Karl Marx, Philosopher of Technics: Critique, Alienation, and the Materiality of Social Power

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a reinterpretation of Karl Marx as a philosopher of technology, challenging dominant views of Marxism as a productivist and economicist school of thought. The five chapters draw on recent Marx scholarship and philological research from the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) to reconstruct Marx’s intellectual evolution from his mid-1840s rupture with the Young Hegelian movement to his 1860s writings on political economy. In contrast to 20th-century interpretations that reduced his work to a eulogy of industrial modernity, this study examines how Marx critically engaged with the technological discourse of his time, particularly in the central chapters of Capital, which mount a historically grounded critique of the technocratic ideologies emerging with the Industrial Revolution. My reading thus foregrounds the centrality of technology in Marx’s mature thought, culminating in a close analysis of his engagement with two early commentators of the English factory system: Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure. This interpretation reframes Marx as a critical theorist of technological modernity, who analyzed how capitalist social relations organize the trajectory of modern technogenesis and, in doing so, anticipated contemporary developments in philosophy, science and technology studies, media theory, and the environmental humanities. Beyond correcting persistent misreadings, this dissertation demonstrates the continued relevance of Marxism for understanding contemporary technological predicaments, especially in light of what philosopher Andrew Feenberg has characterized as “the social struggle over the design of modern life.” I argue that Marx’s work offers an anti-determinist framework for analyzing how capitalist power is exercised through the ongoing transformation of the technical conditions of human life, shedding light on both the distinctively capitalist imperatives embedded in modern technical systems and the latent emancipatory potentials that remain foreclosed.