I apologize for being such a quota-buster today, but this is a very tricky issue. "Technique," as I've used it in the Ellul-ian sense, embraces all the Marxist categories Charles referred to, to some degree.
In a 1982 article on Ellul in the journal "democracy" John H. Schaar noted:
"Now, our 'technology' is narrower than Ellul's 'la technique.' Within technique Ellul of course includes machinery, tools, physical apparatus -- our technology. But technique is generally 'the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity.' Technique thus includes those activities that can be accomplished by purposive, rational, transmissible, repetitive means. It also includes those social formations and processes that are deliberately designed as means to specified ends: bureaucracies, mass production systems, corporations, propaganda and mass communications, police, vocational education, and so forth.
"All societies, of course, use tools and deliberate methods. The technological societies are those in which the technical element predominates, determining or conditioning all other aspects of life. In pretechnological societies the technical element was limited and woven into the entire social fabric. It was truly 'appropriate technology,' framed within customary, religious, moral, and esthetic standards and practices. The purely technical, instrumental element might remain almost unchanged for generations, even centuries. In the technological societies, the technical element is disembedded, set free from social constraints and allowed to proliferate by its own dynamic. In the pretechnological era, society and nature were milieu; in the technological era, technique is milieu.
"Technique is our environment, the sea we swim in. We, of course, are its creators but we are also its creatures. For most of us in the 'developed' societies the technical system sets the rhythms and provides the substance of our lives at work and home, as producers and consumers. It filters our communications and shapes most of our symbolic activities. It constitutes most of our sense of what is possible, necessary, and even real. It provides the stuff of our hopes and fears, even as it provides our daily bread. As we move farther away from tradition and religion, from the bonds of locale and ethnic group, and from the treasury of humane values, our standards of judgment and moral appraisal themselves come to be drawn from within the technical system: nothing ranks higher on our actual scale of values than productivity, precision, power, method, prediction, control. Far from assessing the technological order from a standpoint outside it, we reproduce its own values in ourselves. Genuine alternatives diminish."
Carl Remick