set of productive forces. To what extent was the apparent success and renewed global expansion of capitalism in the neoliberal period based upon a new ‘techno-economic paradigm’ or ‘third industrial revolution’?

As we shall see, for sceptical commentators such as Smil (2005) and Gordon (2000), what was heralded in the early 1990s as a ‘new economy’ based upon infotech and biotech is in no way comparable with the substantial development of the forces of production that was achieved in what has been dubbed the ‘second industrial revolution’, which began in the late nineteenth century and reached full fruition in the decades following the Second World War. Optimistic talk in the 1970s of a ‘third technological revolution’ is, in this view, misplaced.

We begin by locating the neoliberal period within an analysis of the different terms that scholars have used to describe the systemic shift in the structure of capitalism in the 1970s. We then go on to critically examine the claims that this shift was made possible by a ‘third technological revolution’. In the 1990s, capitalism appeared to recover from its two decades of stagnation and went on to have two decades of growth, a revival which was purported to constitute a fifth Kondratieff wave made possible by a new suite of technologies. We bring sceptical commentators to bear on this account, examining the weak performance of the high-technology sector in terms of productivity. We also survey some of the factors that may lie behind this – and also behind the resumption of growth that occurred nevertheless. We then set the transformed relationship between science and capitalism in the neoliberal period in historical context, by examining their couplings in earlier techno-economic regimes. We conclude by using the story of an ‘innovation plateau’ to describe the two faces of the relationship between science and capitalism in the neoliberal period: on the one hand, an economy largely characterized by mundane technologies and globalization, and on the other a scientific commons continually appropriated and harvested by capital and caught up in political economies of promise.

The crisis of the seventies and the end of the ‘Golden Age’

‘Neoliberalism’ is one way of naming a set of strategic responses by states, corporations and other actors to the crisis decade of the 1970s (Harvey 2005). The term usually denotes the eventual new direction taken after the crisis and collapse of the Keynesianism or organized capitalism during the global political turbulence opened by the insurgent year of 1968, the collapse of the Bretton Woods international order and the OPEC ‘Oil Shock’. The year 1973 is frequently taken as marking a key turning point (e.g. Harvey 1989, Jameson 1991), dividing the second half of the twentieth century into two periods. The first, described variously as ‘the long boom’ or the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalist expansion, roughly falls between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, (Marglin and Schor 1992, Brenner 2002a). The second period, from around 1973 to the present moment, has been characterized as one dominated by ‘neoliberalism’, a period of economic and political restructuring, privatization, deregulation and globalization in response to the 1970s crisis.

However the question of precisely how to characterize these two periods has brought forth a range of theorizations and terminologies. Some of these focus on state–economy relations, others highlight the techno-economic, others finance, politics or culture. For Lash and Urry (1987), the post-war ‘Golden Age’ period marked the zenith of ‘organized capitalism’, a term derived from Hilferding ([1910] 1981) and Bukharin ([1918] 1972) to describe the tendency from the turn of the twentieth century onwards towards the concentration of capital, leading to the fusion of industrial, banking and commercial capital with the state. Here, competition between firms becomes transformed into imperialist competition between states, and the state increasingly steps in to organize the economy and society, creating scientific and bureaucratic hierarchies to manage industrial production and social reproduction. This organization of capitalism, while initially performed by the state and managerial elites, is progressively also taken up by organized labour and civil society.

In a similar vein, for Ruggie (1982) and Harvey (2005) the pre-1970s ‘Golden Age’ can be described as one of ‘embedded liberalism’. Ruggie uses this term to describe the international order established in response to the mid-twentieth-century catastrophes of global depression and war, leading to a new post-war order that was neither disembedded market liberalism nor a protectionist and autarkic state-led monopoly capitalism. Other descriptions name this as a Keynesian or Welfare State period, while others still describe the importance of this dirigiste, state-led economic form in developing countries between 1945 and 1970 (Kennedy 2006). According to all of these theorizations, however, by the 1970s a period of change had set in.

Similarly, the naming of the period since the 1970s as ‘neoliberalism’ is only one attempt at description amongst many others. Thus it has been proposed that the period also marks the beginning of a ‘post-industrial society’ or an ‘information age’ (Drucker 1969, Toffler 1970, Bell 1973, Castells 2000), ‘postmodernity’ (Lyotard 1984, Baudrillard 1984, Jencks 1986, Harvey 1989, Jameson 1991) or ‘post-Fordism’ (Piore and Sabel 1984, Aglietta 1979, Lipietz 1982, Lash and Urry 1987, Jessop 1992). More recently, many of these theories have been combined in the policy discourse of a ‘knowledge-based economy’ (OECD 1996), a concept which bears an uncanny resemblance to autonomist Marxist accounts of a new period of capitalism based upon the exploitation of a ‘general intellect’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, Tronti 1966, Virno 2001) or ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang 2012, see also Gandini this volume). Theorists of social change have often been primed by a cultural expectation that we should be living through a period of ‘epochal’ changes, where these expectations are combined with the explanation of them. These works therefore inevitably move between descriptive and performative dimensions, being inescapably bound up with the changes themselves and becoming crucial in the self-understanding of the actors involved in these transformations. Hardt and Negri declare this period marks a ‘qualitative passage in modern history’ from the standpoint of historical materialism, adding that:

When we are incapable of expressing adequately the enormous importance of this passage, we sometimes quite poorly define what is happening as the entry into postmodernity. We recognize the poverty of this description, but we sometimes prefer it to others because at least postmodernity indicates the epochal shift in contemporary history. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 237)

Later, they add that ‘postmodernization’ is synonymous with ‘the informationalization of production’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 280). For us this raises the question of the relationship between science, technology and this alleged epochal shift into a new phase of capitalism that began around the crisis decade of the 1970s.

In other readings, this decade of crisis takes on significance as a moment of transition between two ‘long waves’ of economic development. Long wave theory originates with Nikolai Kondratieff (1925), who noted decades-long cycles in prices, interest rates, trade and production. With an average length of around 50–60 years, each ‘Kondratieff wave’, or K-Wave, is seen as made up of two main phases, an ‘upswing’ or ‘expansionary’ phase, and a ‘downswing’ or ‘depressive’ phase (Mandel 1995: 20–21). For some long-wave theorists, such as Joseph Schumpeter (1934), Christopher Freeman (Freeman and Louçã 2001) and Carlotta Perez (2002), these cycles are driven by technological innovation. In this view, each upswing phase of a K-Wave requires a new industrial revolution, one in which a ‘lead industry’ (Rostow 1978) or ‘general-purpose technology’ (Bresnahan and Trajtenberg 1995) generalizes a whole new set of technological productive forces across the economy. Technologies that have been claimed to have performed that kind of catalytic role, such as steam power, railways and electric motors, are, according to most commentators, essential for an industrial revolution.²

Such understandings of Kondratieff waves are highly relevant to our understanding of the neoliberal period. According to proponents of K-Waves, in the 25 or so years after the Second World War the economy was undergoing the expansionary upswing of the fourth K-wave, based on oil, mass production and petrochemicals, and the crisis of the 1970s represents the start of its depressive downswing. But, for neo-Schumpetarians such as Freeman and Perez, this crisis decade also marks the start of a fifth wave, one based around a new suite of technologies such as information and communication technologies and biotechnology. It is this kind of claim that we are interrogating here. Are there any signs of new lead industries or general-purpose technologies which might carry a new long wave of economic expansion? Or will economic growth and increased productivity have to come from within the existing techno-economic paradigm? To fully answer – or even articulate – such questions we have to attend to the difficult question of why expansive waves start and end.

For Mandel (1995), expansive periods enter periods of crisis and a downswing because of endogenous factors generated by the internal contradictions of capitalist development, such as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. However, the transition to a new expansive phase is the outcome of a cluster of historically contingent or exogenous factors. These include wars, revolutions, and crises where capital is destroyed and/or the costs of labour are massively reduced. Other factors behind the start of a new K-wave can include the innovation of a new assemblage of productive forces or techno-economic relations. Mandel’s analysis helps us hone our question. If capitalist development went into an era of crisis in the 1970s (due to the exhaustion of the previous long wave), then what accounts for the much heralded period of expansion in the 1990s and after? In particular, was there a new assemblage of techno-economic relations sufficient to restore the rate of profit?

A third industrial revolution?

The moment of crisis and transition in the 1970s was understood by many participants and commentators at the time as a new technological revolution. A cluster of new technologies around the microprocessor opened the prospect of a fundamental reordering of economic and social relationships that was billed as the coming of an ‘information society’ (Bell 1973). In this vision, ‘smart production’ would see workers replaced by robots, while the informationalization of the forces of production would make them both more resource-efficient and flexible. Following from the 1960s rhetoric of an economy re-forged in the ‘white heat’ of technological revolution, nuclear power and the space age, expectations were high. In time, the nascent sectors of biotechnology and nanotechnology would be placed within this growing pantheon of promised high-tech futures, a pantheon that seemed to offer salvation not only from the economic quagmire but from the environmental crisis, recognition of which began to proliferate at this time. For some, this heralded a coming ‘third industrial revolution’, as significant as the second industrial revolution that began 100 years earlier in the 1870s and had profoundly shaped the twentieth century. Was the period of neoliberal globalization and economic growth after the 1970s based upon this promised high-tech ‘third industrial revolution’ – or were some other factors at play? In this section we discuss this question, focusing on the cases of ICT and biotechnology. Did either of these have the potential to become a ‘lead industry’ or ‘general-purpose technology’, in the way that has been claimed about steam power or the electric motor in earlier periods of strong economic growth?

The claims of ICT to be a general-purpose technology has had to contend with what Robert Solow (1987) called the ‘productivity paradox’. Solow pointed out that the time of proliferation of computers in the 1970s and 1980s was also a time of slowing productivity in the USA and more widely. Solow’s paradox has been much debated since. David (1990) countered by arguing that general-purpose technologies always have a delay before their productivity benefits are realized, citing the low productivity growth in the United States between 1900 and 1920 despite the existence of electric dynamos and motors. The productivity gains from IT did seem to start to be realized in the mid-1990s, when the USA experienced a productivity surge that some analysts claimed was entirely due to the application of IT (Rhode and Toniolo 2006: 10–11). Yet others argue that the productivity gains associated with computers have been confined to the IT sector itself and to computer-intensive parts of the economy (Gordon 2000, Field 2006). Overall, multi-factoral productivity (MFP) growth in the 1990s was in fact lower than that in the 1930s; and in the 88% of the economy that lies outside durable manufacturing, MFP growth decelerated, despite investment in computers (Gordon 2000: 72).

Rather as Fogel and Fishlow argued about the role of railways in the nineteenth century, Field suggests that much of the productivity gains in the wider economy could well have happened without computers; many of those productivity gains are being driven not by technological change itself but by changes in unit size such as big-box retailing (Field 2006: 109). Gordon (2000) provocatively suggests that that the steadily declining cost of computing power, far from indicating the strength of computers as a factor of production, in fact point to its weakness. The great inventions of the second industrial revolution did not experience the same continuous price decline, because the significant productivity gains provided by their adoption meant that demand kept up with supply. Gordon uses an analysis of the relationship between supply and demand in computing from 1963 to 1999 to argue that the main productivity gains offered by computers were realized early on their diffusion. For example, the productivity gain from developments in word processing technologies flattens out quickly after the development of automatic reformatting and cut-and-paste. As he argues, ‘[t]he fixed supply of time to any individual creates a fundamental limitation on the ability of exponential growth in computer speed and memory to create commensurate increases in output and productivity’ (Gor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Neoliberalism, technoscience and late capitalism
• Part 2: Neoliberalism, technoscience and humanity
• Part 3: Neoliberalism, technoscience and the environment
• Conclusion
• Index