Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-239) and index.

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement : on Marx's Hegelian inheritance -- Other origins of "alienation" and "objectification" -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics : Kraft, Stoff, and the discourse of energetics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft : Marx's transformation of work from self-actualization to energy expenditure -- The second law of thermodynamics : entropy, the heat death of the universe, and revolution -- Machines in the communist future -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's "fragment on machines" -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the capitalist logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital : the symbiosis of human and machine in the production of material wealth -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching Capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage : the speed of production in the Economic manuscripts of 1861-1863 -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory.