The Marxist critique of commodity fetishism - the misrecognition of the power of people as the power of objects - has formed a central plank of its criticism of unequal power relations in capitalist society. Rejecting this project and its humanist roots, Bruno Latour and other new materialists have asserted that objects are agents (‘actants’) that exercise political power themselves. While an interesting set of intellectual provocations, the conception of power Latour employs is flawed. The Latourian approach lacks an adequate conception of history as a process in constant motion, resulting in a static conception of power. Engaging the dialectics of power, this paper will examine the intergenerational attribution of power and responsibility via Marx’s concept of dead labour. Dead labour, it is argued, heightens analytical attention to objects while retaining political focus on the key institutions of technological design - private property and the state.
