When I was an undergraduate, modernity was everything we were taught to despise: totalizing, technocratic, rationalizing. It was the impersonal force that organized Africa into colonies and the motor behind the mechanized doom of fascism. As Theodor Adorno wrote, the logic of modernity ends in a death camp, or the mathematics of a strategic bombing campaign — in human beings becoming abstract numbers in a computerized death count.

Marxism itself is not immune from these kinds of critiques. As writers in the Frankfurt School maintained, our problem in advanced industrial societies is to be treated as an instrument, a thing — a problem as deeply felt in the Soviet Union as the United States. As Russell Means, one of the founders of the American Indian Movement, commented, Marxism is just another word for rendering people into resources.

Indeed, much of the justification for modernity by even Marxist economists is that for all its brutality, modernity makes production more efficient and thus affords us the possibility of plenty. Yet, these critics charge, the processes that make us free enslave us as inputs to the very machines that were supposed to free us. One person’s utopia of material plenty is dependent upon another’s swing shift at the factory.