The bourgeoisie is the class of property-holders (CWCE, 281). The bourgeoise measures “[a]ll the conditions of life […] by money” (CWCE, 282). The decisive aspect of technology in capitalism is that capitalists own technologies as private property that is a means of production used for accumulating capital and the production of surplus value and commodities.
Also in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, a foundational text of Marx’s and Engels’s approach, young Engels (1843, 442–443) stresses that science and technology are instruments in the hands of the bourgeoisie:
In the struggle of capital and land against labour, the first two elements enjoy yet another special advantage over labour – the assistance of science; for in present conditions science, too, is directed against labour. Almost all mechanical inventions, for instance, have been occasioned by the lack of labour-power; in particular Hargreaves’, Crompton’s and Arkwright’s cotton-spinning machines. There has never been an intense demand for labour which did not result in an invention that increased labour productivity considerably, thus diverting demand away from human labour. The history of England from 1770 until now is a continuous demonstration of this. The last great invention in cotton-spinning, the self-acting mule, was occasioned solely by the demand for labour, and rising wages. It doubled machine-labour, and thereby cut down hand-labour by half; it threw half the workers out of employment, and thereby reduced the wages of the others by half; it crushed a plot of the workers against the factory owners, and destroyed the last vestige of strength with which labour had still held out in the unequal struggle against capital.
Marx (1859, 264) characterised the Outlines as a “brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories” and directly referred to it several times in Capital Volume I (Marx 1867, 168 [footnote 30], 253 [footnote 5], 266–267 [footnote 20], 788 [footnote 15]). In the Outlines, Engels points out that “the mental element of invention, of thought” (Engels 1843, 427), as in the form of science, is part of human labour and the “human, subjective side, labour” (p. 427) of production. In work, the human being is “active physically and mentally” (p. 428). Engels here, on the one hand, points out the dialectic of mental and physical activity in work and on the other hand identified mental work, or what today is often called knowledge or information work, as an important aspect of production.
The assumption that Engels was a technological determinist cannot be sustained. He analysed technology in capitalism as embedded into class relations so that there is capitalist ownership of technology as private property that is utilised as means for the production of surplus value, commodities, and profit.
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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The Digital Condition of the Working Class Today