It may be helpful, at this point, to add a reflection on the classic conceptualization of unequal exchange by Arghiri Emmanuel (1972). In a nutshell, he argued that, because of international differences in wages, poor nations are obliged to export greater volumes of embodied labor than they would do if wages were uniform. If we exclude Emmanuels deliberations on labor “value” (see below), this is a perfectly valid observation. International wage differences generate asymmetric flows of embodied labor time, the appropriation of which contributes to underdevelopment in the periphery. But let us also consider this analysis from the converse perspective. If technological progress such as the Industrial Revolution is understood as a process of capital accumulation in the core, at the receiving end of a relation of unequal exchange, it is also a product of international differences in wages.
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Ingenuity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for modern technological progress. Global price relations are systematically excluded from our definition of technology, even though, by organizing asymmetric resource flows, they are crucial for its very existence. Much as inexpensive labor and land in colonial cotton plantations were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution, it today remains essential for high-tech society that prices of oil and other resources are manageable. What we have thought of as the history of human inventions is actually the history of rising inequalities within an increasingly globalized economy. When Paul Crutzen (2002: 23) refers to “James Watts design of the steam engine in 1784,” evoking our conventional understanding of an ingenious but seemingly random technological breakthrough, neither he nor his readers will be inclined to reflect on the extent to which this invention implicated colonialism and slavery.
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The density of distribution of technologies that are ultimately dependent on fossil fuels by and large coincides with that of purchasing power. These technologies are an index of capital accumulation, privileged resource con sumption, and the displacement of both work and environmental loads. After more than 200 years, we still tend to imagine technological progress as nothing but the magic wand of ingenuity that, with no necessary political or moral implications elsewhere, will solve our local problems of sustainability. Universities throughout the world reproduce this illusion by entrenching the academic division of labor between faculties o f engineering and faculties of economics. But globalized technological systems essentially represent an unequal exchange of embodied labor and land in the world-system. The worldview of modern economics, the emergence of which accompanied the Industrial Revolution in the hub of the British Empire, systematically obscures the asymmetric exchange of biophysical resources on which industrialization rests. This disjunction between exchange values and physics is as much a condition for modern technology as engineering. - author⁄Alf Hornborg
Alf Hornborg, 2016. bib⁄Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation From Ancient Rome to Wall Street. Springer.