An aside from the article's subject, but where I thought it was going from the title is another way in which many people (esp. technologists) are Marxist in a s

An aside from the article's subject, but where I thought it was going from the title is another way in which many people (esp. technologists) are Marxist in a sense: methodologically viewing society and history as constructed in large part through the interplay of material 'systems', like technologies, the natural world, trade patterns, etc. It's since become a common enough view that it's no longer exclusively Marxist, but it was one of the big departures of Marxist historiography from classic historiographies (aristocratic ones, romantic-nationalist ones, etc.), which focused on the role of people and culture, especially leaders (and other Great Men) and nations, in shaping history. The idea that you could explain things about how a society is organized by investigating the development of steel mills, tracing money flows, and looking at employment relationships (the "base"), rather than only looking at what happens in a society's parliament or culture (the "superstructure"), was pretty unusual.