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Abstract Marx developed the ideological system of technological innovation by analyzing the capitalist mode of production and the corresponding production and exchange relations, and the study of technological innovation runs through Capital. Under the capitalist system, technological innovation serves capitalist reproduction, and machine production has become the most suitable mode of production for capitalist industry. From the perspective of laws of motion of capitalist production, the organic composition of capital tends to rise continuously, and capitalists must continuously engage in the technological innovation in order to capture more surplus value. However, after the first Industrial Revolution, amidst the general trend of technological innovation, Marx observed certain circumstances that “hindered the application of machinery” and pointed that there lies a boundary in technological innovation.
From a comprehensive point of view, the capitalist system establishes an inherent boundary for technological innovation: its development remains contingent upon its capacity to produce surplus value. This constraint materializes in the productive sphere as a?quantitative imperative: the labor expended in manufacturing machinery must remain substantially below the labor-power it displaces in application. Furthermore, the general trend and essential characteristics of capital’s pursuit of surplus value also implicitly imposes dual boundaries at the level of labor and demand, requiring technological innovation to reduce necessary labor time asymptotically toward zero to cater to the market demands. The boundaries of technological innovation constitute a?flexible and compressible range,?as capital relentlessly seeks to?maximize the exploitation of living labor?while?reducing labor costs to the possible lowest level, thereby contracting these limits to their?narrowest feasible extent. It can be said that the technological innovation serves as a means for capital to extract surplus value and achieve value augmentation, and the boundary is an inevitable outcome of capitalist production relations: the inherent nature of capital’s pursuit of surplus value sets the boundary for technological innovation, the expansion of capital intensifies the boundary and extends it globally, while patent systems and technological blockade, among other forms of knowledge monopolies, create the artificial boundary for technological innovation. Under the constraints of technological innovation, capital responds according to its inherent logic and purpose of value augmentation, thereby exerting corresponding impacts on human society; on the one hand, to meet the demands for continued capital accumulation in new business paradigms, capitalists innovate technologies that are conducive to capturing surplus value, but due to the inability to break through the inherent contradictions of capitalism, capital falls into a triple antinomy of liberating labor and exploiting labor, stimulating social demand and shrinking social payment capacity, and adjusting social production relations and causing economic crises, setting obstacles for the development of capitalism; furthermore, capitalists lack the incentive to promote technological innovation in fields that do not contribute to surplus-value production and realization, and even if technology is innovated, capitalists will strictly control the pace of innovation and the scope of the applications, resulting in technological gaps in the fields of public health, infrastructure construction, and ecological protection, ultimately leaving human developmental needs unfulfilled . In response to the logic of capital, it is necessary to leverage the institutional advantages of China’s socialist system to transcend the limitations imposed by capital logic on technological innovation. This paper proposes three suggestions: firstly, it is crucial to harness and amplify the unique advantages of China’s public ownership economy and encourage state-owned capital to become the “soulmate” of technological innovation; secondly, there is a need to value the private economy and leverage the role of private capital in technological innovation; thirdly, the government should fulfill its supervisory and regulatory functions, guiding technological innovation to steer towards a human-centered logic, with the aspiration to meet the people’s longing for a better life as the ultimate value orientation.
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Published: 22 March 2025
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