Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

Marx & Proudhon in the Digital Age

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In the ‘labour-value-machinery’ debate, Proudhon claimed in The System of Economic Contradictions or The Philosophy of Poverty (1847) 1 that mechanisation of production was antithetical to the division of labour and that machines were able to make the differences between occupations obsolete. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), 2 Marx directly challenged

Proudhon by arguing that machinery served simply as a further extension of existing tools, and

only served to exacerbate the division of labour. This analysis resulted directly from the ideas

presented in Proudhon’s chapter on the division of labour. Although Marx ‘won’ the theoretical

contest, he then unashamedly appropriated many themes from Proudhon in the process. The

purpose of analysing the Marx-Proudhon philosophical argument in the 1840s is to find parallels

for understanding and forecasting the changing relationship between computers (machinery) and

labour, and to suggest a possible basis of any theories which will be applicable in a post-industrial

era. In this context, my view is that Proudhon’s conception of the nature of machinery is

applicable to the digital era in a way in which it was not in the industrial era. As a result, I

contend that Marx’s criticisms of Proudhon no longer hold for a digitised era, and his arguments

stemming from these criticisms need to be re-evaluated.

The first part of this essay evaluates the relevance Proudhon’s initial proposals concerning the

nature of machinery and how it serves to degrade the traditional division of labour. The second

part of this essay critically analyses Marx’s response to these ideas and explores the logical

frameworks through which Marx argues that machinery serves only to reinforce the division of

labour. As a result, Marx emphasises that machinery exaggerates pre-existing class divisions. In

1 Pierre Joseph Proudhon, The Philosophy of Poverty , in The Two Narratives of Political Economy, ed. Nicholas Capaldi and Gordon Lloyd,.ch. 17 (Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., April 2011), specifically Chapter 3 ‘Economic Evolutions First Period. The Division of labour’ and Chapter Four ‘Machinery’. 2 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Cosimo Classics, 2008), Chapter 2’ The Metaphysics of Political Economy’.

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