For a Cyborg Marxism

Donna Haraway, an (Unfaithful) Heir to Marxism

Abstract

This article investigates the influences of Marxism on Donna Haraway’s epistemological project, focusing on her early work from the 1980s, particularly A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and Situated Knowledges (1988). The analysis is based on a cross-reading of the young Marx’s work Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and the foundational texts of the “young Haraway,” mediated by the interpretations of Michael Löwy. The article advances the thesis that Haraway operates as an “unfaithful heir” to the Marxist tradition, insofar as she absorbs its critical, materialist, and transformative impulse and then radically reconfigures it in light of feminism and the technologies of late capitalism. The argumentative trajectory is organized around three axes: (i) the radicalization of the critique of humanism, in which the figure of the cyborg replaces redemptive teleology with an ontology of hybridity; (ii) the Foucauldian influence on the analysis of power, which leads to the formulation of “cyborg materialism” and the concept of the “informatics of domination”; and (iii) the reconfiguration of the notion of praxis as a situated epistemology, in which the act of knowing is affirmed as a form of political intervention. The article concludes that Haraway forges a “cyborg Marxism”: not a map for revolution, but a theoretical toolbox — drawn primarily from her figures and metaphors — aimed at building partial alliances and responsible interventions within technoscientific capitalism.