Maximilian Pieper’s contrast between the ‘Extension’ and ‘Fetish’ concepts provides a crucial framework for contemporary philosophy of technology. While insightfully identifying ‘functional simplification’ as a shared operational principle, his analysis requires rigorous political-economic grounding. From a Marxist perspective, functional simplification is not a neutral, ahistorical technological feature, but the concrete material modus operandi of the capitalist mode of production. This paper conducts a political economy of this simplification, tracing its dual aspects to specific historical-material roots. First, the simplification of social causality directly expresses the logic of abstract labor and ecologically unequal exchange, systematically driven by the global law of value. Second, the simplification of physical causality constitutes a deliberate strategy within the labor process, marking the real subsumption of labor through a dialectic of mass de-skilling and intellectual up-skilling. Historicizing functional simplification unveils the technological fetish as the materialization of capital’s social relations. Furthermore, this critique exposes an immanent contradiction: the same technological development perfecting capital’s domination through the General Intellect simultaneously creates material conditions to supersede capital’s law of value. Ultimately, this Marxist critique moves beyond descriptive ontology to a political analysis, linking the unveiling of the fetish to the concrete possibility of technological emancipation.
Zhimin Bi (Mon,) studied this question.