Marxism and technocracy: Günther Anders and the necessity for a critique of technology

I

When he finally published the second volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings in 1980, after some two decades of delays, Anders inserted a jarring modification of Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach from 1845 (‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’). Anders’s revised version reads:

It is not enough to change the world. That we do anyhow. And this occurs continually even without our intervention. We have, then, to interpret this change. And, indeed, in order to change it [this situation]. Thereby, the world does not change any further without us. And not, eventually, into a world without us. (Anders, 1980: 5)

Throughout Volume 2 of Obsolescence, Anders interjects other declarations which leave little doubt that Marxists are principal addressees of the book. Referring to Hegel’s philosophy of history as the progressing consciousness of human freedom, crucial for so many currents of Marxism, he goes so far as to say, ‘technology has now become the subject of history with which we [human beings] are only still “co-historical” (mitgeschichtlich)’ (Anders, 1980: 9). ¹³ Later in the text, Anders, quoting the phrase coined by Marx and Engels and most associated with Leon Trotsky, describes technology’s tremendous impact on political and socio-economic affairs as a ‘permanent revolution’, the ‘single true and global revolution that has taken place in our era’ (Anders, 1980: 107).

Where did these pronouncements leave Marx? Here the long-awaited new book showcases an increasing ambivalence. If Marx had prophesied, in Anders’s terms, the ‘social revolution’, this praise for his foresight is somewhat blunted by the contention that it was Jules Verne who had foreseen the ‘technological revolution’ (Anders, 1980: 428). In ‘Methodological Afterthoughts’, the same section where he distinguishes Marx and Verne and one of the last parts of the book completed, Anders turns a far more critical eye to Marx’s vision of a socialist future. Marx’s belief that the history of class struggle would inevitably be overcome in a ‘posthistorical messianic kingdom of freedom’, Anders asserts, betrays a progressivist vision of fusing, if not history and system, ‘at least history and harmony’ (Anders, 1980: 412–13). He does not spare either Marx’s crucial argument in Volume 3 of Capital, that under socialism the importation of science and technology into social production could facilitate the dramatic reduction, though never the complete elimination, of labor. Such statements, Anders believes, sound like something ‘from a different age’ (Anders, 1980: 438, n.2).

These are serious misgivings Anders poses about certain aspects of Marxism, even if he thinks he does so from the Left. He set forth these criticisms during a historic downturn for Marxism – when it was assailed in the 1980s as productivist by members of the ecology movement, as an instance of problematic and outdated ‘grand narratives’ of history by post-structuralist thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, and, with its focus on class, as indifferent to racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. ¹⁴ These objections were amplified by the old calumny, long hurled by conservatives and liberals and revived by dissidents active in the Soviet bloc, that Marx’s legacy was inherently totalitarian. By no means, though, did these qualms amount to a complete rejection of Marxist ideas for Anders. On the contrary, the ‘philosophical anthropology in the age of technocracy’ he developed critically responded to the alleged inadequacies of Marxism with a perspective I would designate as post-Marxist (Anders, 1980: 9). ¹⁵

For many readers, the criticisms of Marx and Marxism in these passages might have sounded, though, like a momentous shift in Anders’s thinking. Since the late Weimar years, he had been involved in an extremely fruitful way with Marxist currents in Germanophone philosophy and aesthetics. With the menacing rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party and the onset of mass unemployment during the Great Depression, the writings of Bertolt Brecht and the art of two of the heirs of Berlin Dada, George Grosz and John Heartfield – all three affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) – had pulled Anders toward Marxism and revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Brecht’s aim of producing didactic literature for working-class audiences, the capacity of Heartfield’s technique of photomontage to render visible the opaque interconnectedness of social life under capitalist dominance, and the demystifying function of Grosz’s ‘critical images’, analogous to Marxian critical theory, in the struggle against capitalism shaped his sensibility about what Marxism could accomplish. ¹⁶ Alfred Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, though not a Marxist work, provoked Anders’s 1931 examination of ‘worldlessness’ in the novel. In this text along with his poem, ‘Song of the Unemployed’, he explored the predicament of people caught up in the privation and joblessness of Germany during the Great Depression, ‘people without a world’ (Menschen ohne Welt), forced to dwell in an environment they helped to create, but which confronted them as something alien. ¹⁷ If his engagement with and assimilation of ideas from historical materialism remained idiosyncratic after the 1930s – a decade disastrous for him personally, professionally, and politically – Marxism nonetheless became an integral part of his life and thought.

After he fled to the United States in 1936, Anders incorporated Marxist categories of alienation and reification, the latter taken from his study of Georg Lukács, more fully into his writings. One can see in these pieces an increasing concern about the impact of technology. His remarkable 1944 essay, ‘Homeless Sculpture’, directed strong criticisms at an array of artists, including Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for responding to the spread of commodification and mechanization with a nostalgic ‘thing-worship’, the rescue of objects from a world molded by industrial capitalism. ¹⁸ In his ‘confrontation’ with Martin Heidegger, Anders attempted, through a materialist exegesis of the ‘existential analytic of Dasein’ in Being and Time, to expose its neglect of industrialism and to embed the work within a history of German nihilism. Relying on the concept of reification, he subsequently interpreted Heidegger’s Kehre (Turning) to the history of Being and the problem of technology’s dominance as mystified, romantic protests against reified social life. ¹⁹ Anders had also utilized a Marxist approach in his book on Kafka, pairing Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism with Kafka’s stories of an inhuman world as the most powerful analyses of alienation available (see Anders, 1951). After his move to Vienna in 1950, Anders proposed a new form of estrangement discernible solely in industrial production, that ‘Homo faber and Homo percipiens are in each person alienated from one another – a subset of alienation that, since Marx’s early writings, has been especially neglected in the literature on alienation’. ²⁰

The first volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings features prominently the categories of commodity, alienation, reification, domination, and totality. ²¹ Moreover, Anders stressed the correspondence between Marx’s base-superstructure model and his notion of the ‘prometheische Gefälle’ (Promethean incline or Promethean gap) (Anders, 1956: 16). In later works, his conception of the theory-praxis link, so vital for understanding his commitment to the politics of nuclear abolitionism, also exhibited a clear indebtedness to Marxism. ²² Never reluctant to criticize the hideous degeneration of Marxist ideas in the authoritarian state-socialist regimes, Anders proudly considered himself among those have ‘made the cause of socialism their cause and have understood it and even still today understand it as the hope of humanity’. ²³ After he resettled in Vienna, Anders corresponded on philosophical and political matters with some of the most insightful Marxist thinkers of the time, including Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Yet the type of critique of the Marxist tradition seen from 1979 forward represented a radicalization of earlier criticisms, not something entirely new. A careful reconsideration of a selection of statements culled from various texts Anders published going back to the mid-1950s confirms this assertion. In Obsolescence and other writings, he repeats a central charge: Marxism is unprepared for the treacherous course of industrialism since the advent of the First Industrial Revolution, unprepared for the emergence of ‘autonomous technology’, to borrow Langdon Winner’s term (see Winner, 1977). Unless it distinguishes more fundamental problems generated by technology from secondary, ‘economic’ ones, Marxism risks succumbing to the totalizing logic of obsolescence and liquidation that is ‘industrial revolution’ for him. ²⁴ One of the principal justifications for Anders’s philosophy of ‘technocracy’ would be to ensure this did not happen by preserving the best elements of Marxist thought and recasting others.

Before moving to these arguments, it is important to pinpoint exactly which elements of Marxism Anders responded to in his critique. The ideas of Marx and Engels, it should be recalled, had developed in the mid-19th century alongside the spread of the steam engine, power loom, factory-system, and the railroad (among many technological breakthroughs) from their origins in the United Kingdom to the Low Countries, the German lands, the United States, and Japan. Fully aware of this history, Anders tackled a cornerstone of Marxist theory – the importance of overturning through social revolution ‘modern bourgeois private property’, i.e. private ownership and control of the means of production, transportation, communication, banking, and exchange. ²⁵ A few representative statements from Marx and Engels must suffice here. First and best-known is their contention in The Communist Manifesto that the ‘theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property’ (Marx and Engels, 1978: 484).

The other comments come from Engels’s 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a work written at a time when political parties in Europe began to openly call themselves ‘Marxist’ organizations. There, he characterizes capitalist society as a societal form torn by a ‘contradiction between socialized production and capitalist appropriation’, which ‘manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie’ (Engels, 2015: 59). ²⁶ Thus, ‘modern socialism’, Engels asserts, ‘is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in the society of today, between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production’ (Engels, 2015: 31). Recalling these assertions illuminates how a revolutionary Marxist politics, oriented primarily around seizing control of the means of production and implementing planning to overcome this anarchy, could validate itself. While this type of ‘traditional Marxism’ has been strongly criticized in the last few decades, its understandable power and influence on the Left for over a century has meant that more radical, far-reaching claims about the nature and ramifications of industrial production, many of them first advanced by Marx himself in the Grundrisse and Capital, often remain ignored, unknown, or poorly understood. ²⁷ It was this Marxist perspective, which took property relations, the market, class struggle, and planning to be constitutive, that Anders challenges.

In The Obsolescence of Human Beings, Anders critically addresses several philosophical-political perspectives (e.g. anthropocentric currents in modern philosophy, theories of totalitarianism, views of technology as neutral, the ideas of the later Heidegger), but he devotes special attention to Marxist critique. Ironically, the later Anders detects in Marxism a set of lacunae in what one might assume to be its traditional mainstays – the division of labor, analyses of machinery and heavy industry, and the range of effects of the labor process on workers. ²⁸ And there is a great deal to be said for these latter concerns.

Anders’s assessment of the theoretical and political viability of historical-materialist thought is thus rooted in a demarcation of the mid-20th century from Marx’s time. In Obsolescence, Anders supplies an extremely brief sketch of modern history, characterizing the period of 1845–1945 as a century under which ‘economy’ was ‘destiny’. Marx is seemingly for him the most significant intellectual who theorized this time as such, an epoch superseded by the dominance of the technological (see Anders, 1956: 7). For Anders, Marxist theory, with its roots in the 19th century and imbued with the prejudices and blindspots from that age, clings to a problematic and limited characterization of social domination inherited from an era when the economic sphere predominated.

In the first volume of Obsolescence, Anders contends that the problem of ownership of the means of production had been the ‘fundamental problem of Marxism’ until his own day (see Anders, 1956: 288–9). Social unfreedom had expanded dramatically, however, since Marx’s life. ‘This famous defect…that we are not the owners of the means of production…is only one among others’, says Anders (1980: 362). ²⁹ On this issue, Anders advances the unexpected claim that ‘not only factory workers, whose “alienation” is seen for a century, but rather everyone’ is ‘effectively a consumer, user and virtual victim of machines and machine-products’ (Anders, 1956: 6). One must therefore comprehend alienation as a universal, trans-class phenomenon. Moreover, with the rule of machines over society, new and far more terrible dangers had arisen than those confronted by the classic socialist and communist labor movements. For instance, the problems posed by mass media and weapons of mass destruction, two of the instances of technological domination he looks at in the first volume of Obsolescence, could not be approached from the standpoint of a traditional Marxist class analysis (Anders, 1956: 7). ³⁰

Dialectical critique, thus, has to be rearmed and augmented, for Anders, with a different set of guiding questions. To initiate this process, he settles on one issue as most urgent for critical theory: the ‘question of the transformation or liquidation of the human being by its own products’ (Anders, 1956: 7). What he calls for is nothing less than a serious conceptual reorientation of social critique, ‘since not who produces is the point of departure today; also not how production is carried out; not even how much is produced: but rather…what is produced’ (Anders, 1956: 6). ³¹ Although he pens such statements with an eye to the design, construction, testing, and deployment of atom and hydrogen bombs, the thrust of the argument is not confined to them. Such a position also has vital ecological implications, even if Anders did not consistently pursue them. Furthermore, the transition in focus to the ‘what’ of producing involved the ‘producing’ of human beings in industrial society – i.e. the structuring of people’s consciousness by mechanized, fragmented, and repetitive labor processes, and the conditioning of the ‘soul’ through radio, television, and advertising.

In a 1963 essay, ‘Resistance Today’, Anders expounds on these pronouncements, stating that a ‘present-day critique of labor can no longer limit itself, as it did a hundred years ago, to criticizing property relations and profit as immoral’ (Anders, 1956: 7). ³² What Anders points to here is how the situation of production has changed so dramatically since Marx’s day. Following the Second World War, such neglect might prove disastrous.

That we today have to not only ask how and for whom and under what labor and ownership conditions we should produce our products, but whether we should produce certain products at all, whether we may allow ourselves and others to produce certain products. No question: the Marxian critique, which related to the relations of ownership of the means of production, must be expanded: what we require is a radical product critique. (Anders, 1963: 8) ³³

This type of intervention in producing could not occur, Anders states, until Marxists recognize that ‘the laws of development of technology are relatively independent of forms of economy – even in those states that have or claim to have introduced “economic democracy”’. ³⁶ Developing this line of argument, Anders maintains that technological development does not heed the Cold War labels of ‘democratic’ or ‘socialist’, but ‘essentially runs counter to democracy’ and proceeds, inexorably, towards ‘oligarchic or monocratic forms of domination’ (Herrschaftsformen). ³⁷ This thesis concerning a kind of iron law of technological oligarchy calls into question not only theories that hypostatize political freedom. By the same token, Marxist socialism, which, as he conceives it, demands the democratization of the economy, remains insufficient as long as democratizing measures are exclusively conceived as the overthrow of existing property relations.

Due to its, for Anders, restrictive focus on property ownership, exploitation, and class conflict, Marxist theory misses or at least downplays the problem of technological domination. The ‘space of our unfreedom [is] greater and the variants of our unfreedom are more numerous than we had assumed it until today’, he declares (Anders, 1980: 173). On this point, Anders presses his case in the most unequivocal terms. In his book on the American war in Vietnam, he even insists that alienation did not ‘originate from property relations, but rather from technology’, and, therefore, ‘continues to exist under socialism as a threat’ (see Anders, 1968b: 179). Astonishingly, he later attributes ‘90%’ of the phenomena classified as instances of ‘alienation’ to technology, not to capitalist property relations (Anders, 1980: 376). Thus, observers of communist countries, regardless of their attitude toward these regimes, should not be stunned to discover that alienation had not vanished there. Entfremdung (alienation), for Anders, is not completely or perhaps at all amenable by revolutionary politics traditionally imagined.

Alienation, of course, had been one of the chief and most recognizable concepts in Marxist thinking for a century. ³⁸ Broadly understood, the concept spoke to a historically determinate aspect of human life, how people in the capitalist epoch lost control over their laboring activity and the products they created. The category, retained yet modified throughout Marx’s corpus, addressed class domination, as well as more elusive questions of structural and temporal domination and, later, ecological concerns. Since the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1932, thinkers like Anders’s friend Herbert Marcuse accorded alienation a place of centrality in their interpretations of Marx. ³⁹

Anders relies heavily on the category in his critiques of Kafka and Heidegger. The evolution of Anders’s treatment of alienation from those texts to Obsolescence holds significant implications for Marxist criticism we must not discount. ‘That a hundred years ago’, Anders says in 1956, showing a new unease with the concept, that ‘the phenomenon [alienation] was introduced in connection with labor, the commodity, freedom, and property, therefore in a revolutionary sense, is no longer to be seen’. ⁴⁰ Invoked so frequently in the contemporary arts as a ‘calling card for avant-gardism’, ‘alienation’, he fears, has lost much of its critical-political sharpness. ⁴¹ The degradation of the concept he dates to the 1920s though, assigning considerable blame for this to figures like Karl Mannheim for deliberately trying to dilute the revolutionary character of Marx’s lexicon by detaching parts of it for use in completely different theoretical contexts. ⁴²

Consequently, Anders preferred Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung, the theatrical technique of making the familiar alien, as a German term that better captured the meaning of the Marxian concept of Entfremdung. ⁴³ It was not only the systematic misuse of an originally revolutionary concept which inflamed him, however. Anders contrasts the situation of a contemporary theorist of alienation with that faced by Marx, without actually naming the latter. Marx, in the writing of Capital, had dealt with a form of alienation experienced by the proletariat where ‘the workers are being exploited by their working conditions’, not the other way around. ⁴⁴ Compared with the 20th century, the systematic ‘dehumanization, degradation, and deprivation of liberty’ at the core of alienation critique have ‘become the epitome of naivety and harmlessness’, Anders writes. ⁴⁵ Since that period, the abasement of human beings had reached an extent unimagined by Marx.

Here are much deeper reservations about Marx’s category of alienation, reservations extending to the historical adequacy of the category itself. One can observe this growing discontent in Anders’s decoupling of technologically-generated alienation from capitalism in ‘The Obsolescence of Labor’, an important essay for the second volume of Obsolescence, finished in 1977. A key thesis of the text is that the Left cannot assume that a non-alienated social order would necessarily emerge once capitalist relations had been abolished. On the contrary, ‘that the effects of technology must or will change along with (mitverändern) the change in property relations; that the talk of the “humanization of labor” and that of the “overcoming (Aufhebung) of alienation”, so long as we live in a technologized and still technologizing world, consequently definitive, is pure nonsense.’ ⁴⁶ The problems caused by contemporary technology, so run Anders’s argument, should not be subsumed under an anti-capitalist position. In fact, maybe the opposite should be the case because ‘perhaps even economic programs are yet superstructures over “technological requirements’” (Anders, 1980: 107).

Technology, for Anders, engenders its own ‘logic’ and forms of alienation that were not reducible to those of a capitalist social formation. Defeating and removing the capitalist class and socializing or nationalizing industry would not signal, Anders insists, an automatic overcoming of unfreedom. ‘To hope that the…unfreedoms will disappear along with the perhaps eventual end of capitalism would be foolish’, he says, revisiting his commentary from Visit Beautiful Vietnam, ‘since these are, in much higher measure, consequences of technology rather than of property relations’ (Anders, 1980: 108). ⁴⁷ Real social liberation could only come, if at all, so Anders’s argument implies, with a radical transformation of the ‘base’ of modern society, reinterpreted as technological in nature.

In these commentaries, Anders frequently equivocates, however, in his estimate of Marx himself. Two examples are especially noteworthy. In his discussion of the ‘monocratic’ and ‘oligarchical’ dimension of technical development, Anders credits Marx with first having this insight. His argument about this anti-democratic tendency in Technik stands ‘in the closest connection with the assertion by Marx that the machinery of capitalism leads to ever greater power in ever fewer hands’. ⁴⁸ Even here, though, Anders interjects a caveat. Marx’s assertions, at least in the present, are far more applicable ‘above all for technological power’ than for the capitalist system. ⁴⁹

The second quotation is equally instructive. In this passage, written in 1969, a decade after the first, Anders enlists Marx against what he deems to be uncritical attitudes among (unnamed) Marxists with respect to technology. Since ‘Marx made the apparatus and the technology of capitalist society responsible for alienation and proclaimed the self-transformation of a capitalist system into a socialist one’, Anders presents this claim as evidence that Marx, like himself, ‘affirmed dialectical change in technology (dialektischen Umschlag an der Technik bejaht)’ (Anders, 1980: 127). There is much that could be said about these passages, especially the second, self-serving one. What is most important is to show how Anders seems torn about Marx, viewing him as his indispensable predecessor in both statements, but also struggling with how to negotiate the monumental changes emergent since Marx’s time.

We should not rush too quickly, however, through Anders’s depiction of Marxian theory as a critical theory of ‘economy’ and class exploitation. These comments require greater unpacking, not least the distinction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘technological’. By ‘economy’, Anders evidently means the capitalist form of social organization. Within this theoretical framework, Anders’s quite narrow conception of capital encompasses only private property (i.e. private ownership of the productive means), the bourgeoisie’s supremacy over the proletariat, and the market. Indeed, he does not stray far from the traditional Marxist view of the core features of capitalism. ⁵⁰ For Anders, what decisively limits previous Marxist thinking is its blindness to technology’s separation from and subsumption of the economic. By making capitalism the main object of social critique, Marxists elide central and oppressive elements of modernity.

If this were true, class struggle, traditionally conceived, would leave the roots of technological domination untouched. For Anders, the subaltern status of the worker would not end with the resolution of the ownership question. Social critique could no longer exclusively determine the unfreedom of the proletariat according to whether or not it (or its advocates) held title to the productive means. He turns, especially in Volume 2 of Obsolescence, to Marx and the theorization of the proletariat as historical Subject. If measured by the ‘standard of living’, then the number of proletarians had shrunken significantly in the postwar boom. The standard of living of workers should not serve as the measure for the adequacy of the category of ‘proletarian’. The measure should be what he called a ‘freedom standard’. ⁵¹ From the vantage point of the freedom of workers, things look much worse. To the classic socialist definition of exploitation, he affixes, in summary, the following ‘privations’: that the worker ‘does not oversee the whole of the context of production (das Ganze des Produktionszusammenhanges) in which he is integrated’; does not control the ‘end product and its justification’; does not ascertain the ‘moral and immoral qualities of “his” products’; does not know who used or was negatively affected by the product (Anders, 1980: 91). Citing Marx directly, Anders adds, ‘that all these – and therewith also his [the worker’s] own laboring – take place to some extent behind his own back’ (Anders, 1980: 91). Elsewhere, he chooses a different metaphor – that technological processes happen ‘over the heads’ of those involved in production (Anders, 1980: 217).

So where then does the traditional proletariat, once the prime mover in Marxist social theory and revolutionism, stand in Anders’s revision of Marxism? Like many thinkers on the Left, Anders eventually acknowledges, with significant qualifications, the enormous improvements in living standards for workers in the three decades after the Second World War. The once stark difference between blue-collar and white-collar work had disappeared (Anders, 1992: 10). Following, too, from this claim about the universalization of victimhood in technological society, Anders takes the radical step of ascribing alienation to a host of non-proletarian professions. What had held true for those who worked in factories had become, with some few exceptions, valid for everyone who labored. ⁵² To ensure that no one missed the message, Anders enumerates scientific, administrative, as well as mechanized work, as equally subject to the heteronomous division of labor of industrialism. ⁵³ If one had to single out a group most victimized by the industrial system, it would not be the proletariat, Anders contends. ‘Natural scientists’, he says, ‘have become the chief victims in the contemporary production process’. ⁵⁴ Later, returning to this issue, he numbers among the unfree – besides workers, engineers, physicists, inventors, and, stunningly, manufacturers (Fabrikanten) – the owners of the factories – too! (Anders, 1992: 10). Most revealingly, Anders titled one of the last texts published during his lifetime ‘The Obsolescence of the Proletariat’ (Anders, 1992). The class implications of his critique laid out here, while provocative, should evince deep skepticism from Marxists of all stripes.

Anders reaffirms this contention about unfreedom in the second volume of Obsolescence. After 1945, the world-historical conflict between the proletariat and the capitalist class has been superseded by the ‘new oppositional pair technology/humanity (neuen Gegensatzpaar Technik/Menschheit)’, he asserts (Anders, 1980: 297). Extraordinarily, Anders goes on to pronounce that ‘we are all proletarians’ to a world where huge disparities of wealth, an onslaught against trade unions and the welfare state, and mass unemployment had reappeared in the 1970s. ⁵⁵ This stunning passage, with its promotion of a kind of class concord, convinced few on the Left at that time and has not aged well at all.

II

One can see how far Anders travelled toward a post-proletarian, post-Marxist radicalism. Because of its fixation on property relations and class conflict to the exclusion of other forms of oppression, the classical Marxist critique stays extrinsic to the essential, epoch-defining problems caused by contemporary technology. As a result, the categories of Marxism, therefore, risk their own irrelevance if they are not reconfigured to confront technological forms of subjection. A critique of the ‘essence of technology in general’, of ‘machines and apparatuses in general’, Anders seems assured, derived its necessity, its ultimate justification, from this dilemma. ⁵⁶ Without exaggerating their commonality, his criticisms of traditional historical materialism foreshadow some aspects of a host of analyses promulgated by Marxian intellectuals after the dissolution of the New Left. ⁵⁷

Anders’s indictment of the narrowness of Marxism’s social vision does not culminate in a repudiation of Marxist thought, however. He never joins the camp of anti-Marxists nor does he indulge those who wish to consign Marxism to the status of a ‘fossilized holdover from the nineteenth century ready for the museum’ (Anders, 1963: 5). Rather, Anders attempts to move ‘beyond’ the historical limitations of previous Marxism through an expansion and radicalization of historical materialism. ⁵⁸ Surmounting the aporias of Marxist theory thus became a constitutive feature of The Obsolescence of Human Beings.

For Anders, working out the theory of ‘technocracy’ means subjecting the categorial arsenal of Marxism to considerable revision. These revisions reveal so much about the underpinnings of Andersian philosophy and should provoke considerable scrutiny – and counter-arguments – from Marxists. What Ernst Schraube fittingly describes as the ‘crystallization point of Anders’s thinking’, the central idea of the prometheische Gefälle, supplants Marx and Engels’s idea of the primary contradiction in capitalism between forces and relations of production. ⁵⁹ Rapid, ceaseless technological innovation Anders explains, implausibly, not by competition or Marx’s dynamic of absolute and relative surplus-value but by an inherent ‘pressure to expand’ (Expansionsdrang) in machines (see Anders, 1964). The ‘laws of motion’ of capital accumulation give way, in his theory, to the ‘principle’ or ‘tendency’ structuring modern life discovered in the creation of those ‘instruments (Geräte), which through their functioning, we make ourselves superfluous, we exclude ourselves, we “liquidate” ourselves’. ⁶⁰ ‘Liquidation’, Anders would later decide, characterizes modern society better than the venerable Marxist category of ‘reification’ (see Anders, 1980: 55–6).

Instead of class consciousness (or the absence thereof) and ideology critique, mainstays of previous Marxism, Anders investigates new heteronomous subjectivities like ‘Promethean shame’, the ‘mass hermit’, and ‘blindness to apocalypse’, all bound up with the spread and entrenchment of mechanization. ⁶¹ When it comes to praxis, Anders raises the question whether the opportunity still existed to ‘revolutionize this revolution’, meaning the relentless pace of technological revolution, though he is not sanguine about the prospects (Anders, 1980: 31). In reality, he never departs from his earlier pronouncement: ‘we hope with our efforts to “catch up to” (einzuholen) the instrument world – and indeed even to “catch up to” as one “catches up to” a line that has been cast; this means to reel it back (zurückzuholen)’ (Anders, 1956: 274). ⁶² This is truly a striking and objectionable retreat from the old ideal of worldwide workers’ revolution. In its place, Anders promotes a politically far more moderate ethics of industrial production that would aid us in determining ‘where our Yes to technology has to transform into a skepticism or into a blunt No’ (Anders, 1980: 127). Although a sketch, this set of claims grasps the core of what I term the post-Marxism of Anders. It also indicates how evaluations of his critique of modern technology should stress the engagement with Marx more and that with Martin Heidegger less. ⁶³

With the welcome reconstitution of Marxism in the early 21st century, a critical-historical treatment of attempts to overcome the inadequacies of Marxist thought – like that of Günther Anders – is necessary. Anders forcefully advanced arguments about the salience of a critique of production and the labor process and demanded a broadening of the purview of subjection in industrial capitalism. Of course, the alternative to traditional Marxism’s limitations he devised must have much greater investigation and critical response. The ‘rediscovery of Marx’ now underway will only proceed through open, vigorous debate with interlocutors on the Left, such as Anders. ⁶⁴ Marxists can learn much from the questions raised by Anders’s fundamental systemic critique of technology without accepting all of its answers.