INVENTIVENESS IN SOCIETY 5 and technical field in countries such as India. So our first distinction will be between inventions or innovations in capitalist and non-capitalist environments. By non-capitalist, we mean mainly a post-capitalist, that is, a socialist, system (including in its extreme case, a communist society). We shall explicate the relevance of his distinction a little later. The second type of distinction is between exhausting and non-exhausting inventions, and exploitative and non-exploitative inventions. There are inventions which lead to better means of finding and recovering existing resources, transporting them and utilizing them. When such resources are exhaustible, then the inventions are characterized as "exhausting". The recovery of natural gas, its liquefaction and transportation across the seas and its use in the production of fertilizer are a cluster of useful and exhausting inventions. When an invention simply leads to finding new uses for the existing and practically unlimited materials, then we characterize it as a non-exhausting invention. We say "practically unlimited" because we depend ultimately on the availability of matter in the solar system, or, if space travel becomes possible, of the universe. And scientists tell us that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is clocking up a steady decline from order to disorder, from usable to unusable energy. Subject to this final limitation, discovery of high-yielding varieties of seeds or of the silicon chip-based electronic technology can be cited as examples of non-exhausting inventions. Exploitative^ Non-exploitative Inventions Parallel with this distinction, there is a distinction between exploitative and non-exploitative inventions. An invention is exploitative when its use involves the deprivation of other human beings or their exploitation. In this sense the mining of coal in the Chotanagpur plateau was an exploitative invention, for its success required the expulsion of tribal people from their homelands and the employment of miners on low wages in those "death-traps". In the same sense, all inventions that subject human beings to rigidly hierarchical control or to machines are exploitative (and alienating) inventions.1 It can be argued that inventions themselves are not exploitative; it is the social system which makes them so. But those inventions which require the increasing concentration of exhaustible resources are, in a fundamental sense, both exhausting and exploitative. For, increasing concentration for a few necessarily involves deprivation of the rest of the humanity of these scarce resources, and it also generally involves the subjection of men and