ABSTRACT
A common argument about new technology condemns it as the battering ram that the capitalist metropolis uses to break down a provincial regime’s barriers against the world market’s pressures to commodify its peoples and natural resources by adopting bourgeois socio-cultural predicates.1 This penetrative model of domination by foreign influences may be true, but it is not analytically comprehensive. While Marx himself recognized that it is ‘possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt’, this observation was only the prelude to his larger redefinition of technology and its impact on non-or weakly capitalist societies.2 My project here will be to rehearse Marx’s argument about the capitalist institution of new social relationships through technical capacities as an enabling opportunity for replacing often de-historicized, functionalist readings of non-European structured dependency by ‘the West’ through a world-systems perspective, which emphasizes the mutually reinforcing and competitive pressures of simultaneously emerging sets of global bourgeoisie.
