Winner & Marx & Engels

This is a follow up to my post earlier in the week, in which I break down Langdon Winner's classic article, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Because it's an interesting side-track, but not quite as essential as other parts of the article, I skipped over what Winner wrote about a slight difference of opinion between Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, on the subject of the relationship between technologies and political forms. So here it is, as a little supplement.

Winner gives us an argument from Engels first: that certain technologies require certain kinds of management, and that the management requires a particular form of authoritarian, or at least rigidly hierarchical organization. Winner cites Engels deploying the examples of an industrial factory, and of a ship. Each of these, according to Engels (according to Winner) requires organization which cannot be done democratically by all interested parties, but must be regimented by someone capable of overseeing the whole process. (Worth noting that Engels came from a family of factory owners.)

We then get the nuancing from Marx. Winner writes: “Marx tries to show that increasing mechanization will render obsolete the hierarchical division of labor and the relationships of subordination that, in his view, were necessary during the early stages of modern manufacturing” (129). Both Engels and Marx are suggesting that certain forms of production (certain technologies) require certain forms of organization. Or: Engels argues that factories in the 19th century require rigid hierarchies. Marx argues that mechanization will eliminate the need for such hierarchies. Marx gives us a slightly more complex argument, though still a deterministic one, that a technology can change social organization. This is a counterpoint to the argument from Engels, that a certain technology (the Industrial era factory) strongly requires a certain form of social and political organization. The two offer alternate causalities.

As Winner puts it, “In this conception, some kinds of technology require their social environments to be structured in a particular way in much the same sense that an automobile requires wheels in order to run. The thing could not exist as an effective operating entity unless certain social as well as material conditions were met” (130).