Ellul's Critique of Marx

One of the bigger secondary themes of The Technological Society is Jacques Ellul’s repeated insistence that, under the reign of technique, all sorts of historical ironies emerge, the most typical being “Someone sets out to remedy something bad; instead, they make it worse.” That’s an argument with instant appeal for me, of course.

Among the various historical examples of this phenomenon that Ellul provides, the one that sticks out most to me is that of Karl Marx. I’ve long maintained that Marx is one of the most misunderstood figures in history, as much by his supposed admirers as by his rabid detractors. Of course, I have a rather esoteric reading of Marx, due largely to the influence of my oddball undergraduate thesis advisor. On my reading Marx is, in the end, an agrarian dreamer. The life he imagines is one where workers man the factory in the morning, then spend the afternoon fishing, exploring nature, and other forms of rural lollygagging. It’s not unlike the future proposed by guild socialist William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere.

Under this reading of Marx, Ellul’s critique of him gets shot through with tragic irony. The kernel of the critique is as follows: Marx sought the freedom of workers, but insisted that this freedom could come only through the vast productive powers of technique, the machine, etc. In the end, whatever economic gains might be made through this method of technique get overwhelmed by the sheer limiting logic of technique. In other words, Marx seeks freedom from a source that can only enslave.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Ellul sees this nascent strain of tech-submission in Marx’s original writings play out in the nations that followed in Marx’s footsteps. What I love about Ellul is his ability to penetrate beneath the easily-surveyed surface to the underbelly of society, and that ability shows itself here in his dismissal of the cursory differences between communist and capitalist regimes in the post-war period in favor of recognizing their fundamental point of unity: an ever growing dependence on, and willing subordination to, technique.

Pulling back a bit, it makes sense to think of Ellul’s general critiques as clustering around the idea that means matter as much as ends, sometimes. Think of it like a diet. Even if the goal of losing weight is important for a given individual, certain ways of getting there might not be worth it (who can forget the Atkins craze of the mid-aughts?). In the same way, certain noble goals, like freeing the workers from their exploitation, cannot be pursued in ways that ultimately lead to a further exploitation by technique itself. We see this dynamic still heartily at play today, unfortunately. Feel free to pick your favorite example. Regardless of what you have in mind, we should be humbled to remember that enacting real, just social change is always harder than it appears, and should remain on guard against solutions that will, in the end, be worse than the problems they remedy.