Karl Marx

Marx's treatment of technology in Capital, particularly in the long chapter on machinery and large-scale industry, resists any reading of technical change as a neutral, self-propelling process. For Marx, the machine is not simply a tool; it is a crystallized form of social labor — dead labor that confronts the living worker as a power external to and over them. The origin of a technology, in this framework, cannot be separated from the question of who owns it, who benefits from its deployment, and what social configuration its adoption presupposes. The spinning jenny did not arise from an abstract problem in fiber mechanics; it arose from the structural pressure of capital to displace expensive skilled labor.

This does not mean Marx denies the power of technology; on the contrary, he treats the development of the productive forces as the motor of history. But the means of production are always also relations of production. A loom is not merely a mechanism for weaving; it is a node in a system of ownership, contract, and coercion. Marx's lasting contribution to the question of technology's origins is the insistence that technical and social change are mutually constitutive: each new force of production reorganizes the social relations around it, and each new social configuration calls forth and shapes new forces of production. Technology does not come from engineering alone; it comes from the entire structure of political economy in which engineering is embedded.