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21 - Technology and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2020

By
Amy E. Wendling
Edited by
Marcello Musto
Marcello Musto
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Summary

Karl Marx synthesized a new critical concept of technology. As with the legal and political norms purporting to be universal and neutral that Marx exposed as bourgeois, Marx also showed how technology was capitalist. In Capital, volume I, Marx argued that capitalism does not work to develop technology, in general; instead, it develops only those kinds of machines that abet its economic, social, and political interests. It even inhibits the development of technologies that do not. However, capitalism also claims that it is developing technology, in general, and so reigns in our ability to imagine non-capitalist technologies.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Marx Revival
Key Concepts and New Critical Interpretations
 , pp. 363 - 375
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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