The Dialectic of Labor and the Limits of Technological Growth

This chapter analyzes Marx’s conception of labor in the framework of his anthropocentric ontology. The fundamental problem of his alleged ‘inversion’ of Hegel is the inconsistency between the circular pattern of the self-referential dialectic of labor with an assumption of infinite technological progress and open-ended history. To further explicate this problem, we briefly discuss an alternative nineteenth-century approach to technological evolution by the organ projection theory, where, by contrast with Marx’s speculative dialectic, the methodological principles of Feuerbach and Kant are substantiated by archeological, anthropological, and philological data. In the second part of this chapter, we proceed ‘beyond Marx’ and discuss the early twentieth-century developments in orthodox and revisionist Marxism. We conclude with an examination of an unorthodox interpretation of Marx by the Russian Marxist and philosopher A. Bogdanov. In his original synthesis of empiriocriticism and Marxism, the materialist dialectic is construed in the framework of the general theory of organization, viewed by some as an early precursor of cybernetics and general systems theory.