In 1976, the shop stewards at the British Lucas Aerospace Corporation published a document that would come to be known as “The Lucas Plan.” The company was planning to lay off a significant number of workers as part of a restructuring effort. Faced with the prospect of losing their livelihood, many of these workers banded together to propose an alternative: that the British government should intervene to prevent layoffs so that the workers could redeploy the productive assets of the company towards socially useful ends rather than military contracting.

Subjecting engineering to Marxist analysis yields complex results.