Technical and technological innovation in Marx

Johann Beckmann (1739-1811) and Modern Chemical Technology

“…In pioneering countries of the Industrial Revolution, like France and Great Britain, empiricism alone lead to satisfactory results with respect of quality and costs of products obtained, and theoretical concerns, as expressed by Beckmann, seemed to be irrelevant. As Frison observes, the notions of "technique" and "technology" are absent from the works of Adam Smith (1723-1790) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): terms like 'art', 'trade', industry', 'manufacture' are found instead [53] . In fact, as Ruy Gama observes, Beckmann does not exist in French or British technological literature, he is not cited in the monumental "History of Technology" by Charles Singer (1876-1960), or in the famous article about mills, which Marc Bloch (1886-1944) published in 1935 in the Annales.…”

Linnaeus, Beckmann, Marx and the foundation of technology. Between natural and social sciences: A hypothesis of an ideal type

“…Beckmann introduced innovation as a possibility offered by the knowledge acquired THE FOUNDATION OF TECHNOLOGY 169 by Technologie, while Marx, instead, treated economic change within his production theory and established a differentiation, which is almost impossible to translate into English, between technical change and technological change. Technical change relates to changes in what Marx defined as the technical basis, that is the relationships between labour-power and the intervening means of labour, and the technological change is connected to innovations in the means of labour (Frison, 1988). The difference between Marx and Beckmann lies in the fact that the former distinguished and separated sociological facts from technological ones, while the latter simply ignored the existence of sociological phenomena in production.…”

“…The sociological side of the labour-process can be subdivided into technical facts (sociological relations between labour-power and means of labour = prescriptions of use related to means of labour) and organizing facts (relations worker-worker, see Frison, 1988). In Marx's opinion, the wish to accumulate and the spirit of competition push the entrepreneur to innovation, that is to: "an alteration in the labour-process of such a kind as to shorten the labour-time socially necessary for the production of a commodity and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use-value" (ibidem, :298).…”

Der ökonomische Determinismus – neu betrachtet

“…Ausgeklam-mert wird der technologische Reduktionismus, da er -entgegen anderslautender Gerüchte -bei Marx und Engels nicht zu finden ist (Bimber 1990;Frison 1988;Llobera 1979;McKenzie 1984;Rosenberg 1976 Das Vorwort wurde eilig geschrieben und so formuliert, dass es keine Probleme mit der Zensur geben sollte . An wichtigen Punkten ist der Text mehrdeutig und etwas dunkel .…”