what is technical necessity?(karl Marx, microeconomics)?

Answer 1

From Munson:
Munson says: "By building the morale of the troops, we are trying to increase their yield, to substitute enthusiastic self-discipline for forced obedience, to stimulate their will and their attention - in short, we are pursuing success." There he gives us the key to the kind of psychological action: the yield is greater when man acts from consent, rather than constraint. The problem then is to get the individual's consent artificially through depth psychology, since he will not give it of his own free will. But the decision to give consent must appear to be spontaneous. Anyone who prates about furnishing man an ideal or a faith to live by is helping to bring about technique's ascendancy, however much he talks about "good will." The "ideal" becomes so through the agency of purely technical means whose purpose is to enable men to support an insupportable situation created within the framework of technical culture. This attitude is not the antithesis of the humanistic attitude; the two are interwoven and it is completely artificial to try to separate them.

Human activity in the technical milieu must correspond to this milieu and also must be collective. It must belong to the order of the conditioned reflex. Complete human discipline must respond to technical necessity. And as the technical milieu concerns all men, no mere handful of them but the totality of society is to be conditioned in this way. The reflex must be a collective one. As Munson says "In peacetime, morale building aims at creating among the troops the state of mental receptivity which makes them susceptible to every psychological excitation of wartime." And this "receptivity" must also be installed in every other human group in the technical culture, and especially in the masses of the workers.

Psychological conditioning presupposes collectivity, for masses of men are more receptive to suggestion than individuals, and, as we have seen, suggestion is one of the most important weapons in the psychological arsenal. At the same time, the masses are intolerant and think everything must be black or white. This results from the moral categories imposed by technique and is possible only if the masses are of a single mind and if countercurrents are not permitted to form.

Answer 2

"Technical necessity" refers to the way in which divisions of labor are necessary or efficient for concrete, objective reasons. The opposite is "social necessity", which refers to the ways in which division of labor is determined by the politics of class, gender, race, nationality, and so on. At the risk of oversimplifying: technical necessity determines that certain jobs need to be done, while social necessity determines which people specialize in which jobs.

If that's confusing, think about this example: some people need to take care of children during the day so other adults can do other forms of work. This is usually a technical necessity--you simply can't do most jobs very well if you are trying to take care of your kids at the same time. But why have woman traditionally taken care of the kids, while men are at the factory or whatever? Maybe with kids who are still breastfeeding, that is technical necessity, but afterward, its purely a matter of social necessity.