“…it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture…” Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845 During the 1960s, publications from across all academic disciplines in the USSR and its satellite countries were making frequent reference to the ‘scientific-technological revolution’. Not only had science and technology become a primary means of demonstrating the successes of the socialist system on the international stage of the Cold War, but they were becoming inscribed as ‘force of production’ that could be utilized in the process of achieving a true communist society. This paper will draw from archival papers, academic publications, propaganda literature and CIA intelligence reports to explore how the concept of the scientific technological revolution was used by senior Communist Party officials and academics in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and ‘70s, as a means to update and reinterpret Marxist theory for the modern age. The term ‘Scientific-Technical Revolution’ was first coined by the British Marxist scientist J.D. Bernal in his 1957 edition of Science in History to describe a perceived second scientific revolution in the first half of the twentieth century, with the ‘discovery of the nuclear atom, relativity, and the quantum theory, as well as the processes of bio-chemistry and the inner structure of the cell, the electron microscope, and the electronic computing machine’. The use of these new fields, along with further innovation in science and technology, could act as an engine for historical change that could transform and liberate humanity. Such arguments were taken up enthusiastically by the scientific communities of Czechoslovakia and East Germany in particular, as a means of furthering their professional interests. Senior Party members also became involved in such debates; with rifts beginning to appear in both countries within the Party over how best to achieve a true Communist society. Those who remained in the Marxist-Leninist tradition as advocated under Stalin favoured a transformation of society through through propaganda and education, with the Party essentially being responsible for producing socialist subjectivity by ideological means. In contrast, those influenced by the concept of the scientific-technical revolution advocated a focus on scientific research and industrial investment as the method through which to change the historical conditions in order to bring about a socialist liberation of humanity, drawing specifically on Marx’s German Ideology. Central to this thesis was what CIA intelligence reports termed ‘Cybernetic Revisionism’. My paper demonstrates how concepts from cybernetics came to be used by Walter Ulbricht’s Party elite in the GDR, as well as by reformists in Czechoslovakia, as a solution to the social and economic problems facing both countries by the end of the 1960s. I will discuss how cybernetic concepts of self-regulation and feedback loops were appropriated by advocates of economic reforms who were dissatisfied with the performance of the centralised planned economy. By inscribing decentralisation measures in terms of the application of technology and increasing workers’ participation in the process of production, Party members were able to challenge the doctrine of centralisation whilst still maintaining a commitment to a socialist planned economy. I will also examine the increasingly utopian visions of a socialist future conjured by the possibilities of computer technologies and automatization, whereby workers would be liberated from manual work and thus enabled to fulfil their ‘human potential’ in more intellectual and scientific pursuits. In conclusion, I argue that such ‘cybernetic revisionism’ was crucial to understanding the history of Central and East European socialism in the 1960s, and played an often overlooked but fundamental role in the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968.