Karl Marx is often portrayed as an advocate of technological progress — with mechanization as the necessary path to socialism. Prof. Gavin Mueller of the University of Amsterdam argues that reading flattens Marx's ideas. In Part 2 of this three-part conversation, Mueller finds Marx's own writing on machinery far less deterministic than the "orthodox" Marxism that followed him: alongside the stagist logic of historical materialism sits the dark language of Capital, where machines leave workers "crushed" and "degraded," reduced to "appendages of the machine." Mueller traces how that ambivalence hardened into certainty in Karl Kautsky's "orthodox" Marxism, and remained a current running through the English designer William Morris. The same question — does technology serve human ends, or just reshape them — resurfaces in Frederick Taylor's scientific management, the Technocracy Movement, and Norbert Wiener's unheeded warning to organized labor.

Overview

Episode 18 continues the three-part conversation with Prof. Gavin Mueller, moving from the Luddites of Part 1 into the political theory that followed in their wake. Mueller traces Karl Marx's own ambivalence toward machinery — real intellectual curiosity paired with the dark language of Capital — and the resulting split between Karl Kautsky's "orthodox" Marxism, which read capitalist technological development as an inevitable path to socialism, and a more "heterodox" tradition, exemplified by William Morris, rooted in shop-floor experience and working-class autonomy. The conversation turns to Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose "scientific management" Mueller frames as a theory of control developed before it needed any specific machine at all, then to the Technocracy Movement's short-lived vision of engineer-led economic rule, and finally to Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, including his 1949 letter warning UAW president Walter Reuther that automation threatened organized labor. The episode closes by tracing that warning into the 1960s, when automation's disproportionate impact on Black workers became a live civil rights question.

Key Moments from the Conversation

1. "Crushed... Appendages of the Machine"

Mueller describes an unresolved tension in Marx's own writing: the stagist model in which capitalist technology develops the productive base socialism requires, set against the passages in Capital where machinery leaves workers "trapped and degraded and crushed," reduced to appendages of the machine. Mueller also points to Marx's personal fascination with new technology — he diagrammed steam engines and pressed Engels, then managing a factory, for firsthand detail — arguing that the common "technological determinist" reading of Marx oversimplifies a much more mixed position.

2. Orthodox and Heterodox Marxism

Mueller traces "orthodox" Marxism to Karl Kautsky and the German Social Democratic Party. Against this, Mueller traces a "heterodox" current through figures like William Morris, who read Capital in French translation in the 1890s largely outside any party program, and stayed closer to shop-floor militancy and working-class autonomy.

3. Taylorism as a Theory of Control, Not Machines

Mueller's account of Frederick Winslow Taylor is stated as follows: scientific management was, above all, a system for separating the knowledge of production from its execution — taking know-how away from skilled workers and placing it with management — developed before it was ever attached to any specific machine. Taylor's own biography, Mueller notes, was defined by this obsession with control rather than sympathy for either workers or the technologies later associated with his name.

4. Wiener's Warning and the Road to Civil Rights

Mueller traces cybernetics back to Norbert Wiener's WWII-era work on self-correcting feedback systems, and to his letter warning UAW president Walter Reuther that automation could bring "disastrous" unemployment to organized labor. Mueller follows that thread into the 1960s, when civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were tracking what they called "cybernation" and its disproportionate threat to Black industrial employment.

Guest Spotlight

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he also teaches Marxist Theory for the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Instituut. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is a Contributing Editor at Jacobin and a member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021), the book at the center of this three-part conversation, and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019).

For Further Reading

Primary Sources

Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021) — the book at the center of this three-part conversation.

Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Harper & Brothers, [1911] 1913).

Norbert Wiener, Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther, August 13, 1949 (available at libcom.org).

A.B. Spellman, "Interview with Malcolm X," Monthly Review 16:1 (May 1964).

Further Context

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1974).

Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Charles H. Kerr & Co., [1892] 1910).

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1965).

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (Basic Books, 1995).

Questions to Consider Based on This Episode

Marx's own writing on machinery was more ambivalent than the "technological determinist" reading that came to dominate the workers' movement he inspired. How does that change a more contemporary understanding of his ideas on technology and mechanization?

Taylor's system worked by separating knowledge of the production process from its execution — how has that same separation manifested today?

Norbert Wiener tried to warn organized labor about automation in 1949. Given the current discourse on robotics and AI, was he well ahead of his time?

Connection to Notions of Progress

Notions of Progress exists to surface the debates embedded in the word "progress," not resolve them. This installment traces that debate into the twentieth century's own struggle over the same question the Luddites raised: does mechanization serve those it displaces, or only the interests that deploy it? Mueller's account — moving from Marx's own unresolved ambivalence through Kautsky's determinism, Taylor's theory of control, and Wiener's unheeded warning to organized labor — keeps that argument open rather than resolving it in either direction. Part 3 carries the same question into the present, from Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism to today's debates over artificial intelligence.

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Website — notionsofprogress.com

Email: marshall@notionsofprogress.com