Abstract: As a classic theory to explain the causes of technological tailspin, Collingridge's dilemmatic proposition has been debated in the field of technology assessment for more than 40 years. Previous studies mainly weighed details within the framework of this proposition, and rarely realized that since Collingridge presupposed the western economic structure as a logical premise without reflection, he could only abstractively infer the difficulty of feedforward control and feedback control of technologies on the superficial level of properties of artifacts, overlooking the decisive reaction of capitalist production relations on technologies embedded in them. From the perspective of the Marxist political economy, the capitalist production relations contain irreconcilable publicprivate contradictions, which will repeatedly promote the emergence and spread of technologies that yield public hazards but benefit private interests. The solution to Collingridge's dilemmatic proposition is not to elaborate on design indicators, but to limit capital:popularizing maker education in the session of feedforward control together with reforming Coase's theorem of property; meanwhile, separating incumbent firms that abuse market power horizontally or vertically in the session of feedback control according to the antimonopoly law, so as to activate vertical innovations to eliminate technical maladies.

Key words: Collingridge's dilemmatic proposition; social control of technology; production relation; capital limiting