That Benjamin approached the symptomatic significance of the ‘crisis of the arts’ for the ‘crisis of experience’ through the concept of Technik attests to the fundamentally Marxist character of his conception of historical development. It is the development of the forces of production that is the motor of history. However, Benjamin was no more orthodox a Marxist about technology than he was with regard to the concept of progress, the Marxist version of which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) grounded upon it (see Section 8, below). Not only did he recognize the potential for a “bloodbath” in a technology subjected to “the lust for profit” (SW  1, 487)—amply demonstrated in the horrors of the First World War—but he came to distinguish between a ‘first’ and a ‘second’, potentially liberatory technology, the latter making possible “a highly productive use of the human being’s self-alienation” (SW 3, 107; 113). It appears, in places, as the basis for a kind of ‘technological cosmopolitics’ or politics of a ‘new collective technoid body’ (Caygill 2005, 225; Leslie 2000, 153, in Osborne 2005, II: 391).