Marcuse asked whether late-industrializing countries could avoid capitalism’s repressive technology

Evidence

Is a non-capitalist form of industrialization possible in these countries, a form of industrialization that avoids the repressive, exploitative industrialization of early capitalism, which constructs its technological apparatus à la mesure de l’homme and not in such a way that it has power over people from the start and that they need to submit to it? Can one speak of this, too, as being a historical advantage possessed by the `latecomers’? — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2600

Categorization

• QUESTION: This question — whether ‘latecomers’ enjoy a historical advantage toward non-capitalist industrialization — is worth chasing for how it structures later dependency-theory debates.
• XREF: Parallels later world-systems and dependency theory (Wallerstein, Frank, Amin) and Marx’s own notion of the Asiatic mode of production’s developmental alternatives.