Pre-industrial populations untransformed into wage labor might industrialize differently.

Evidence

These countries enter upon the process of industrialization with a population untrained in the values of self-propelling productivity, efficiency, and technological rationality. In other words, with a vast majority of population which has not yet been transformed into a labor force separated from the means of production. Do these conditions favor a new confluence of industrialization and liberation—an essentially different mode of industrialization which would build the productive apparatus not only in accord with the vital needs of the underlying population, but also with the aim of pacifying the struggle for existence? — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 221

Categorization

• QUESTION: Marcuse poses the question without answering it here — does a population not yet shaped by technological rationality and waged labor offer a genuine alternative path? Worth chasing into chapter 6.
• SEED: Article angle: 60 years on, did India or Egypt take the alternative industrial path Marcuse speculates about? Testing his genuine hypothesis against postcolonial economic history.
• XREF: connects to: Technical progress may become incompatible with industrialization’s own institutions. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 183; Free wage labor was not the basis of early American capitalist development — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 612