It was not until the rise ofNazism in Germany and World War II, as a result of which a great deal of scientific talent was either driven from Germany by Hitler's racial and political policies or was appropriated by the victorious allies, that the United States acquired a scientific base equal to its industrial power, which had prior to this development depended largely upon the engineering exploitation of foreign science. Thus it has been only since World War II that scientific research in the United States, heavily financed by corporations and government, and buttressed by further drafts of scientific talent from all over the world, has systematically furnished the scientific knowledge utilized in industry.\*
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, what Landes called “the exhaustion of the technological possibilities of the Industrial Revolution" had set in.2º The new scientific-technical revolution which replenished the stock of technological possibilities had a conscious and purposive character largely absent from the old. In place of spontaneous innovation indirectly evoked by the social processes of production came the planned progress of technology and product design. This was accomplished by means of the transformation of science itself into a commodity bought and sold like the other implements and labors of production. From an “external economy," scientific knowledge has become a balance-sheet item.2' Like all commodities, its supply is called forth by demand, with the result that the development of materials, power sources, and processes has become less fortuitous and more responsive to the immediate needs of capital. The scientific-technical revolution, for this reason, cannot be understood in terms of specific innovations—as in the case of the Industrial Revolution, which may be adequately characterized by a handful of key inventions—but must be understood rather in its totality as a mode of production into which science and exhaustive engineering investigations have been integrated as part of ordinary functioning. The key innovation is not to be found in chemistry, electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital.\*
Notes
114 Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Scientific-Technical Revolution
115
\* As spending for research and development has grown, a characteristic pattern of financing and control has appeared. Most such research is financed by federal expenditures and controlled by private industry. Thus in the early 1960s, three-fourths of such research, concentrated chiefly in the areas of engineering and the physical sciences, was carried on by corporations, while the federal government paid for some three-fifths of the cost directly and most of the rest indirectly, through tax write-offs.19
\* A pamphlet published in 1957 by the New York Stock Exchange firm of Modell Roland, and Stone under the title "The Scientific-Industrial Revolution"notes that while the steam engine was the prime mover of the Industrial Revolution, no single innovation of recent times occupies the same position. The advances made in a large number of fields “are tightly interrelated in a veritable seamless web of technological change," so as to constitute “mere branches of one master technology” based upon an “elaborate apparatus of scientific research and testing." “Science," it concludes, “is the steam engine' we have been seeking, and the collective scientist is the master technologist."