Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

Marx & Proudhon in the Digital Age

gjy680

1 Introduction

Since the production of IBM’s 701 Mainframe in 1952, featuring just 4,096 36bit binary words,

modern society has become increasingly reliant on digital systems and their information

processing capacity. Indeed, many of a society’s primary functions, including its political, social

and economic mechanisms, are totally reliant on mass digitisation. Although computers have

penetrated into nearly all aspects of our lives, many futurists opine that digitisation is just getting

started. If this premise is correct, then the full impact of mass digitisation has not yet been

realised. In my view, digitisation is causing a tectonic’ shift how our society functions, but this

shift is somewhat opaque because of our focus on short-term issues.

In this regard, our burgeoning digital age has many parallels with the Industrial Revolution and its

spawning of radical social, political and economic theories from the 1840s to 1870s. These

decades witnessed a myriad of theorists attempting to reshape society to account for effects

of industrialisation. This essay investigates the ‘fierce’ debate between two Industrial Age

philosophers, namely Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The theoretical contest between

Marx and Proudhon was wide-ranging on topics such as the distinction between use and

exchange values, the existence of synthetic value, and the value of human labour. This essay

focuses on one aspect of the theoretical contest, namely: the capability of machines to perform

labour and generate value in the same ways as humans. More specifically, I am investigating the

question of the extent to which Marx’s theory of labour-value exchange will be superseded by

Proudhon’s philosophy, given the dynamics of the digital age. My methodology is to evaluate the

differing theories proposed by Marx and Proudhon in a digitised society, as represented by a

number of case studies. Ultimately, I conclude that Proudhon’s idea of machinery as a force for

liberation is more applicable to a digitised world than it was to industrial-era machinery.

4