The Sci-Tech-Economic Complex: On the Subsumption of Productive Forces under Capital

This article proposes to reconceptualise some key terms within the Critical Theory of technology.On the one hand, its goal is to bring forward a dense defence of a Marcusean understanding of Marxism that includes the problematisation of otherwise unquestioned premises known from certain scientist or positivist Marxisms-like the neutrality of science and technology, the positivity of labour, or the revolutionary tendency of productive forces.On the other hand, the article refutes more liberal takes on science and technology as found in works from Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas, instead reconceptualising some of their terms.Its general argument runs as follows.If technology can be deciphered, with a twist on Marx, as undead labour, then capitalist technology may be described as undead alienated labour.Instead of being a neutral toolbox, specific ends are inscribed into technological means-ends ratified, under capitalist rule, not by natural law but by capital's law of value.In this sense, the article reconceptualises technocracy as being not only a rule of experts, scientists, or bureaucrats but first and foremost as being the say (logos) of a techné modelled after capital's needs.This has strong implications for what we make of science and technology under capital.For liberalist paradigms, they are supposed to be outside the political questions of democratic decision and participation processes like the private, privatized and appropriated realm of capitalist economy.Yet, it is precisely this connection that allows me to introduce the term sci-tech-economic complex to highlight its overall subsumption under capital.Indeed, science and technology are constructed 'outside the political' only because they remain inside the logics and logistics of capital-or disciplined by a regime of growth, innovation, and valorisation.As such, their calculations are less zweckrational (rationally directed towards a human purpose) than 'selbstzweckirrational' (irrationally conditioned by the purpose of undirected self-continuation).Hence, the irrationality of this inversion can only be overcome if the sci-tech-economic complex is reclaimed from what the article dubs the end-in-itself-irrationalism of capital.Science and technology may become truly rational only in a socialist society: This is the Marcusean Marxist clue at the heart of this article.