An electronic computer can serve equally a capitalist or socialist administration. […] in Marxian theory itself […] the social mode of production, not technics is the basic historical factor. However, when technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality – a “world” (Marcuse 1964b, 157–158).
Marcuse, like Marx, considered the antagonism between class relations and productive forces to be at the heart of modern technologies such as the computer: the computer socialises the means of production and communication and is therefore a foundation of a better society. Its capitalist application turns it, however, into a tool for warfare, control, surveillance, advertising’s manipulation of needs, the creation of unemployment and new forms of precarious labour, etc. Marcuse did not think that one must simply abolish capitalism and can then use the same technologies in a socialist society. Rather, he felt that a qualitative change of society would have to come along with a qualitative change of technology:
The technological transformation is at the same time political transformation, but the political change would turn into qualitative social change only to the degree to which it would alter the direction of technical progress – that is, develop a new technology. For the established technology has become an instrument of destructive politics (Marcuse 1964b, 232).
The technology which the industrial societies have inherited and developed, and which rules our lives, is in its very roots a technology of domination. Consummation of technical progress therefore implies the determinate negation of this technology. […] The idea of qualitatively diferent forms of technological rationality belongs to a new historical project. (Marcuse 1962, 57).
4.2.3. The Computer and Freedom
Marcuse argued that modern technology must in a truly free society be dialectically sublated (aufgehoben) – i.e. at the same time eliminated, preserved and lifted to a new qualitative level of existence:
If the completion of the technological project involves a break with the prevailing technological rationality, the break in turn depends on the continued existence of the technical base itself. For it is this base which has rendered possible the satisfaction of needs and the reduction of toil – it remains the very base of all forms of human freedom. The qualitative change rather lies in the reconstruction of this base – that is, in its development with a view of diferent ends (Marcuse 1964b, 236).
Herbert Marcuse and Social Media
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