Determinism or Voluntarism? Philosophy of Technology between Western and Soviet Marxisms

Communication and media studies, the history and philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, and related fields are structured by a longstanding prohibition on technological determinism. A weapon in the ideological arsenal of the long Cold War, “technological determinism” is an insult originally and most consistently launched from the outside at Marx and Marxism by non-Marxist social theorists who emphasize subjective agency and historical contingency. Just as often, though, this accusatory call is coming from inside the house as well: Many Marxists themselves argue that the theoretical tradition of Western Marxism distinguishes itself from orthodox and Soviet Marxisms through a more sophisticated view of the relationship between technology and society. Soviet Marxists were technological determinists, whereas Western Marxists are not—so the story goes. Attention to technology throughout the history of Marxism, however, challenges such a rigid division, showing that Western Marxists are not consistently anti-determinist and Soviet Marxism was not straightforwardly determinist either in theory or in practice. Historically and today, “technological determinism” is less a genuine theory than the name of a taboo—one that discourages big questions and strong claims about technology, especially by Marxists using the language of historical materialism. Strictly speaking, “technological determinism” names a position that has two tenets: first, that technology is an autonomous sphere that develops in a linearly progressive fashion according to exclusively internal, technical criteria; and second, that technologies-in-use shape their human users and, by extension, determine social and historical change. Having convincingly dismantled the first of these positions, scholars of the social construction of technology generally presume to have rendered the second position untenable as well. The phrase “technological determinism” is thus most often used to chastise too strong, simplistic, or substantive an emphasis on technology as a causal force in the world, from individual behavior to the shape of society or the course of history. A charge first levied in this form against Marx and those in his wake for positing material conditions—whether technological in particular or economic more broadly—as the primary explanans of historical change, technological determinism has been a “founding negation” of the history and philosophy of technology ever since (Peters 2017, 15). These fields are, in other words, structured by their originary prohibition on Marxism. It echoes throughout introductions, textbooks, and anthologies in the philosophy of technology that Marxism is a form of technological determinism, and technological determinism is a fallacy. As the alleged groundspring of this fallacy, Marxism thus has much at stake in the persistence of the taboo on technological determinism (Jameson 1981, 25). Even as Marxism is criticized from the outside, however, Marxists themselves reproduce the taboo on technological determinism. They transpose the mainstream stereotype of Marxism to their ideological opponents by insisting that (the critique of) technological determinism marks an internal division between Western and other Marxisms. Preeminent Marxist philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg, for example, has consistently argued that Western Marxists articulate more sophisticated accounts of technology than the determinism of “traditional Marxism” (1999, 9; 2022, 209). In this account, Marxism is roughly hewn between scientific and critical tendencies emphasizing objective structures and subjective agency, respectively—determinism on the one hand, voluntarism on the other (Gouldner 1980). This schism stems from ambiguities in and disagreements about Marx’s base-and-superstructure model of historical materialism: the idea that the legal, political, cultural, and ideological forms of a society (the superstructure) reflect the manner in which that society (re)produces itself economically (the base). Only minimally developed in his lifetime, the model fell to Marx’s successors to elaborate and clarify. Orthodox and Soviet Marxists followed Engels’s allegedly simplistic popularization of the base-superstructure model, leading them to neglect the subjective element of human practice. Some of these early Marxists argued that socialist revolution and communism would follow inevitably from the objective tendencies of the capitalist mode of production and the development of the forces of production as their prime mover. Revolutions in technology, in other words, would bring revolutions in society—technological determinism, cut and dry. Monika Reinfelder’s introduction to Slater’s Outlines of a Critique of Technology (1980) reflects this conventional wisdom, arguing that an unquestioned “technicism” unites orthodox Marxism from Engels through Kautsky and Plekhanov to Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. By contrast, Western Marxism emerged from attempts to theorize, among other things, the reciprocity and relative autonomy of the superstructure and the economic base. Subsequent debates on the relative primacy, within the base, of the forces of production (machinery, factories, labor-power, etc.) and the relations of production (the division of labor and private property, principally) have attempted to take Western Marxists far away from any simplistic reflection or determination of the superstructure by the economic base. Marxists’ internal critique of “technological determinism” thus appears to be foundational to Western Marxism, having emerged more or less contemporaneously with the mainstream attack mounted against Marxism from the outside. Part and parcel of the similarly pejorative vulgar, the epithet “determinist” was originally attached to the Marxisms of the Second International and the Soviet Union by the principal theorists of what became Western Marxism: Korsch, Lukács, Gramsci, and later Althusser. Detailed studies suggest that Korsch’s germinal critique in Marxism and Philosophy basically hit its mark in the major theorists of the Second International, Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, whose biological and technological determinisms shaped the mechanistic fatalism for which orthodox Marxism has become infamous (Joll [1955] 1974; Colletti 1971; Arato 1973; Gronow 2016). Gramsci and Lukács raised the issue of technology in particular, both criticizing influential Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin’s textbook Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. Gramsci ([1929–1935] 1971) rebuked Bukharin for reducing Marx’s notion of the forces of production to technical instruments alone, smuggling into Marxism a substantive or mechanistic concept of matter and an unhealthy amount of teleology alongside. Earlier, Lukács ([1925] 1966, 29) made a similar argument in language even more familiar to contemporary readers: “Bukharin attributes to technology a far too determinant position, which completely misses the spirit of dialectical materialism.” These fathers of Western Marxism, however, were not consistently anti-determinist themselves. In his critique of Bukharin, Gramsci maintained a substantive philosophy of technology in which the forces of production crystallize capitalist social relations and are an “actual propulsive force” of history (1971, 466). In the same notebook Gramsci even justified the notion of historical necessity as an essential component of Marxism, speculating whether some amount of teleology might be maintained by the philosophy of praxis (410–3, 470–1). As for Lukács, his followers too often forget the second term of his (in)famous formula: the proletariat as the subject-object of history. Lukács’s proletariat does not simply act in and upon history as a subject in-and-for-itself; it is also determined by the objective, reified forms of its own past activity—technology included. The traditions that descend from these fathers of Western Marxism were not consistently anti-determinist either. The major theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, for example, did not shy from claiming that technology shapes human perception, action, and history. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” for instance, accorded a strong causal power to technology; so did his essays on fascism, Paris, and (especially) Baudelaire. To be sure, Benjamin’s relationship to the Institute for Social Research was at times tenuous, but the major figureheads Horkheimer and Adorno also frequently emphasized the domination of individuals by technology as a product and manifestation of instrumental reason. In Minima Moralia, Adorno famously described how technology makes gestures like closing car and refrigerator doors (proto-)fascist by subjecting people to “the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects” ([1951] 2005, 40). His writing on music also frequently accorded a determining role to its media, namely the radio and vinyl records. Both celebrated for its prescience and criticized for its inconsistencies, Marcuse’s work on technology was the most sustained among theorists of the Frankfurt School, but even his democratic program emitted occasional flashes of determinism where he imagines the transformation of technology to transform society as well ([1964] 1991, xlvii, 227). A similar, dialectical reversal of social constructionism into technological determinism can be observed in Italian Marxism’s development of concepts drawn from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” by Panzieri, Tronti, Negri, and Virno. Upon closer investigation, moreover, the original orthodox and Soviet recipients of the “technological determinism” label were not as determinist either in theory or in practice as their critics allege. Rather, Soviet Marxists understood that technology both shapes and is shaped by society. Bukharin, the most frequent target of both Western Marxist and anti-Marxist attacks, described technology as intrinsically social, produced out of human intercourse with nature and comprising not a simple aggregate of devices but a complex, socially mediated system. His determinism, as well, suggested historical conditioning rather than linear causality and seems in places to actually prefigure Western Marxist formulations that emphasize human praxis. Similarly, some papers of the Soviet delegation led by Bukharin to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London (1931) anticipated by nearly fifty years the social constructionism that would later come to prominence in Western science and technology studies. Bukharin, like Kautsky before him, did simplify Marxism for the purpose of popularization, but neither Bukharin nor Kautsky excluded human praxis or ceded historical agency entirely to technology (Nove 1974; Baring 2025, 44). Likewise, Lenin’s pronouncement in 1920 that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” (1966, 419) and his admiration for Taylorism are widely reported, but they arguably expressed determinism and voluntarism in equal parts. Even Stalin, who in 1931 famously declared that “technique decides everything,” took care in the same speech to emphasize subjective factors as much as objective forces (1954, 43). To reflect this, the slogan was soon replaced with a new one: “Cadres decide everything” ([1935] 1978, 76). Thus Rubinstein’s rather technical report to the International Congress in London on the progress of the GOELRO campaign of electrification, which Lenin’s slogan inaugurated and Stalin’s urged along, was optimistic (propagandistically triumphant, even) but simultaneously warned against simply reproducing capitalist technology. Rather than indulge a simplistic belief in technological determinism, Soviet and other non-Western Marxists debated the necessity and possibility of developing wholly new technology as the foundation of new forms of communist work and culture. Indeed, scholars of the Soviet Union have consistently shown that Soviet Marxists did not passively anticipate the democratization of technology as an inevitable result of socialist industrialization. Far from dogmatic supporters of state socialism, those associated with the Planning Group on Comparative Communist Studies (1965–1975) of the American Council of Learned Societies, for instance, produced a number of empirical studies demonstrating that Soviet Marxism was not always, if ever, a simplistic technological determinism (Erlich [1960] 1967; Amann et al. 1977; Fleron, Jr. 1977; Bailes 1978; Amann and Cooper 1982; Parrott 1985). On the contrary: Soviet Marxists treated technology as a site of active social transformation by instituting a system of rationalization proposals, unique legislation concerning inventions and intellectual property, a network of organizations and agencies for ensuring social control over technology’s development and implementation, and the promotion of mass technical creativity (Balz 1975; Lee 1982; Kirsanova 2024). The abundance of evidence to the contrary makes it all the more surprising therefore that historians and philosophers of technology—let alone Marxists themselves—continue to perpetuate the determinist stereotype of Soviet Marxism. Increasingly strained by the manifest power of “Big Tech,” though, the taboo on technological determinism, if not the stereotype of Marxism, seems to be weakening today. Immanent critiques of social constructionism have shown that the taboo on determinism has prevented scholars from treating expert and non-expert knowledge of technology symmetrically (Wyatt 2008; Edgerton 2010); at worst, it forecloses critical reflection on one of the most significant conditions of possibility of our modern world (Peters 2017). Simply put: everyday experience attests to technology’s causal power in our lives, from the direct effects that devices have on our bodies and minds to more complexly mediated phenomena like stock and job markets, but the taboo on technological determinism has handcuffed scholars into rejecting the reality of this appearance. The social construction of technology, in other words, mistakes dereification in theory for dereification in practice. To be sure, technologies are products of historically contingent social choices, but we rarely if ever encounter transparently malleable assemblages. Instead, our world is populated with opaque technical objects by which we are compelled to work and live in particular ways. Burgeoning projects of critical infrastructure studies, German media theory, environmental media studies, media archaeology, and other new materialisms are therefore rebalancing the equation between the social shaping of technology and the technical shaping of society. Conditions seem ripe within contemporary Marxisms, as well, for reconsidering the taboo on technological determinism. Though Marxist scholars of technology have generally resisted the incursions of competing materialisms, some have attempted to reconcile Marxist materialism with myriad others, including even the recuperation of Engels’s much-maligned Dialectics of Nature. Recent interventions in Marxist value-form theory have contributed to a surge of interest in compulsion, too (Bonefeld 2023; Mau 2023; Best 2024; Johnston 2024; Fridell 2026). Finally, a growing literature on Soviet philosophy is beginning to destabilize the rigid boundary between Western and other Marxisms. In this context, perhaps it is worth returning to the rare handful of scholars who have offered qualified defenses of technological determinism within a Marxist idiom (Heilbroner 1967; Winner 1977; Cohen [1978] 2001; Shaw 1978) and to the theoretical and empirical resources for such a defense throughout Western and other Marxisms alike. Lifting the taboo on technological determinism, however, does not immediately provide any conceptual resolutions but only returns the philosophy of technology to fundamental questions that the taboo’s shadow has obscured: the nature of materialism, reification, and historical causality. In this new light, the dialectic of technological determinism and social constructionism is not a theoretical antinomy but a real contradiction that subtends the capitalist mode of production insofar as the latter is ruled by alienation, fetishism, and the value-form. If that is the case, then Marxism, a theoretical tradition that abjures both simple determinism and wishful paeans to social agency, remains a vital resource for addressing the problems so urgently posed to us by technology today. This essay is part of a JHI Blog forum, “The Conceptual History of Technology.” D. W. Kamish is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Working in critical theory and the history and philosophy of technology, their dissertation concerns technological determinism within and across Western and Soviet Marxisms. Their research on the Black Panther Party has been published in the Journal of African American Studies and is forthcoming in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Edited by Daniel Judt, Jonas Knatz, and Zac Endter Featured image: Stamp produced to celebrate the fourtieth anniversary of the GOELRO plan for the electrification of the USSR, 1961. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.