A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Marxism, Critical Theory and Technology

Marxism and neo-Marxism are another major component of contemporary philosophy of technology, both as a source of ideas and as an object of criticism. Marx’s later economic writings contain detailed discussion of the effect of factory machinery on workers. Ironically, “orthodox” Marxists of the half century after Marx did not greatly elaborate on these specifically technological inquiries of Marx, though they emphasized the technologically deterministic aspects of Marx’s account of history. Much of the neo-Hegelian rediscovery of the dialectical and social constructivist aspects of Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century, so-called “Western Marxism,” concentrated on aesthetics and literary criticism rather than on the economy and technology. Critical Theory was an exception to this de-emphasis on technology within neo-Marxism. However, the critical theorists tended to treat technology and technological reason as a monolithic unity. (This was true of other mid-twentieth-century writers such as Jacques Ellul as well.) Andrew Feenberg corrects this tendency of critical theory to treat technology as an undifferentiated repressive phenomenon, examining particular technologies with regard to emancipatory as well as repressive potentials.