Quotes from Ch. 2: Minimalist Marxism

The distribution of culture is in large part a function of the division of labor. Although society becomes more complex, most jobs remain simple or become even simpler as crafts and professions are deskilled. Despite the growing emphasis on credentialing in management, the gap between the level of culture required to understand the social world grows ever larger. Technological advance not only subordinates workers to capital, but disenfranchises them. Society has no incentive to teach and they have none to learn the knowledge that would qualify them to participate in the social decisions that concern them. This is the knowledge deficit. (28)

The capitalist's hierarchical status is further enhanced by the authority he exercises in the name of the group in coordinating its activities, and by his role in supplying members of the group with tools and equipment. The capitalist acquires the operational autonomy to reproduce his own leadership through these activities in which his leadership essentially consists. The collective laborer is thus a form of social organization in which the whole dominates its parts through the activity of one of those parts. (28-9)

Marx was not a technological determinist, they claim, but classified work relations as well as technologies as forces of production and treated both as contingent on social interests. On this account, socialism must change the very machinery of production and not just its ownership. (31)

In fact there is no such thing as technology "in itself" since technologies exist as such only in the context of one or another sort of employment. This is why every significant dimension of technology can be considered a "use" of some sort. (31)

What Feenberg calls Marx's "product critique": "Although the advance of technology has the potential to serve the human race as a whole, under capitalism its contribution to human welfare is largely squandered on the production of luxuries and war" (32).

Marx's "process critique": "Under capitalism, technology is applied destructively because the pursuit of maximum profit and the maintenance of capitalist power on the workplace conflicts with the protection of the workers and the environment from the hazards of industrial production" (33).

According to this design critique, the nature of capitalist technology is shaped by the same bias that governs other aspects of capitalist production, such as management. (34)

These passages seem to say that technology is shaped in its design and development by the social purposes of capital, particularly by the need to maintain a division of labor that keeps the labor force safely under control. (34)

Technological progress achieves advances of general utility, but the concrete form in which these advances are realized is through and through determined by the social power under which they are made and insures that they also serve the interests of that power. (34-5)

According to this view, technology is a dependent variable in the social system, shaped to a purpose by the dominant class, and subject to reshaping to new purposes under a new hegemony. (35)

The class that decides on the course of industrial progress governs the future out of the present. (36)