Marx's notebooks on the history of technology
Encyclopedia
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 wrote a number of notebooks on the history of technology
History of technology
The history of technology is the history of the invention of tools and techniques, and is similar in many ways to the history of humanity. Background knowledge has enabled people to create new things, and conversely, many scientific endeavors have become possible through technologies which assist...

. Their whereabouts were not known but in the past they were read and discussed by Marxist writers. Dr Amy Wendling's recent study "Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation" may have had access to them.

György Lukács studied these notebooks while they existed in the archives in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, and appears to refer to them in a 1925 article later published in English translation in the New Left Review
New Left Review
New Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...

, no. 39, September/October 1966 criticizing what he saw as Bukharin's undue technicism.

Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...

 lists Marx's collection of material on technology as one of Marx's "specialisms" in correspondence outlining their mutual division of intellectual labour.

Marx directly refers to the notebooks in his letter to Engels of January 28, 1863 where he says
… I have re-read my notebooks (extracts) on technology, and am attending a practical (only experimental) course for workers on the same by Professor Willis (in Jermyn Street, the Institute for Geology, where Huxley also gave his lectures)… While re-reading the technological-historical excerpts, I came to the conclusion that , apart from the invention of gun-powder, the compass and printing - these necessary pre-requisites for bourgeois development - from the 16th to the mid-18th centuries, i.e. the period of the development of manufacture from craftsmanship until really large-scale industry, the two material foundations on which were based the preparations for mechanised industry within manufacturing were the clock and the mill …


Across his writing Marx makes frequent reference to his interest in technological developments, and these mentions are complemented by generic statements such as the need for a critical history of technology in the major footnote at the beginning of the chapter on "Machinery and Large Scale Industry" in Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...

.

Nathan Rosenberg
Nathan Rosenberg
Nathan Rosenberg is an American economist specializing in the history of technology. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1955, and has taught at Indiana University , the University of Pennsylvania , Purdue University , Harvard University , the University of...

wrote an essay on "Marx as a student of technology" published in his Inside the Black Box.
see also Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation by Amy E. Wendling 2009
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