The explosion in AI has led many to speculate about how it will impact our lives. Will I lose my job? Will it erode our rights? Will it worsen inequality? But perhaps to understand the present, we should analyse the unique role technology has played in our economic and social relations. Assistant Professor Matthew Shafer argues we need to re-engage with Marx and Engels' dialectical materialism to fully understand not what AI does, but the possibilities it creates.

The phrase “Marxist theory of technology” typically suggests images of factories, machinery, and automation—the mechanization of economic production, from the steam-engines of nineteenth-century textile mills to the computerized assembly-lines of contemporary automobile plants. The continual technological transformation of economic processes enabled the exploding wealth of capitalist societies in the decades before Marx’s time, just it has reshaped them in the century and a half since. In “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” which is by far the longest chapter of Capital (bulky enough, indeed, that it could have been a book of its own), Marx argues that capitalist society is distinctively technological in a historically-specific way, for competition between firms within each sector of the economy—and competition between different sectors of the economy as a whole—demands constant invention and change.

The relentless development of new productive techniques is fundamental to the dynamism and the domination of capitalist life. The meaning of technology in history, like the meaning of technology for our own future today, cannot be properly grasped unless its relationship to society is understood as a contingent and interactive one—a critical task that must find its tools not only in Marx but in Engels as well.

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Marxist theorists have long argued about technology as much with each other as with their non-Marxist opponents. The Communist Manifesto had famously suggested that the capitalist class “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” That phrase from the Manifesto might suggest that Marx and Engels embraced a certain “technological determinism” in their view of history. In the twentieth century, such a reading of Marx was characteristic of major strands within the orthodox materialism of party communism, and it remained significant for certain influential reevaluations of his work in academic quarters as well (most notably that of “analytical Marxism”). But this view, that technological change is the origin and not also the result of social transformation, is as dangerous politically as it is untenable historiographically: for some socialist states and their rulers, it helped legitimate industrialization without democratization, while for some activists and theorists, it has inspired a false confidence (whether “economistic” or “accelerationist”) that innovation alone will save us from catastrophe. More recently, however, both interpreters of Marx and theorists of Marxism have increasingly turned away from this once-presuppositional emphasis on the role of technology in shaping not only what actually happens but also what is possible at all. The last several decades have seen a flowering of new and innovative reinterpretations of Marx’s work, many of them in tension with each other in totally new ways; but from the socialist-feminists to the “value-form” theorists, what is typically shared by the best of these new approaches is a conviction, most basically, that social relations determine technological development, not the other way around. The smartphone is a product of our social form, not our social form a product of the smartphone. 

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Society makes the smartphone, and the smartphone changes what society can be.

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The old technological determinism was certainly mistaken (about both Marx’s ideas and about history itself); to simply turn it on its head, however, would be an overcorrection. “Social relations” and “technological forces” are intimately intertwined, so intimately that sometimes we cannot quite tell the difference between them—as scholars in fields like science and technology studies now often (and justifiably) take for granted. A more adequate materialist account of technology must see its connection to society in dialectical terms, that is, in terms of the constitutive interconnection between apparently opposed processes. What seems at first to be the autonomous development of social relations turns out to rely on technological forces that allow those relations to be what they are, just as the course of any particular technological transformation cannot be explained without reference to the social conditions in which it arises. Society makes the smartphone, and the smartphone changes what society can be.

Like Marx, Engels took up these themes across his life. Unlike Marx, Engels wrote his longest studies of technology not on its productive forms but on its destructive ones—for Engels also had a lifelong interest in military strategy and in the history of warfare. Yet Engels’s writings on such questions have informed the new approaches to the Marxist theory of technology less than one might expect, for two reasons. One the one hand, they have most typically been read as documents of military historiography or theory, and not also as studies of technology as such; and on the other hand, and more significantly, while Marx has thrown off the reductive veil, the interpretation of Engels remains enshrouded in the old determinism. A fuller account of science and technology in historical materialism must jettison this approach to Engels, instead extending to his often contradictory and half-formed writings the same interpretative creativity and charity that is now de rigueur in the analysis of Marx’s—which are, for better and for worse, likewise shot through with inner tensions and only partly-worked-out insights.

Consider Engels’s 1860 essay “The History of the Rifle,” which offers an implicit model of how a materialist theory of technology might proceed. As I have argued at greater length in the academic journal Political Theory, Engels’s attempt to make intelligible the complex development of a single technical artifact, the rifle, exhibits in miniature an approach to technology that Marx himself would call for in Capital. In a footnote to the “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” chapter, Marx suggests that a materialist method for understanding the history of technology should model itself after Darwin’s method for understanding the history of species. Technology, like biology, evolves through pressures both within and without, responding to its material conditions and transforming those conditions in turn. Rather than look for the singular inventor (or creator) of each fully-formed kind of object, we should examine how technical artifacts develop through their social environments. Technological history is not, Marx suggests, a catalogue of visionaries but a record of constant mutation and change. Its logic is dialectical, not biographical.

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Engels emphasizes that the development of any technology over time is shaped as much by the shifting repertoire of its uses as by its initially intended design

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Engels traces the history of the rifle in such terms. Though his piece might appear at first a flat narration of dry details, it is organized by a more fundamental theoretical sensibility that closely anticipates much later arguments in science and technology studies. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the development of any technology over time is shaped as much by the shifting repertoire of its uses as by its initially intended design—he shows that every way in which the rifle was used became part of what we might now call a feedback loop shaping the next iteration in its development. Social relations and technological processes, in other words, continually determine each other: neither is permanently more fundamental. On the other hand, Engels demonstrates that the overall process of such development is never deterministic, driving toward some specific final form or goal given in advance, but is instead historically contingent. The dynamic contingency of technological change is the result not only of the dramatic significance of the unintended effects of particular innovations and uses but also of how apparently “obsolete” technical forms can suddenly be found newly useful in changed social conditions.

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To understand developments like artificial intelligence, we must examine not only how new technology remakes the field of the possible but also how social contestation shapes what possibilities are then realized at all.

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Similar insights, in various forms, are familiar from later non-Marxist scholarship as well. But Engels pushes his theory of technology in a distinctive political direction in the surprising way he concludes the essay. After dozens of pages of dense technical discussion, he ends with what might seem a mere rhetorical flourish, claiming that he has gone on at such length about the rifle’s history because everyday soldiers, and not only their elite officers, should understand the workings of their weapons. The claim is puzzling. Typically, we do not act as though theoretical knowledge of a technology’s history is particularly important for practical knowledge of its everyday use—we do not usually study the origins of computer networking in order to confidently send an email. Why does Engels insist on this connection?

Engels, like Marx, was always concerned not only with the distinctive kinds of knowledge appropriate to capitalist society but also with the distinctive forms of mystification that shape our everyday relationship to it. Marx’s most famous investigation of such mystification, of course, appears in Capital’s discussion of the “commodity fetish”: the way in which capitalist life leads us to see mere objects as the actual source and agent of powers and capacities that arise from the social relations that economic production organizes. The strange conclusion of Engels’s history of the rifle is best understood as a counterpart to this insight. Engels suggests that to use any technology well, we must understand its history and not only its present shape: we must understand the contingency, the dynamism, and the unpredictability of what happens whenever objects designed in the past are put to our own uses in the present. Just as Marx shows how the fetish of the commodity conceals the social relations that make every object what it is, Engels shows how a similar mystification conceals the social relations that shape the process of innovation itself over time. When he insists that “men, and not muskets, must win battles,” he is warning his readers against a naïve technological optimism. It is difficult to win a war without weapons; it is impossible to win without deeds.

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What Engels offers to a Marxist theory of technology today is this sensitivity to the role of historical understanding in overcoming the illusions of our own technological conditions. His work brings into relief the interconnection between social relations and technological forces, demanding that we treat technology not as a by-product of abstract economic categories but instead as an element within the relations that make them what they are. Returning to Engels alongside Marx can help us see more clearly what kind of theory of technology might best comprehend its role in capitalist society in our own time, as in theirs. In a moment when digital surveillance as easily enables targeted advertising as targeted missiles, we must insist on studying modes of destruction alongside modes of production—the fetish of the weapon as a special form of the fetish of the commodity. Reconstructed in these terms, a Marxist theory of technology today can orient us toward the future and not only toward the past. Neither the old technological determinism nor the equally reductive (even if superficially more capacious) turn to social relations alone can respond adequately to contemporary technological anxieties, such as those swirling around AI. To understand developments like artificial intelligence, we must examine not only how new technology remakes the field of the possible but also how social contestation shapes what possibilities are then realized at all. We should not ask how AI will change our society; we should ask what AI makes it possible (or impossible) for us to change. But in order even to know how to pose that question adequately at all, we must look in artificial intelligence—as in every other revolutionary innovation—for a longer dialectical history of designs and uses, of unintended effects and unexpected openings, of insights and illusions at once. For those who still see in the complex tradition of historical materialism an essential resource for such a task, Engels’s work offers tools that are today more valuable than perhaps ever before—just as (he might remind us) an apparently obsolete technology can find new uses in conditions radically transformed.