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Thesis ID: CBB001561465

On Alienation and Machine Production: Capitalist Embodiment in Karl Marx (2006)

Pennsylvania State University
Conway, Daniel W.
Publication date: 2006
Language: English

Publication Date: 2006
Edition Details: Advisor: Conway, Daniel W.
Physical Details: 294 pp.

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My dissertation explores Karl Marx's concern with science and technology. For Marx, technology exemplifies the interaction between human beings and nature. My central insight is that Marx's description of this interaction is in transition throughout his works. An older, humanist and vitalist paradigm, exemplified by Hegel and Locke, sets the human being over against nature as a qualitatively different type of force. A newer, thermodynamic paradigm, exemplified by the scientific materialists, sets the human being and nature in continuity. Marx's work occurs at the juncture of these paradigms, containing elements of both. This affects his deployment of the concepts of "labor," and "revolution," both of which undergo modifications as a consequence of Marx's partial adoption of thermodynamic language and metaphysics. Labor is demoted from its status as a meaningful human activity that confers political status and mastery of the natural word. Labor becomes merely a nodal point where energy is transferred. Against this backdrop, Marx increasingly appeals not to meaningful labor but to labor's abolition as the culmination of human freedom. In a conceptual slide equally indebted to Marx's situation between the two paradigms, revolution changes from an agent-based political movement to a system-wide structural inevitability. In conclusion, I discuss the aftermath of the tensions in Marx's account of technology, with special attention to the problems of instrumental/technological reason and free time. The chapter concludes by assessing Marx's impact on 20th century theory, focusing especially on Donna Haraway, Herbert Marcuse, and Martin Heidegger.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/08 (2007). UMI pub. no. 3229345.

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