Marxist Theory of Technology, Productive Forces, and Late-Imperialist Technophobia: From the Human Organ to Artificial Intelligence
Bisharat Abbasi
Introduction: The Machine Is Not the Enemy
Few questions have become as ideologically charged in contemporary capitalism as the question of technology. Artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, biotechnology, nuclear power, algorithms and increasingly autonomous systems are routinely presented through a vocabulary of anxiety: machines will replace human beings, artificial intelligence will escape human control, technology will destroy employment, automation will render humanity redundant, intelligent machines may become conscious and turn against their creators, and technological development may ultimately lead to a dystopian future in which human beings become subordinate to the very productive powers they themselves have created. Yet this contemporary technophobia is neither technologically neutral nor historically innocent. It belongs to a much longer transformation in the ideological relationship between bourgeois society and the productive forces. The same civilisation that once celebrated science, machinery, industrialisation and technological mastery as the material foundations of progress increasingly represents its own technological achievements as threatening, autonomous and potentially catastrophic. The contradiction is striking: capitalism is compelled by competition to develop the productive forces with unprecedented intensity, while the ruling social relations simultaneously transform those productive forces into instruments of exploitation, domination, imperial warfare and alienation. The machine becomes frightening not because technology has ceased to be human, but precisely because technology is profoundly human: it is the accumulated, objectified and socially organised power of human labour, knowledge, imagination and scientific intelligence. The fundamental Marxist question, therefore, cannot be whether technology is inherently emancipatory or inherently oppressive. It must be: under what relations of production are humanity's productive powers organised, who controls them, and towards what social purpose are they developed? Once this question is posed, the contemporary fear of artificial intelligence appears in a different light. The problem is not simply that humanity has created machines powerful enough to threaten humanity. The deeper contradiction is that humanity has created productive forces increasingly capable of overcoming scarcity, reducing necessary labour and expanding the sphere of freedom, while those same productive forces remain subordinated to capitalist accumulation, monopoly ownership and imperialist power. The machine is not the alien. Capital is the social relation that makes humanity's own productive powers appear alien to humanity.
Marx's analysis of machinery provides the indispensable starting point because Marx never approached technology as an autonomous technical phenomenon detached from social relations. In the Capital manuscripts and in Capital itself, machinery appears as a development of human productive capacities, an extension and objectification of human powers into instruments of production. Human beings do not merely adapt themselves passively to nature; they transform nature through their labour and, in doing so, transform their own capacities. The tool extends the hand; the machine magnifies muscular power; optical and measuring instruments extend the senses; scientific instruments extend the capacity of perception; industrial systems coordinate and multiply collective labour; computers externalise and amplify capacities of calculation, memory and symbolic manipulation; and contemporary artificial intelligence increasingly externalises and amplifies certain historically developed capacities of cognitive labour. It would therefore be misleading to describe AI as a completely alien form of intelligence descending upon humanity from outside. It is better understood as a new historical stage in the objectification and social externalisation of human productive intelligence. The computer is not literally a human brain, and AI is not simply an artificial human being, but both represent an extraordinary development in the capacity of society to materialise, formalise, store, process and reproduce aspects of human cognitive activity. In this sense, the history of technology can be interpreted as a history of humanity progressively extending its organs and capacities beyond the immediate limits of the individual organism: hand into tool, tool into machine, individual action into collective industrial apparatus, memory into archive and computer, calculation into computational systems, and increasingly cognitive operations into artificial systems. What capitalism does, however, is transform these extended human organs into capital, thereby confronting the worker with his or her own accumulated productive power as an alien social force. This is the central contradiction that bourgeois technophobia obscures: the machine becomes oppressive not because it ceases to embody human power, but because human power is socially appropriated by capital and confronts the producer as the property and command of another class.
This distinction allows us to move beyond both technological determinism and romantic anti-modernism. Marxism does not tell us that every technological innovation automatically produces emancipation. Nor does it tell us that technology is intrinsically destructive and that humanity should retreat from modern science and industrial development. Such positions confuse the material content of the productive forces with the social form in which those productive forces are organised. A railway can integrate societies, facilitate the movement of people and goods and expand productive cooperation, while under imperialism it can also be constructed to extract resources from a colony and transport them towards imperial centres. A factory can increase enormously the productive capacity of society while simultaneously subjecting workers to the discipline of capital. Computers can expand human knowledge and communication while also becoming instruments of surveillance, financial speculation and military command. Artificial intelligence can reduce socially necessary labour and democratise access to knowledge while simultaneously being deployed for labour displacement, algorithmic management, surveillance, autonomous warfare and monopoly accumulation. The productive force itself therefore does not contain its final social meaning independently of history. Its meaning is mediated by relations of production. This is why the Marxist critique of technology differs fundamentally from bourgeois technophobia. The latter sees the machine as an external threat to humanity; Marxism sees the machine as human productive power distorted by alien social relations. The revolutionary task is therefore not to destroy the productive forces but to transform the social relations that subordinate them to private accumulation.
This becomes even more important when technology is situated within the global history of capitalism rather than within a narrowly European history of invention. The productive forces of modern capitalism did not develop inside an isolated European laboratory. Modern industrialisation emerged within an expanding world system structured through colonial conquest, Atlantic slavery, dispossession, unequal exchange, extraction of raw materials, international trade and the incorporation of Asian, African and American economies into an increasingly integrated capitalist world market. European technological development was therefore embedded from the beginning in global relations of power. The technological superiority of particular European states became inseparable from military superiority, naval power, colonial administration and the capacity to reorganise the economies of subordinated societies according to the needs of capital accumulation. The modern productive forces were global in their material foundations even when their ideological representation was presented as an exclusively European achievement. This is why a non-Eurocentric Marxist theory of technology cannot simply narrate a progression from European science to the Industrial Revolution and from the Industrial Revolution to computers and AI. It must ask how the development of productive forces was simultaneously connected to the creation of an international hierarchy between an imperialist core and a dependent periphery. Technology under capitalism has always had this double character: it develops the universal productive capacities of humanity while simultaneously becoming an instrument through which particular classes, states and imperial centres appropriate the labour and resources of others.
The imperialist stage makes this contradiction qualitatively sharper. With the emergence of monopoly capital, finance capital and the increasingly international concentration of economic power, technology becomes inseparable from geopolitical power. Scientific knowledge, industrial capacity, military technology, communications infrastructure, transportation systems, energy systems and financial technologies become instruments not merely of production but of the organisation of the world economy. Imperialism does not simply export commodities; it organises the conditions under which technological development itself becomes uneven. The imperialist centre attempts to retain control over the most advanced productive forces while subordinating peripheral societies to forms of dependency that limit their technological sovereignty. Underdevelopment is therefore not simply the absence of development; it is historically produced through an international division of labour in which the development of some regions has been connected to the subordination of others. From this standpoint, technological dependency becomes one of the central mechanisms of neocolonialism. A Third World country deprived of industrial capacity, scientific infrastructure, technological sovereignty and control over its productive resources cannot simply purchase emancipation from the world market. It must develop the productive forces itself. The question of technology is therefore not merely a question of “innovation”; it is a question of sovereignty, class power and national liberation.
This is precisely why the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century were so significant for the history of technology. The Russian Revolution of 1917 represented the first successful attempt to place a modern industrialising society's productive transformation under the political leadership of a revolutionary working-class state. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 expanded this contradiction beyond the European industrial core and transformed it into a central problem of Third World emancipation: how could a formerly colonised and semi-colonised society acquire the productive forces necessary for genuine sovereignty while resisting imperial domination? The Chinese revolutionary experience, like the broader socialist and national liberation experiences of the twentieth century, demonstrated that the question of technology could not be separated from the question of political sovereignty. The Third World could not achieve liberation merely by changing flags while leaving its productive forces dependent upon imperial capital. It required industrialisation, scientific education, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, technological development and the expansion of productive capacity. This is why the socialist and national liberation traditions cannot be reduced to romantic anti-modernism and various trends of postmodernism. Their historical significance lies precisely in their attempt to appropriate modern productive forces while changing the social relations within which those forces operate.
Here lies one of the central differences between a Marxist conception of technological emancipation and the technophobia that increasingly characterises late imperialist culture. For the oppressed nations, technology is simultaneously a weapon of domination and an indispensable instrument of liberation. The Third World cannot reject industrialisation because imperialism has used industrial technology for domination. Nor can it simply imitate the imperialist development model. It must develop its productive forces under conditions of sovereignty and increasingly social control. The revolutionary question becomes: How can humanity universalise the productive forces without reproducing the imperial hierarchy through which those productive forces have historically been monopolised? This is why the liberation of the Third World is not a peripheral question to Marxism. It is a central question of the universalisation of the productive forces. A world in which advanced technology remains concentrated in a small imperialist core cannot be genuinely universal. The emancipation of humanity therefore requires not the technological impoverishment of the advanced regions but the technological development of the historically subordinated majority of humanity. The real alternative to imperialist technological domination is not technological primitivism; it is technological universalisation under emancipatory social relations.
This global contradiction also helps explain the historical emergence of modern technological dystopianism. The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary confidence in science, machinery and industrial progress, even though this confidence was always internally contradictory and never universally shared. The productive forces appeared as instruments through which nature could be mastered, production expanded and human life transformed. But as capitalism entered its monopoly and imperialist phase, the ideological meaning of technology increasingly became unstable. Industrial machinery was now associated not only with productivity but with mass warfare; chemistry with both medicine and chemical weapons; transportation with both integration and imperial conquest; communication with both universal connection and propaganda; nuclear physics with both scientific achievement and the possibility of planetary annihilation; computation with both knowledge and surveillance; and AI with both cognitive augmentation and the fear of autonomous domination. The emergence of dystopian science fiction therefore deserves to be interpreted not as a simple rejection of technology but as a cultural symptom of the contradiction between the enormous productive powers created by modern society and the inability of capitalist-imperialist relations to organise those powers rationally for humanity as a whole. The machine begins to appear as an autonomous monster because the social relation that commands the machine is itself opaque and alienated.
From this perspective, the long genealogy extending from R.U.R. and Metropolis to nuclear dystopianism, cyberpunk, Terminator, The Matrix and contemporary AI narratives becomes theoretically significant. The recurring image is remarkably consistent: humanity creates an extraordinarily powerful productive system; the system becomes autonomous; human beings lose control; the machine turns against its creators. Yet the social possibility that Marxism places at the centre, the collective appropriation and democratic planning of the productive forces is often absent. The choice presented is frequently between capitalist technological domination and technological apocalypse. What disappears is the possibility of socialised technology. The dystopian imagination therefore registers a real contradiction but often misrecognises its cause. It sees the alienation of humanity from its own productive powers but attributes the alienation to technology itself rather than to the capitalist relations that organise technology.
This is where the contemporary fear of artificial intelligence becomes historically intelligible. The ruling classes do not fear technology in the abstract. Capitalism requires continuous technological innovation. What monopoly capital fears is the social and political transformation that increasingly autonomous productive forces make possible. Automation potentially undermines the necessity of human labour in enormous sectors of production; AI potentially reduces the amount of socially necessary cognitive labour required for particular tasks; robotics potentially transforms manufacturing; scientific computation accelerates discovery; and integrated technological systems make possible levels of coordination that would have been unimaginable in earlier historical periods. Under capitalism, however, the reduction of necessary labour does not automatically become freedom. It can instead become unemployment, precarity, intensified labour discipline and concentration of ownership. Society may become capable of producing more with less labour while workers become increasingly insecure because access to the means of production remains mediated through capital. The contradiction is therefore not technological but social: capitalism develops the means for reducing necessary labour while preserving a social system and relations in which access to life remains dependent upon the sale of labour-power.
Marx's conception of the transition beyond capitalism becomes extraordinarily relevant here. The reduction of necessary labour can become the material basis of freedom when the productive forces are socially appropriated. Automation, therefore, is not inherently a catastrophe. Under capitalist relations, automation can appear as a threat because the worker's livelihood depends upon employment. Under socialist relations, the same automation can become an instrument for reducing the socially necessary working day and expanding the realm of free activity. This is the dialectical significance of Marx's distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. The ultimate goal is not to preserve employment for its own sake but to develop productive forces sufficiently to reduce the amount of socially necessary labour required to reproduce human life, while transforming the distribution and ownership of the resulting social wealth. The emancipation of labour does not mean eternally preserving labour in its capitalist form; it means progressively liberating human beings from the domination of necessary labour.
The AI question therefore reveals the contradiction with unusual clarity. Artificial intelligence can be treated as another stage in the externalisation of human productive intelligence. It can amplify memory, calculation, language processing, modelling, pattern recognition and scientific inquiry. It can become an instrument through which humanity extends its cognitive organs. But under monopoly finance capitalism, this extension of collective intelligence is privately appropriated and transformed into a source of profit, surveillance and geopolitical power (military AI). The absurdity is that humanity's accumulated knowledge becomes increasingly social while its ownership remains increasingly concentrated. The more social the productive intelligence becomes, the more contradictory private appropriation becomes. The more AI depends upon vast quantities of socially produced knowledge, infrastructure, labour and scientific development, the less plausible it becomes to understand its productive capacity as the achievement of isolated private owners. AI is a concentrated expression of the social character of productive forces.
And this is perhaps where the Marxist conception of technology reaches its deepest point. Technology is not merely a collection of machines. It is socially accumulated human productive intelligence materialised in objective form. Every machine contains previous generations of knowledge; every scientific instrument embodies collective experimentation; every computational system rests upon accumulated mathematics, physics, engineering, language and social labour. AI therefore represents not the replacement of human intelligence by an alien intelligence but a new stage in humanity's capacity to externalise and organise aspects of its collective intelligence. The real historical question is consequently not “Will AI replace humanity?” but “Will humanity collectively appropriate the productive intelligence it has created?”
Under capitalism, the answer is determined by property and class power. Under socialism, it can increasingly become a question of conscious social planning. This is why socialism should not be conceived as the rejection of technological modernity but as its social emancipation. Capitalism develops the productive forces behind humanity's back; socialism seeks to bring those productive forces under conscious collective social control. Capitalism transforms human cooperation into competition and collective intelligence into private property and intellectual property rights; socialism seeks to transform social cooperation into conscious social power. Capitalism makes the machine confront the worker as capital; socialism can transform the machine into an instrument consciously controlled by associated producers and society as a whole.
The deepest irony of contemporary capitalist technophobia is therefore that the ruling order is increasingly frightened by the very productive forces whose development it has historically compelled. It fears AI becoming autonomous while itself organising an economy in which the productive forces have already become autonomous from human social purposes. It fears machines replacing human beings while maintaining a system that makes access to life dependent upon employment. It fears artificial intelligence becoming uncontrollable while allowing financial capital, military-industrial systems and imperial competition to dictate the direction of technological development. It fears the machine becoming an alien power while failing to recognise that the alienation originates in the social relation of capital.
The revolutionary alternative is therefore neither a naive technophilia nor an irrational technophobia. It is dialectical materialism applied to the productive forces. We neither worship technology nor demonise it. We ask what historical possibilities it contains, what social relations constrain those possibilities, and what class forces can transform those relations. The productive forces are humanity's accumulated capacity to transform nature and itself. The historical task of socialism is to transform that accumulated capacity from an instrument of private domination into a consciously social power. The machine, the computer and AI are not enemies of humanity. They are humanity's extended organs, magnified capacities and accumulated intelligence. But under capital, humanity's own extended organs confront humanity as alien powers. Under socialism, the historical possibility emerges of turning those alien powers back into conscious human powers.
The ultimate question, therefore, is not whether technology will rule humanity. The question is whether humanity will finally rule its own productive powers. The capitalist-imperialist order answers this question through private ownership, monopoly, competition and domination. Socialism answers it through social ownership, planning, sovereignty and conscious collective development. The historical contradiction between these two answers is not a technological contradiction. It is the contradiction between two different social relations of production. And the more powerful the productive forces become—from the steam engine to electricity, from automation to computers, from digital networks to artificial intelligence, the more urgent that contradiction becomes.
Socialism does not liberate humanity from technology; socialism liberates technology from capital. And the ultimate emancipation of the productive forces is therefore inseparable from the emancipation of humanity from the capitalist relations. See less