An Inquisitive Introduction
Many have received this prize because of their right-wing political stances supporting Western capitalist imperialism and even the Zionist Entity ZE. Examples include Naguib Mahfouz, who supported normalization with ZE; the right-wing Venezuelan woman who opposed the Bolivarian Revolution; and Yossef Agnon, who won the prize in the early 1960s even though he once called for Israel to occupy Damascus! Not to mention the prize awarded to Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for a “peace” between them at the expense of the Palestinian people and the Arab nation — a hypocrisy later overturned by the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” which exposed through the genocide in Gaza the depth of deceit in the imperialist center and in the official world at large.
It is therefore no innocent coincidence that an Israeli was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in a field deeply tied to politics — economics. If bias is evident in politics and literature, can it exist in the sciences too, assuming that economics is a science? In reality, economics is the science of capital and classes — and politics permeates even philosophy and science, let alone history.
To begin, I should note that I have not yet obtained the actual book, but rather relied on the article below, which analyzes the topic from the author’s perspective while referencing other views. Thus, my discussion is bound by what is mentioned there, especially the theoretical interpretations of the three laureates — and in particular the first one.
“A History of Creative Destruction: From Karl Marx to the 2025 Economics Nobel Winners
A look at the evolution of the theory of creative destruction, widely regarded by economists as a defining feature of capitalist economies.
Written by Adrija Roychowdhury
New Delhi | Updated: October 14, 2025, 06:20 PM IST”
Adrija Roychowdhury’s article centers on Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction” and traces its roots to what Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto about the forced destruction of vast productive forces:
“In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction… a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.”
“Later, in Grundrisse, Marx wrote that capital must periodically destroy previous forms of productive capacity — not because of external causes but because of its own internal dynamics. Such periods of destruction, he argued, involve upheavals, crises, mass unemployment, and the annihilation of a large portion of capital — yet they ultimately allow productive forces to be fully employed again”
Thus, the dynamic of capitalism itself is based on destruction — the destruction of productive forces. Marx did not describe this dynamic positively. Productive forces are not purely material: they consist of human labor power — both physical and intellectual — including skills, knowledge, and capacities; the means of production such as tools, machinery, infrastructure, and raw materials; and also technology and scientific-technical knowledge, which cannot be separated from labor.
Schumpeter, the 20th-century Austrian economist credited with modernizing this theory, called creative destruction the “essential fact about capitalism.” In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) he wrote:
“It is the essential fact about capitalism and the one thing every capitalist enterprise lives in.”
He limited his analysis to the material level, celebrating technological acceleration — the rapid innovation that brings maximum accumulation for capital, disregarding the exploitation, hardship, and exhaustion inflicted upon the working class. Here lies the contrast between a right-wing idealist thinker and a materialist scientific thinker — each grounded in their class position. Schumpeter ignored the working class, the actual producer, implicitly serving the bourgeoisie.
While Schumpeter took from Marx the material and technological aspects, he ignored the waste of human labor embedded in destroyed goods and discarded machines — as did Joel Mokyr (who received half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics). Both focused only on the shortened lifespan of machines or the consumption of materials, neglecting the squandered human effort.
By ignoring this, they conflated productive forces with means of production, just as Adam Smith once did — a confusion Marx mocked by saying that Smith “put the worker on the same footing as the horse.” Australia’s white settlers, for instance, classified the Aboriginal people as part of the “animal wealth” until 1970! Marx, by contrast, clearly distinguished three components of production: human labor, the subject of labor (nature/land), and the means of production (tools).
Moreover, the waste of human labor is not only in scrapped machines or ruined goods, but also in the premature exhaustion of human life itself through exploitation that shortens workers’ lives — even as their output is wasted by discarding usable machines or dumping agricultural products into the ocean to prevent price drops. You may recycle metals, but you cannot recycle human effort. (Here I refer readers to the notable writings of Ali Kadri on waste and destruction.)
Adrija Roychowdhury writes:
“The work of Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt — who shared the other half of the prize — covers both historical analysis and growth models based on Schumpeterian insights. Mokyr, an American-Israeli economic historian, demonstrated that before the Industrial Revolution, technological progress was largely based on descriptive knowledge — people knew how things worked but not why. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment changed this, and a better understanding of the scientific processes behind technology enabled Europe’s progress. In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Mokyr argues that openness to change is the key driver of sustained economic growth.”
Mokyr thus confined the history of industrial progress — indeed all human progress — to the European model, reproducing Eurocentrism and implicitly claiming modernity as a purely European phenomenon. Yet modernity is a human process, and European modernity is but one phase of it — no longer confined to Europe.
He claims that before the Enlightenment, “people knew how things worked but not why they worked,” and that only Europe, after the Enlightenment, came to understand the “why.” But this implies that objects act by themselves, independent of human agency! Material things exist in nature, but humans act upon them through labor — through a social relation of production unfolding in time. Human struggle with nature is universal and ancient; hence, understanding why things work cannot be monopolized by Europeans. Inventions and discoveries never occur without human agency — unlike earthquakes or tectonic shifts. As Mao Zedong said:
“When equipment needs to speak, it does so through men” — meaning through people, not merely males.
Was the compass not the result of humanity’s cumulative effort to navigate and explore? Was the printing press not an outgrowth of centuries of writing? Many materialist historians have shown that Europe’s achievements were cumulative, building on prior civilizations.
Anouar Abdel-Malek showed how Europe’s rise depended on looting other nations’ wealth — what he called historical surplus value. This plunder financed Western capitalist regimes, enabling them to bribe their own working classes with a share of the stolen surplus, thus neutralizing revolutionary potential. The result is that Western popular classes remain beneficiaries of imperialism — their “revolts” limited to humanitarian protests against wars like those on Iraq (1991, 2003), Libya (2011), or today’s genocide in Gaza. In essence, global power rests on an alliance between the bourgeoisie of the center and the comprador elites of the periphery.
Could Britain’s wealth and innovation have flourished without this looted surplus? Abundance breeds invention — especially when combined with necessity. Britain’s industrial power grew through imperial robbery — from India, for instance, which economist Prabhat Patnaik estimates lost over $40 trillion to Britain. The empire invested that wealth in its white settler colony — the United States — and even diverted Palestinian peasants’ taxes (during the British Mandate (in fact, Colonialism), 1917–1948) to fund Zionist settlements in Palestine itself, creating a dual economy of colonizers versus natives.
British imperialism also crushed rival industries — in India and China — by force, not just competition. Marx remarked that “the bones of India’s cotton weavers bleach the plains of India.” The Opium Wars, too, show how military aggression ensured European dominance. As Paul Baran wrote in The Political Economy of Growth (1960):
“Whatever the proportion of Europe’s increased national income derived from overseas operations, it greatly augmented the available surplus… This surplus rapidly accumulated in the hands of capitalists who could reinvest it. The external contribution to capital accumulation cannot be overstated.”
Baran added that Western Europe’s social decay, racism, and imperial chauvinism owed much to “the monstrous rape of non-European peoples.” Mao himself noted that pre-capitalist China already showed “embryonic capitalism,” meaning that even without foreign interference it might have evolved toward capitalism — an idea aligning with Abdel-Malek’s thesis that colonialism cut off organic development.
The same applies to India: by the 16th century its textile industry surpassed Europe’s — prompting Britain to destroy it militarily, not competitively. India thus illustrates both “historical surplus value” and “blocked development.”
Immanuel Wallerstein likewise questioned Britain’s alleged superiority:
“France in the 17th and 18th centuries was the world’s leading industrial power.” (The Modern World-System, Vol. 3, 1730–1840, p. 29)
He also argued that British “laissez-faire” was largely myth — the state withdrew its hand from trade only to place it firmly on industry. In short, state intervention — especially imperial extraction — underpinned the so-called free market. Here Wallerstein negates the pretense that China neglected commerce. (see below). In fact, states sometimes decide to apply this measure or that.
Roychowdhury cites other thinkers echoing Schumpeter’s view — all from a capitalist, idealist, class-biased perspective that ignores the destruction of human beings. Among them are Werner Sombart, who in War and Capitalism (1913) wrote:
“From destruction arises a new creative spirit: the scarcity of wood led to coal, and the invention of coke for iron…Also Darwin and Nietzsche are mentioned “— yet none address labor, wages, or where the surplus ultimately flows. Yes, technology advances and oligarchic profits grow — but the working majority sees no proportional benefit. Inequality widens to the point of social explosion, as seen today across the imperialist triad as Samir Amin noted (the U.S., Western Europe, Japan).
Hence, the minimum response to this global alliance of financialized Western capitalism and peripheral comprador elites must be a conscious popular movement — a people’s protective development — where society itself decides what to produce and what to waste.
Capitalism is indeed intertwined with science and technology, but only to maximize accumulation while disregarding humanity. If this very dynamic ultimately destroys capitalism, the alternative must be a popular, conscious current grounded in people’s control of development.
Roychowdhury concludes by praising Mokyr:
“He is an economist who is not merely an economist. Through a series of books, he linked the Industrial Revolution in the West — particularly England — to the Scientific Revolution and a culture of curiosity and progress. While other economists assume that outputs depend on inputs, Mokyr recognizes that beliefs, values, hopes, and aspirations also matter. The result is a powerful explanation of economic growth in England and elsewhere.”
Yet economically, outputs are determined by inputs. As Mao said, “When equipment needs to speak, it does so through men.” Productive forces determine relations of production — and with them, the superstructure of beliefs and values that Mokyr over-emphasizes. This idealist reconciliation between material and ideal moral factors masks the material base. Even if we humanize the question, Mokyr’s framework still ignores the source of financing and the massive accumulation extracted from other nations’ labor.
His focus on “culture” recalls Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis — both downplay colonial plunder. Roychowdhury notes that Mokyr’s upcoming work attributes China’s “failure” to develop capitalism to “clan governance,” contrasting it with Europe’s corporate institutions. But this is historically false: vast empires are not run by clans. In imperial China, governance was executed by the Mandarins — scholar-officials selected through rigorous examinations, not by tribal lineages.
The author arrives at what she calls “the refutation of old beliefs… which we still teach our students even though we no longer believe them. Things such as the claim that the Chinese state was hostile to commerce, and therefore crushed and destroyed the Chinese economy.
Or that China was what is called an “Oriental despotism,” where property was insecure, and because it was insecure, there was no incentive for improvement. It becomes very difficult to reconcile these so-called “self-evident truths” about institutional structure with the results we see in the Lower Yangtze region in the eighteenth century.
If these things were true, how could that region have been as wealthy as England?
Richer than the richest part of northwestern Europe? That makes no sense”.
Perhaps the clearest evidence against this claim is the old trade route with the Arab Homeland — the Silk Road — which modern China is reviving through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Whether or not one accepts that “clan rule” impeded capitalism, the real cause of China’s “century of humiliation” was Western imperial destruction — a past it has now overcome, even surpassing its former colonizers.
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The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Kana’an’s Editorial Board.