The bit about innovation

In Karl Marx's Manifesto of the Communist Party, there is a paragraph that opens perhaps the most important discussions that humans ever have about the future of community and society, and the joy or terror of that future:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Let's contrast this with normal actions we take every day: the preservation of the good, and the repair of the broken. Both take invention to achieve. If there was no threat against the good, there would be no need to protect it. If nothing was broken, there would be no need to repair it. So a person must do something positive to take these actions, and depending on the issue at hand, this can be very complicated.

So, just on an individual scale, we need to revolutionize the means of production. We need to invent tooling and techniques and apply them to specific circumstances. These may be novel or routine. But we need to do it.

But Marx is clearly talking about capitalism's tendency to throw out entire industries, their people, hence their culture, hence their rights, if any.

This was later described by 'free market' advocates as 'creative destruction'. But Marx, and many others, saw that this was a consequence of the drive for profit, power, and markets -- which drives disruption for the sake of the bourgeois competitors, not for any public interest.

But where does this creativity, this 'innovation', come from? The same place -- everyday people who need to solve a problem, to repair something or preserve something that's good. These individuals may cooperate with others to become even more inventive, solving problems on the community scale. And then capitalists or administrators will, if they are clever, steal some of these innovations for profit or power. Typically they don't: the bourgeoisie are lucky to have stolen one such innovation which, coupled with luck and existing power, disrupted the existing order enough to launch them into some kind of high position.

Capitalist entities do this, but all kinds of top-down, centralized, bureaucratic tyrannies do the same thing.

People want freedom. People need power relations not to prevent the emergence of fun, inventive, public-interest, community-minded, good solutions. But power relations always have this effect. Many people will defend them, but they should always be questioned, and it must always be possible to dismantle power relations democratically. So that the real conditions of life, and relations with each other and nature, can improve.

So then we must define what 'improve' and 'good' are.