Part III covers four British writers of the 1820s and 1830s: William Thompson, Thomas Hodgskin, John Gray and John Francis Bray. In the texts quoted in Entries 15–17, each treats wealth as the produce of labor and holds that those who labor receive only part of what it produces. H. S. Foxwell named these four, with Godwin and Hall, as “the chief names” of an “English School” (Introduction to Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, London: Macmillan, 1899, p. xxvii). They are usually called the “Ricardian socialists,” and J. E. King calls the label inappropriate (“Utopian or Scientific? A Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists,” History of Political Economy 15, no. 3, 1983, p. 345). Entry 14 sets out the dispute over the label and over what the group took from Smith and Ricardo (Entries 10 and 12, Part II — Classical political economy). Entries 15, 16 and 17 take Thompson, Hodgskin, and Gray with Bray in turn. Marx wrote on all four (Entries 14–17); Entries 18–24 (Part IV — Marx and Engels) treat Marx. Unconfirmed details are flagged inline.
Entry 14. The “Ricardian socialists”: a disputed label
Entry 15. William Thompson: utility, security and the whole product
Entry 16. Thomas Hodgskin: capital, labor and natural property
Entry 17. John Gray and John Francis Bray: labor money and equal exchange
Entry 14. The “Ricardian socialists”: a disputed label
Overview. In the 1820s and 1830s several British writers argued that labor produces all wealth and that rent, interest and profit are taken from what labor produces. The claim they share is what Anton Menger’s history of it calls “labour’s claim to the whole product of industry” (subtitle of The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, tr. M. E. Tanner, London: Macmillan, 1899). They are usually grouped as the “Ricardian socialists,” on the view, stated by Marx in 1847 and by H. S. Foxwell in 1899 (Readings below), that they applied David Ricardo’s labor theory of value (Entry 12, Part II — Classical political economy) against the capitalist. J. E. King disputes both words of the label: whether their economics came from Ricardo, and whether all of them were socialists. This entry sets out who is included, what the 1821 pamphlet with which Marx opens his chapter on these writers said, and the rival Readings of the group.
Who is included. Text: Foxwell wrote that “Of this English School, the chief names are undoubtedly those of Godwin, Hall, Thompson, Gray, Hodgskin, and Bray” (Introduction to Menger, 1899, p. xxvii) [C]. King adds lesser figures, among them Piercy Ravenstone and T. R. Edmonds, and notes that Esther Lowenthal’s The Ricardian Socialists (1911) “passed over the claims of a number of lesser figures, some of whom had featured in the earlier denunciation of the school by Anton Menger (1899) and H. S. Foxwell (1899)” (King, 1983, pp. 345–46) [C]. This part follows Lowenthal’s four: Thompson, Gray, Hodgskin and Bray (the contents of the 1911 edition as listed in the CiNii record of the 1972 facsimile; King, 1983, p. 345, likewise says she “restricted itself to just four men”).
The 1821 pamphlet. Text: the anonymous The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell (London, 1821) states: “It is admitted that the interest paid to the capitalists, whether in the nature of rents, interests of money, or profits of trade, is paid out of the labour of others” [C]. It adds: “Whatever may be due to the capitalist, he can only receive the surplus labour of the labourer; for the labourer must live” [C]. Wealth, it says, “is disposable time, and nothing more” [C]. Dilke’s grandson, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, names Charles Wentworth Dilke as its author and Rodwell and Martin as its publisher (“Memoir,” in The Papers of a Critic, London: John Murray, 1875, vol. 1, pp. 14–15) [E]. Marx called it “an important advance on Ricardo,” since it “bluntly describes surplus-value … as ‘surplus labour'” (Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, ch. 21, §1) [C].
What they took from Smith and Ricardo. Text: Hodgskin opens his 1827 lectures by quoting Smith: “all wealth is created by labour,” and “‘Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things'” (Popular Political Economy, London, 1827, Introduction, citing Wealth of Nations, Book I) [C]. In Labour Defended (1825) he accepts Ricardo’s definition of the natural price of labor and Ricardo’s account of rent, and rejects the claims that McCulloch and James Mill make for capital (Entry 16) [C]. Thompson’s Inquiry (1824) argues from the principle of utility and cites James Mill’s Elements (Entry 15) [C]. In the Introduction to Popular Political Economy Hodgskin also quotes Smith that “all things would gradually have become cheaper” with the growth of productive power, had it not been “for the appropriation of land, and the accumulation of stock,” citing “Wealth of Nations, Book I. Chap. VIII.” [C]. Note: no citation of Smith’s statements of rent and profit as deductions from the produce of labor (Wealth of Nations, I.vi and I.viii) was found in searches of Labour Defended (1825), The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), Thompson’s Inquiry (1824), Gray’s Lecture (1825) or Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs (1839), or in the Introduction to Popular Political Economy (1827); their other writings were not searched. Entries 10 and 11 (Part II — Classical political economy) flag that claim.
Positions at a glance
| Writer | Key text | Remedy | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| William Thompson | Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824) | “Voluntary equality of wealth” by “mutual co-operation,” on Owen’s plan (ch. VI, p. 391) | 15 |
| Thomas Hodgskin | Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825) | Labor’s produce to belong to labor; division among laborers left to “the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves” (Labour Defended, 1825, p. 25) | 16 |
| John Gray | A Lecture on Human Happiness (1825); The Social System (1831) | A national bank issuing certificates of labor-time (as Marx describes it, 1859) | 17 |
| John Francis Bray | Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1839) | Joint-stock companies of producers as an “intermediate resting-place” (Bray, 1839, p. 134) | 17 |
Readings. The contested question is whether these writers took their economics from Ricardo. Text: Marx wrote in 1847 that “almost all the Socialists in that country have, at different periods, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory,” citing Hodgskin, Thompson and Edmonds (The Poverty of Philosophy, ch. 1, §2) [C]. Reading: H. S. Foxwell held that “it was Ricardo’s crude generalisations which gave modern socialism its fancied scientific basis,” and that Thompson “was only one of a series of socialist writers, culminating in Marx and Lassalle, who take the Ricardian position as the very basis of their argument” (Introduction to Menger, 1899, pp. xl–xlii) [C]. Reading: J. E. King replies that “These writers were not ‘Ricardian’ in any important sense. They were ‘Socialists’ only on a very loose usage of the term, and Ravenstone and Hodgskin not even then”; he keeps the label because “it seems unnecessary to invent a new one” (1983, p. 346) [C]. The two exclude each other on the debt to Ricardo. They overlap in treating the group as forerunners of Marx: King calls them “important forerunners of Marx” (p. 370) [C]. Further authors are listed in Where to read it without summary.
Objections. Engels objected that the inference “that the entire social product belongs to the workers as their product, because they are the sole real producers” is “incorrect in formal economic terms, for it is simply an application of morality to economics”; Marx, he adds, “never based his communist demands upon this” (Preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, 1884) [C]. Note: David Ellerman’s Reading of the group as theorists of a labor theory of property rather than of value (Entry 1, Contents and Part 0) bears on this objection; Part IX sets out his argument (to verify) [C]. Note: the marginalists rejected the labor theory of value on which the whole-product claim was often argued (Part VI; to verify) [C].
Where to read it
- The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell (London: Rodwell and Martin; printed by Thomas Davison, 1821). Modern reprint under Dilke’s name: Contributions to Political Economy 38, no. 1 (2019): 31–58.
- H. S. Foxwell, “Introduction,” in Anton Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour: The Origin and Development of the Theory of Labour’s Claim to the Whole Product of Industry, tr. M. E. Tanner (London and New York: Macmillan, 1899), pp. xxvi–xlii; Foxwell’s bibliography, pp. 189–267.
- Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), ch. 1, §2, “Constituted Value or Synthetic Value”; Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, ch. 21, “Opposition to the Economists (Based on the Ricardian Theory)”; Friedrich Engels, Preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy (dated 23 October 1884).
- Readings: J. E. King, “Utopian or Scientific? A Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists,” History of Political Economy 15, no. 3 (1983): 345–73. Further: Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists (New York: Columbia University, 1911; Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, vol. 46, no. 1); Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 4, “Ricardian socialists/Smithian socialists: what’s in a name?” (pp. 82–110); Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); E. K. Hunt, “Value Theory in the Writings of the Classical Economists, Thomas Hodgskin, and Karl Marx,” History of Political Economy 9, no. 3 (1977): 322–45.
Entry 15. William Thompson: utility, security and the whole product
Overview. William Thompson (1775–1833, dates as in Pankhurst’s biography) asked how wealth should be distributed to produce the most happiness, and answered that the products of labor should be secured to those who produce them. His Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness (1824) weighs two values against each other: security, which he identifies with his “natural laws of distribution” (p. 177), and equality of wealth. It concludes that under what he calls “free individual competition” (p. 367) the two cannot be fully reconciled, and that “mutual co-operation” on Robert Owen’s plan can reconcile them. All page references are to the 1824 edition.
Utility and the natural laws of distribution. Text: the Inquiry begins from the principle of utility (ch. I, p. 1) and holds that “Labor is the sole parent of wealth” (§1, p. 7) [C] (see register). It sets out “‘Natural Laws of Distribution,’ or General Rules, the observance of which is necessary in order to attain the greatest happiness derivable from wealth”: “First. All labor ought to be free and voluntary, as to its direction and continuance. Second. All the products of labor ought to be secured to the producers of them. Third. All exchanges of these products ought to be free and voluntary” (p. 6) [N]. Thompson later calls these the “principles of security respecting property or wealth” (p. 177) [C].
Security and equality. Text: Thompson holds that “it is only by an undeviating adherence to (real) equal security that any approach can be made to equality,” and that “What has been hitherto worshipped under the false name of security, has been the security of a few at the expense of the plunder, the degradation of the many” (ch. I, §11, p. 97) [N]. He concedes a limit: “as far as concerns the system of labor by individual competition … security is not reconcileable with equality of distribution” (§14, p. 151) [C]. Of the earlier chapters he says that he had “taken it for granted, in opposition to Mr. Owen, that the re-production of wealth and security were incompatible with equality of wealth” (§13, p. 146) [C]. In chapter VI he concludes that “Forcible equality and fraudulent equality are inconsistent with security. Voluntary equality is dependent on it” (p. 392) [N].
The two measures. Text: on what the user of capital should pay its owner, Thompson sets out “the measure of the laborer, and the measure of the capitalist” (§14, p. 167) [C]. The laborer’s measure is “such sums as would replace the waste and value of the capital by the time it would be consumed, with such added compensation to the owner and superintendant of it as would support him in equal comfort with the more actively employed productive laborers” (p. 167) [N]. The capitalist’s measure is “the additional value produced by the same quantity of labor in consequence of the use of the machinery or other capital; the whole of such surplus value to be enjoyed by the capitalist for his superior intelligence and skill in accumulating and advancing to the laborers his capital or the use of it” (p. 167) [C]. Between them, “Equality pleads altogether in favor of the productive laborer. Security stands neuter, prohibiting to either party the use of compulsion” (p. 169) [N]. In practice “neither the measure of the producer nor of the capitalist prevails; but a measure between the two, formed out of the conflict of their opposing interests” (p. 171) [E].
Competition and co-operation. Text: “There are then three systems of human labor, that of constraint by mingled force and fraud, that of free individual competition (the mode hitherto advocated in this inquiry), and that of mutual co-operation” (ch. V, p. 367) [C]. The “first and the greatest objection” to individual competition “in its most perfect form” is that “it retains the principle of selfishness as the leading motive to action in all the ordinary affairs of life” (p. 369) [N]; it also “paralyzes the productive powers, as to wealth, of one half the human race, women” (p. 372) [E]. Chapter VI, “Of Voluntary Equality in the Distribution of Wealth. Labor by Co-operation Opposed to Labor by Individual Competition,” sets out “the plan of voluntary equality of wealth, produced by mutual co-operation, always under the shield of equal social as well as individual security, proposed by Mr. Owen” (pp. 381, 391) [N]. Thompson also criticizes “the air of mystery and frequent boldness of promise of Mr. Owen’s stile” (p. 442) [C].
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Thompson, Inquiry (1824) |
|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | “All the products of labor ought to be secured to the producers of them” (p. 6) [N] |
| Labor theory of value | “Labor is the sole parent of wealth” (p. 7) [C] |
| Wage labor | Neither measure prevails; the share is “formed out of the conflict of their opposing interests” (p. 171) [E] |
| Interest and profit | The capitalist’s measure claims “the whole of such surplus value”; the laborer’s measure allows replacement of capital plus a living equal to the laborers’ (p. 167) |
| Markets | Free and voluntary exchange is a natural law of distribution (p. 6); individual competition is limited by its “principle of selfishness” (p. 369) |
| Remedy | Voluntary equality by mutual co-operation on Owen’s plan (ch. VI, p. 391) |
| Drew from | The principle of utility (p. 1); Owen (p. 391) |
| Argued against | James Mill on a class “exempt from the necessity of labor” (Preliminary Observations, pp. x–xii) |
Readings. The contested question is whether Thompson’s case rests on Ricardo’s theory of value. Reading: Foxwell made Thompson “only one of a series of socialist writers, culminating in Marx and Lassalle, who take the Ricardian position as the very basis of their argument” (Introduction to Menger, 1899, p. xlii) [C]. Reading: J. E. King holds that the group was “not ‘Ricardian’ in any important sense” (1983, p. 346) [C]. The two Readings exclude each other on the debt to Ricardo; Entry 14 sets out the dispute over the label. On Thompson’s place in the history of ideas, King adds that Marx “seems never to have realised that his theory of history had been anticipated, if only in broad outline, by Thompson and Edmonds” (p. 369) [C]. Note: Anton Menger held that, in Marx, “the whole theory of surplus value, its conception, its name, and the estimates of its amount are borrowed in all essentials from Thompson’s writings,” and that “The real discoverers of the theory of surplus value are Godwin, Hall, and especially W. Thompson” (§ 9, “Marx,” p. 101 and n. 1, in The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899).
Objections. Text: Thompson quotes James Mill: “If the natural laws of distribution were allowed to operate freely, the greater part of this net produce would find its way, in moderate portions, into the hands of a numerous class of persons exempt from the necessity of labor” (Preliminary Observations, p. x, quoting Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, chapter on Distribution) [E]. He replies that “it appears not proved, nor a just inference, that freedom from the necessity of moderate labor is essential either to the highest intellectual or moral attainments” (p. xii) [N]. He states the capitalist’s ground himself: the surplus is claimed “for his superior intelligence and skill in accumulating and advancing to the laborers his capital” (p. 167) [N]. Thompson’s Labor Rewarded (1827) answers Hodgskin’s Labour Defended (Entry 16): “The author of Labour Defended stands alone, as far as I know, amongst the advocates of Individual competition, in even wishing that labor should possess the whole of the products of its exertions” (p. 97, as quoted by Foxwell, Introduction to Menger, 1899, p. lxi, who calls the book “an answer to Hodgskin”) [C].
Where to read it
- William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824): natural laws, ch. I, §1, pp. 6–7; security and equality, §11, p. 97, and §§13–14, pp. 146–51; the two measures, §14, pp. 167–71; ch. V, on individual competition, pp. 367–80; ch. VI, from p. 381. Marx quotes p. 274 on the separation of “the man of knowledge and the productive labourer” (Capital I, ch. 14, §5, n. 44).
- William Thompson, Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated: Or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of Its Exertions. By One of the Idle Classes (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), 127 pp. (title as on the 1827 title page; catalogues of the 1969 reprint give “Labour” and “Product of Its Exertion”).
- William Thompson [and Anna Wheeler], Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery; in Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill’s Celebrated “Article on Government” (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, 1825), opening with an “Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler”: “To separate your thoughts from mine were now to me impossible, so amalgamated are they with my own.”
- William Thompson, Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the Principles of Mutual Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of the Means of Enjoyments (London: Strange and E. Wilson, [1830]).
- Readings: Richard K. P. Pankhurst, William Thompson (1775–1833): Britain’s Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator (London: Watts, 1954); Foxwell, Introduction to Menger (1899), p. xlii; King (1983), pp. 346, 369.
Entry 16. Thomas Hodgskin: capital, labor and natural property
Overview. Thomas Hodgskin argued that the advantages attributed to capital are “caused in fact by labour” (Labour Defended, 1825, p. 33), and that what labor produces belongs to it by a natural right that legislation overrides. His Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (1825) answers the economists who credited capital with productive power. His Popular Political Economy (1827) gives the lectures he “delivered … at the London Mechanics Institution in 1826,” where he had been honorary secretary (title page and preface). His Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832) sets a natural right of property grounded in labor against property made by law. Whether these positions make him a socialist or a free-market critic of privilege is disputed (Readings; Entry 1, Contents and Part 0). Quotations from Labour Defended and their pages follow the first edition (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825).
Capital as labor. Text: Labour Defended opens: “Throughout this country at present, there exists a serious contest between capital and labour” (p. 3) [E]. Its prefatory note refers to “the law passed during the late session of Parliament, on account of the combinations of workmen” (unpaginated “Notice” before p. 3; Note: Élie Halévy places the pamphlet in the 1824 debate on repealing the laws against combinations, which, he says, struck Hodgskin by “la faiblesse des arguments opposés par les ouvriers aux arguments des capitalistes” (Thomas Hodgskin, Paris, 1903, pp. 85–88); he does not name the Act the Notice means, which is to verify). Hodgskin argues that “the effects attributed to a stock of commodities, under the name of circulating capital, are caused by co-existing labour” (p. 9) [C]. Of fixed capital he writes that it “does not derive its utility from previous, but present labour; and does not bring its owner a profit because it has been stored up, but because it is a means of obtaining a command over labour” (p. 15) [C]. Between producers, “in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both” (p. 20) [N]. He asks readers to “agree with me, when I say, that whatever labour produces ought to belong to it” (p. 24) [N].
What he took from the economists. Text: Hodgskin accepts the inverse relation of wages and profits (p. 5) and Ricardo’s definition of the price of labor as what “will enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist, and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution” (p. 24) [C]. He accepts Ricardo’s account of rent: “The superior produce of the best soil is not, therefore, profit, and Mr. Ricardo has called it rent” (p. 24) [C]. He rejects the productive power attributed to capital by McCulloch (p. 8) and James Mill: “Mr. Mill’s account of these effects, though not so precise, is still more astounding” (p. 7) [C] (all Labour Defended, 1825).
Markets among laborers. Text: on how the produce should be divided among different laborers, Hodgskin writes: “I know no way of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled by the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves.” If all kinds of labor were “perfectly free,” individual wages “would be justly settled by what Dr. Smith calls the ‘higgling of the market'” (p. 25) (Labour Defended, 1825) [N].
Natural and social price. Text: in Popular Political Economy, “NATURAL or necessary price means … the whole quantity of labour nature requires from man, that he may produce any commodity.” The laborer “must always, in the present state of society, give a great deal more labour to acquire and possess it than is requisite to buy it from nature. Natural price thus increased to the labourer, is SOCIAL PRICE” (ch. IX, “Prices”) [C].
Natural and artificial property. Text: in the 1832 letters to “H. Brougham, Esq.”, Hodgskin writes: “I heartily and cordially concur with Mr. Locke, in his view of the origin and foundation of a right of property,” quoting Locke that “Every man … has a property in his own person” (p. 25) [N]. Locke’s view is “more correct than Mr. Bentham’s,” who, through Dumont, “expressly says, that the right of property is altogether the work or creation of the legislator, or the law” [C]. Of the laws of property Hodgskin says: “Actually and in fact they are intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce of those who cultivate the soil, prepare clothing, or distribute what is produced” [N]. He calls the right of individuals “to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that,” “essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society” [N]. Hodgskin’s quotation runs on into Locke’s acorn example, and his footnote gives “Of Civil Government—Book II, Chap. 5, sec. 28” (p. 25); the opening sentence is Second Treatise, §27.
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Hodgskin |
|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | A natural right to “the produce of their own industry,” with Locke against Bentham (1832) [N] |
| Labor theory of value | Natural price is “the whole quantity of labour nature requires” (1827) [C] |
| Wage labor | Fixed capital brings profit as “a means of obtaining a command over labour” (1825, p. 15) [C] |
| Interest and profit | Circulating capital is “co-existing labour”; the capitalist “appropriates to himself the produce of both” (1825, pp. 9, 20) |
| Rent | Accepts Ricardo’s account of rent (1825, p. 24) |
| Markets | Wages among laborers set by “the ‘higgling of the market'” if labor were “perfectly free” (1825, p. 25) [N] |
| Law and the state | Laws of property “intended to appropriate to the law-makers the produce” of producers (1832) [N] |
| Drew from | Locke (1832); Smith (1827); Ricardo on wages and rent (1825) |
| Argued against | McCulloch and James Mill on capital (1825); Bentham on property (1832) |
Readings. Whether Hodgskin was a socialist is disputed. Reading: Marx counted him among “the Socialists” of England who “proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory,” citing his Political Economy, 1827 (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, ch. 1, §2) [C]. Reading: J. E. King holds that the group were “‘Socialists’ only on a very loose usage of the term, and Ravenstone and Hodgskin not even then” (“Utopian or Scientific?”, 1983, p. 346) [C]. The two exclude each other. Reading: After rejecting the “Ricardian,” “Smithian” and “Lockean” epithets, David Stack writes: “In its place we propose no alternative epithet. Such terms are anachronistic and encumbering”; “Perhaps the best short summation of Hodgskin’s work is as an anti-Malthusian” (Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869), London: Royal Historical Society; Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998, pp. 3–6) [C]. For Stack, “all aspects of his thought were underlain by an extreme providentialism which found only beneficence in natural laws, and did not permit any positive role for artificial intervention” (p. 1) [C]. Of the neo-liberal reading he writes that “The pre-cursor of Marx should not be turned into a forerunner of the New Right,” noting among the differences that Hayek “explicitly denied the right of the labourer to the full value of his product” (p. 205) [C]. Stack overlaps with King on Hodgskin’s distance from Ricardo (p. 3). Entry 1 (Contents and Part 0) pairs a further two: Ellerman, who keeps the label and reads the group as theorists of a labor theory of property, and Carson, who calls the label “somewhat misleading” for Hodgskin. Further authors are listed in Where to read it without summary.
Objections. Thompson’s Labor Rewarded (1827) answers Labour Defended (Foxwell, Introduction to Menger, 1899, p. lxi; Entry 15). Text: Samuel Read’s Inquiry into the Natural Grounds of Right to Vendible Property, or Wealth (Edinburgh: printed for the author, 1829), Book I, ch. IX, “Capital in General,” pp. 125–29, answers Labour Defended by name, calling its author “this very able though anonymous author” (p. 125). To Hodgskin’s claim, as Read quotes it, that the tailor knows “nothing of any stored-up stock of provisions,” Read replies that if there were not “any stored-up stock of provisions,” people “could not continue to be supplied” (p. 126) [E]. Of fixed capital he grants that it “can do nothing without men to guide and apply them,” but holds that “the labourer can do but little without such capital,” and “it is but this little that is properly to be accounted the effects or produce of labour” (p. 128) [C]. The capitalist’s claim to share in the produce “rests partly upon compact and agreement with the labourer,” “partly upon the comparative degree in which labour can produce with and without capital, and partly upon the cost and difficulty or privation which the particular contribution of capital requires” (p. 128) [N]. He asks “who is it, I would beg to ask, that should supply such capital gratuitously?” (p. 129) [N]. In the Preface (dated “Roslin, October, 1829”) Read sets “the plain and luminous doctrines of Dr Smith” against “the dogmas and paradoxes of Mr Ricardo and his followers” (p. vi), and presents political economy as “for the first time, treated as an investigation concerning the right to wealth, (or property;)” (p. ix) [C]. Note: Marx’s critique of Hodgskin is in Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, ch. XXI, §3, “Hodgskin” (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972, pp. 263–319; Entry 20, Part IV — Marx and Engels). Note: defenders of interest answer that capital goods add to output and that waiting has a cost, so that interest is not taken from labor’s product (Part VI; to verify) [C].
Where to read it
- Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital; or, The Unproductiveness of Capital Proved with Reference to the Present Combinations amongst Journeymen (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825; see register); reprint with an introduction by G. D. H. Cole (London: Labour Publishing Company, 1922), [3], 108 pp. Pages above are those of the 1825 edition (33 pp.).
- Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy: Four Lectures Delivered at the London Mechanics’ Institution (London: Charles Tait; Edinburgh: William Tait, 1827): Introduction, on Smith; ch. IX, “Prices,” from p. 219 (page to verify).
- Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted. A Series of Letters, Addressed without Permission, to H. Brougham, Esq. M.P. F.R.S. &c. (now the Lord Chancellor.) (London: B. Steil, 1832), Letters I–III (pages to verify).
- Readings: Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), ch. 1, §2; King (1983), p. 346; Stack (1998), Introduction, pp. 1–6, and Conclusion, p. 205. Further: Gregory Claeys, “Political Economy and Popular Education: Thomas Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1823–8,” in Michael T. Davis, ed., Radicalism and Revolution in Britain: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Thomis (Macmillan, 2000), pp. 157–75; Élie Halévy, Thomas Hodgskin (Paris: Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, 1903; English translation, London: Benn, 1956); David Stack, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) (London: Royal Historical Society; Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998).
- Objection: Samuel Read, Inquiry into the Natural Grounds of Right to Vendible Property, or Wealth (Edinburgh: printed for the author, 1829), Preface, pp. v–ix; Book I, ch. IX, “Capital in General,” pp. 125–29.
Entry 17. John Gray and John Francis Bray: labor money and equal exchange
Overview. John Gray and John Francis Bray proposed to change how labor and its products are exchanged. In Marx’s account, Gray proposed that a national bank measure the labor-time in goods and issue certificates for it; Marx also called him “the first to set forth the theory that labour-time is the direct measure of money in a systematic way” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, ch. 2, B) [C]. Bray held that in the wage bargain the workmen give “the labour of a whole year, in exchange for the value of only half a year,” and proposed joint-stock companies of producers as an intermediate step. Marx’s criticism of both, that their remedies keep the private exchange they set out to correct, is given under Objections.
Gray: the unproductive classes. Text: A Lecture on Human Happiness (1825) holds that “Every unproductive member of society is a DIRECT TAX upon the productive classes,” and that the productive classes receive “but a small trifle more than ONE-FIFTH PART OF THE PRODUCE OF THEIR OWN LABOUR!!!” [E] [N]. It works through Patrick Colquhoun’s table of classes, beginning “Nos. 1, 2, and 3. The King, and others of the Royal Family. Kings are unproductive members of society” [N]. It argues that “In the present state of society production is limited by demand,” that “competition is the limit to production,” and that the quantity of wealth individuals command “is limited by COMPETITION between man and man” [E] (pp. 15, 20, 22, 62–63 of the London School of Economics reprint, No. 2 in its Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts, the pages King cites as the 1931 reprint; its title page reads “London: Published by Sherwood, Jones, & Co.” and is undated).
Gray: the bank and labor-time. Text: in Marx’s account of The Social System (1831) and the Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money (1848), Gray “proposes that a national central bank should ascertain through its branches the labour-time expended in the production of various commodities,” and the bank “not only receives commodities with one hand and issues certificates for labour supplied with the other, but … directs production itself” (Contribution, ch. 2, B) [C]. In The Social System Gray writes: “A National Bank should be established, possessing the sole power of manufacturing paper money, and of issuing it on demand to the accredited agents of the association” (Edinburgh, 1831, p. 64) [C].
Bray: labor, land and exchange. Text: Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (Leeds, 1839) holds that “It is labour alone which bestows value; for labour, as it has been truly said, is the purchase money which is paid for everything we eat, or drink, or wear” [C]. “Every man has an undoubted right to all that his honest labour can procure him. When he thus appropriates the fruits of his labour, he commits no injustice upon any other human being” [N]. On land, natural equality of right to subsistence cannot be maintained “unless the earth be COMMON PROPERTY,” and “Equality of rights can never be enjoyed until all individual claims to landed property are subverted, and merged in those of the nation at large” [N] (all ch. II, pp. 33–34). Of the wage bargain Bray writes that “the workmen have given the capitalist the labour of a whole year, in exchange for the value of only half a year” (p. 48) [C]. “The whole transaction, therefore, between the producer and the capitalist, is a palpable deception, a mere farce: it is, in fact, in thousands of instances, no other than a barefaced though legalised robbery” (p. 50) [N]. Pages are those of the 1839 edition.
Bray: the joint-stock remedy and politics. Text: Bray seeks “some intermediate resting-place, to which society may go with all its faults and its follies” (p. 134) [N]. In his proposed system of joint-stock companies, “the same as under that now existing, every individual would be at liberty to accumulate as much as he pleased,” with “general and local boards of trade” (pp. 168, 160) [C]. He judges that if the working classes obtained “any or all of the political changes just mentioned, they would remain in almost the same condition of poverty and ignorance and misery as they are at present” [E] (ch. I, p. 18).
Positions at a glance
| Topic | Gray | Bray |
|---|---|---|
| Labor theory of property | Unproductive members are “a DIRECT TAX upon the productive classes” (1825, p. 15) [N] | “Every man has an undoubted right to all that his honest labour can procure him” (ch. II) [N] |
| Labor theory of value | Labor-time as the measure of money (Marx’s account, 1859) [C] | “It is labour alone which bestows value” (ch. II) [C] |
| Wage labor | Producers receive “but a small trifle more than ONE-FIFTH” of their produce (1825, p. 20) [E] | A year’s labor exchanged for “the value of only half a year” (p. 48) [C] |
| Interest, rent and profit | Colquhoun’s classes read from “The King, and others of the Royal Family” as “unproductive members of society” (1825, p. 22) [N] | Land to be “COMMON PROPERTY” (ch. II) [N] |
| Markets | “Competition is the limit to production” (1825, p. 62) [E] | Individuals “at liberty to accumulate” under the joint-stock system (p. 168) [C] |
| Remedy | A national bank issuing certificates for labor-time (Marx’s account, 1859) | Joint-stock companies with boards of trade, an “intermediate resting-place” (pp. 134, 160) |
Readings. Note: how far Gray’s argument that competition limits production anticipates later theories of crisis is a matter of Reading; Noel W. Thompson’s The People’s Science (1984), ch. 7, “Early socialist political economy and the theory of capitalist crisis” (pp. 158–90), is a lead (to verify). Entry 14 sets out the Readings of the group as a whole.
Objections. Reading: Marx argues that “Mr. Bray turns the illusion of the respectable bourgeois into an ideal he would like to attain,” and that “this equalitarian relation … is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it”; “There is thus no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes” (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, ch. 1, §2) [C]. Reading: of Gray, Marx writes that “Every commodity is immediately money; this is Gray’s thesis which he derives from his incomplete and hence incorrect analysis of commodities”: society “in the shape of the bank makes the individuals independent of the conditions of private exchange, and, on the other hand, it causes them to continue to produce on the basis of private exchange” (Contribution, 1859, ch. 2, B) [C]. Note: Part V treats later labor-note and free-credit proposals, and Entry 22 (Part IV — Marx and Engels) Marx’s theory of money (to verify).
In context. Gray’s Lecture was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1826, “stereotyped for, and published by, J. Coates, Jr.,” with “the Preamble and Constitution of the Friendly Association for Mutual Interests, located at Valley Forge, (near Phil’a.)” (title page of the 1826 printing). Bray was born in Washington in 1809, and his family returned to Leeds in 1822. He went back to the United States in 1842, worked as a printer in Detroit, and from 1856 to 1865 ran a daguerreotype gallery in Pontiac, Michigan. He joined the Knights of Labor in 1886, the Pontiac branch took the name “John F Bray Assembly,” and he died at his son’s farm near Pontiac on 1 February 1897 (London School of Economics Library, catalogue description of Bray’s papers; BnF authority record).
Where to read it
- John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (London: Sherwood, Jones, & Co., 1825), the “one-fifth” calculation and the Colquhoun table (pp. 15–22 in the London School of Economics reprint, No. 2 in its Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts, 1931); Gray’s section “Competition the Limit of Production” (pp. 59–72 of that reprint).
- John Gray, The Social System: A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange (Edinburgh: William Tait; London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1831), p. 64 on the National Bank; Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black; London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848).
- John Francis Bray, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy; or, The Age of Might and the Age of Right (Leeds: David Green, 1839), ch. II, “First Principles relating to Society and Government”; pp. 45–50 on exchange; pp. 134–94 on the joint-stock system (pages as cited by Marx; quotations above checked at pp. 18, 33–34, 48, 50, 134, 160, 168). Also A Voyage from Utopia, ed. M. F. Lloyd-Prichard (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957).
- Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), ch. 1, §2, “Constituted Value or Synthetic Value”; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), ch. 2, B, “Theories of the Standard of Money.”
- Readings: J. E. King, “Utopian or Scientific?” (1983); Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science (1984), ch. 7; Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium (1987). Biography: M. F. Jolliffe, “John Francis Bray,” International Review for Social History 4 (1938): 1–38; H. J. Carr, “John Francis Bray,” Economica 7, no. 28 (1940).