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Marxism, Fascism and Technology

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Marxism, Fascism and Technology
Carol Dietrich | | Marxism, Fascism, and Technology | |
In his work, Karl Marx stressed that technology had a dual potential: to exploit, dominate, and/or to emancipate, liberate humanity. In the first volume of Capital, Marx demonstrated the way in which competition and the “werewolf hunger” of the capitalist to increase relative surplus value drove producers to introduce new, more efficient technology whenever possible. This constant social compulsion to innovate technologically led to driving down the value of wage labor, while also increasing the material wealth of society as a whole. By the same token, technology, such as automation, he assumed, had the potential to reduce wage labor and thus increase the scope of individual freedom (Abromeit, 2010, p. 90).

In his 1941 essay “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Herbert Marcuse analyzed technology in terms of its power to transform society, and he developed a theory of “technological rationality,” the belief that “rationality is embodied in the coordinated apparatus of production itself” (Abromeit, 2010, p. 89). According to Marcuse (1998), “He is rational who most efficiently accepts and executes what is allocated to him, who entrusts his fate to the large scale enterprises and organizations which administer the apparatus” (p. 60). Marcuse linked his concept of technological rationality to the rise of large corporations, increased state intervention in the economy and the integration of the working class into the capitalist system. From his point of view, technology is no longer a field open to society’s experimentation and creativity, but an activity having only one possible dimension of development: the capitalist one of a profit-based economy (Berardi, 2007, p. 61).

Marcuse (1998) applied the tenets of technological rationality to National Socialism—the typically German form of technocracy--and argued that Hitler’s ruthless political and economic programs were carried out through technological rationality:

Under National Socialism, all standards and values, all patterns of thought and behavior are dictated by the need for the incessant functioning of the machinery of production, destruction and domination….Men are compelled to think, feel and talk in terms of things and functions which pertain exclusively to this machinery (p. 161).

Ultimately, Marcuse concluded that “technology cannot be seen as either fundamentally neutral or transhistorically instrumental” (cited in Abromeit, 2010, p. 95). He argued that “quantitative technical progress” would have to be transformed into “qualititatively different ways of life,” and that “in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals” (cited in Abromeit, 2010, p. 95). According to Jean Badrillard (1993), this situation poses a new dilemma: | Am I a man or a machine? In the relation with the traditional machines this ambiguity didn’t exist. The worker was always foreign to the machine and therefore alienated in it. As a man, he maintained his precious quality of externality. The new technologies, instead, the images, the interactive screens, live with me as if in an integrated circuit. Video, television, computers, networks: these are contact lenses, transparent prostheses which are integrated to the body to such an extent that they become a genetic part of it. (p. 51) | |

The body politic is, in essence, the political body outfitted with a technological superstructure.
References
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Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death. Iain Grant (Trans.) London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Berardi, F. (2007). Technology and knowledge in a universe of indetermination. SubStance 112(36), 57-74.
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