The Pre-Marxians :

The English pre-Marxians, meaning thereby those writers who arrived at what is substantially the Marxian theory of exploitation and of surplus value—not infrequently, like Marx, building on Ricardo—are, for our purpose, five in number. They are Charles Hall (? 1745-? 1825), William Thompson (1785–1833), Thomas Hodgskin (1783–1869), J. F. Bray (?-?) and John Gray (1799-? 1850). It is impossible, and probably undesirable, to consider these Marxian forerunners in any detail, but enough should be said of each to give the flavour of the group.

(c) CHARLES HALL

Charles Hall inevitably comes first in the bunch of early anticipators of Karl Marx, partly because the date of his birth so decrees; and partly because his attitude of mind and the solutions which he advocates demand that he should be placed as near as possible to the agrarians who have just been noticed. Little is known of him except that he was a physician, and obviously a ‘good physician,’ in the West Country; he had a large family, and he died in a debtor's prison—not because he was insolvent, but because he refused to come out. He did not in fact acknowledge the debt in dispute; and, like a man of high principle, he refused to purchase his liberty by acquiescing in the demands of injustice.

He was a good physician, and he wrote as a good physician. To those who would ask why a doctor, a mere doctor, should consider himself competent to write on such matters, he replies, and with justice, that no one is so well qualified as a doctor to write about the conditions of the people:

He is admitted into the dwellings of all ranks of people, and into the innermost parts of them: he sees them by their fire-side, at their tables, and in their beds: he sees them at work, and at their recreations: he sees them in health, in sickness, and in the article of death: he is frequently made acquainted with their hopes, and their fears, their successes and their disappointments, as these have often a relation to their diseases; and, possessing their confidence, they frequently also unbosom themselves to him on matters not connected with the state of their healths.¹

Such is the proud boast of the family doctor, and it is well founded. The physician, always assuming that he is a good physician, has unique opportunities of getting to know his fellow-men. In the case of Hall, this quality colours his whole discussion. Somehow he conveys in fuller measure than any other writer in the socialist tradition, the impression that he has lived very near to suffering humanity.

Hall's one book bears the title, The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States, and his thesis is a simple one. It is that however much civilisation, and with it the concomitants of civilisation, may have been of advantage to a privileged minority, it has depressed and rendered miserable the bulk of humanity. In every respect, and however matters may be viewed, the poor in civilised countries are uniformly taken advantage of, and get nothing out of the assumed progress of humanity. In a book wholly concerned with the effects of civilisation, it is well to ask at the outset what in fact the author means by ‘civilisation.’ Hall is ready with a precise definition: civilisation ‘consists in the study and knowledge of the sciences, and in the production and enjoyment of the conveniences, the elegancies, and luxuries of life’²—but, as the argument proceeds to make clear, these conveniences, elegancies and luxuries are not for the poor. They are reserved for the privileged.

The outstanding feature of society as seen by Hall in the daily pursuit of his calling lies in the division between the rich and the poor. The poor are not merely neglected: they are the forgotten men. Politicians and statesmen may be interested in instituting enquiries into other aspects of the life of the nation, but when it comes to

the state and condition of the great mass of the people: how are they fed; how they are clothed; what kind of houses they live in; how they are supplied with fuel; how they are instructed; in short, what advantages, corporeal, mental, and even spiritual, they enjoy or are deprived of,

no one (he is writing in 1805) is so curious as to ask. It is the miserable state of the poor that Hall places in the forefront. Most fundamentally, ‘the poor are not in fact furnished with the requisite quantity of the necessaries of life.’¹ Their employment in manufactures is injurious to their health; their minds are necessarily uncultivated; their moral and spiritual instruction is neglected.

When we turn to consider Hall's analysis of the causes and consequences of this prevailing poverty of the poor, we are at once confronted with a bias which affects the whole discussion. Hall is profoundly antagonistic to trade and manufactures; in an almost physiocratic sense, he regards agriculture as natural. If it be asked why there is scarcity, he does not tarry for an answer. It is that ‘a sufficient number of hands are not employed on the land.’² Hall is quite clear that no sane man would ever voluntarily abandon the land for any other occupation: ‘it was never through choice that manufactures were entered into by any people’³ He gives a somewhat gloomy, but not too gloomy account (having regard to the date, 1805) of the horrors of manufactures. Despite their variety, they are all

carried on within doors, in confined rooms, shutting out the pleasant objects of nature, frequently within frames like cages, in offensive atmospheres, generally rendered more nauseous by the effluvia of the subject worked on, always by that of the bodies and filthy clothes of the workmen; their postures bent, doubled, and every way distorted.⁴

Despite the repulsive nature of manufactures, however, the wealth of the rich ‘draws off the labour from the cultivation of the land' by a kind of compulsion,’⁵ and directs it above all to what Hall calls ‘refined manufactures,’ created exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich. The compulsion so exercised is indeed summarised in a formula: the rich in effect say:

If you will labour for me in such and such a way, I will give you out of those things such as you stand in need of; but unless you will do these things which I require of you, you shall have none of them.⁶

There is thus no voluntary labour contract, but rather a state of coercion which derives its sanction from the wealth of the rich, and which leaves the poor no choice.’⁷ This indeed, in a notable definition, is the essence of wealth. ‘Wealth,’ says Hall, ‘is the possession of that which gives power over, and commands the labour of man: it is, therefore, power; and into that, and that only, ultimately resolvable.’⁸ Nor is this a mere metaphor or simile. The power of the rich is as strong and effective as that of the most absolute monarch that ever lived:

To condemn so many to the mines; to confine such numbers to such nauseous, irksome, unwholesome, destructive employments, is more than equal to any kingly power on earth.¹

The fact that wealth means power vested in one to order the lives of others means likewise that there is a complete opposition of interests between the two classes. Wealth is an advantage to the possessor, precisely because, and only to the extent to which, it is a disadvantage to the non-possessor. What the possessor has, the non-possessor is deprived of: ‘The situation of the rich and the poor, like the alge braic terms plus and minus, are in direct opposition to, and destructive of each other.’² There is here no suggestion of ‘economic harmonies’; indeed the foundations of the doctrine of the class war could not be more clearly expounded.

But wealth is not merely power over the labour of others; it is, in Hall's analysis, power at large, in a sense which points to the Marxian doctrine of the class State. In civilised states, he tells us, the wealthy part ‘have in their hands all power: the legislative, the executive, and judiciary, in all their branches, viz. ecclesiastical, magisterial, martial, etc’³ As a consequence the rich form an aristocracy, in which the effective power is lodged: ‘It is wealth universally that puts power into the hands of those that have it.’⁴

We have seen the poor labouring for the rich under the coercion of ‘absolute necessity.’ Hall makes a laudable effort to estimate what portion of the proceeds of the labour of the people at large is appropriated by the rich, and how much is left for their own use. The calculation is probably not above reproach, and indeed the statistical material of the time was hardly such as to justify the attempt being made. What is more significant than the conclusion at which he arrived is the fact that he endeavoured to express the problem in concrete terms, and that in doing so, he came very near to the Marxian formula for surplus value. After presenting his estimate, he says:

If this statement is true, eight-tenths of the people consume only one-eighth of the produce of their labour: hence one day in eight, or one hour in a day, is all the time the poor man is allowed to work for himself, his wife and his children. All the other days, or all the other hours of the day, he works for other people.⁵

One other Marxian dogma which is stated with remarkable precision is that of the Increasing Degradation of the Working Classes. It follows almost automatically from the view that the rich and the poor are in the relation of plus and minus, combined with the uncontested fact (in 1805) that the rich are growing richer. Increase of the wealth and the power of the few must therefore mean ‘an increase of poverty in the people, as it subjects them to new and additional demands for the produce of their labour.’¹ As a consequence, it is argued that the poor are becoming every day poorer and poorer in most States. Further, this increasing misery or degradation (not that Hall uses the expression) is occasioned in the two ways which are indicated later in The Communist Manifesto. It is ‘brought about not only by those, already in a state of subjection, being placed in a state of still greater subjection; but also because more people are reduced to that state’² This is almost an anticipatory glimpse of the process whereby the lower strata of the middle class, the small tradespeople, and many more ‘sink gradually into the proletariat’³ It should perhaps be added that on this point Hair almost goes beyond Marx, for he holds that there is no limit to the extent to which this increasing Marxian misery may be carried. There are no bounds, he asserts, to the quantity of labour that the rich may have the power of claiming from the people, and it follows likewise that there are no bounds to the ‘diminution of the necessaries of life that remain to the poor for their own use’⁴

Before looking at Hall from a somewhat wider point of view, one last connecting link with the later Marx-Lenin tradition may be noted. Hall is emphatic that wars, if not exclusively, are yet predominantly, attributable to what a subsequent generation has come to call the Capitalistic System. ‘The objects of all wars,’ he says, ‘whether near or distant, are to increase trade, or to extend territory’; they are occasioned, in a rather odd phrase, by ‘the ambition or irritability of the rich’⁵ Wars are caused by the wealthy, and their object is an increase of wealth. To this he adds, as a further comment, that the education of the children of the rich tends in the same direction; the jargon had not then been invented, but he implies that they are educated to think imperially.⁶

So far we have in the main been concerned with those aspects of Hall which would arrest the attention of a Marxian student, reading backwards. In fairness to Hall, however, one ought to have regard to the general framework in which these Marxian sentiments find expression. In essence, it may be said that Hall is primarily an agrarian with a quite peculiarly strong antipathy against manufactures and trade, pushed indeed at times almost to the verge of paradox. The inequality which Hall analyses has, in his view, its distant source in the original appropriation of land and its distribution among a few.¹ This is clearly in conflict with the design of the Almighty, which was that the land should belong to the people, and that the people should never be divorced from the land:

It is evident, therefore, that the Creator intended the land for the use of the creatures he has put on it. Consequently, that no creature ought to be cut off from the possession of some part or other of the earth, and that in such quantity as to furnish him with the necessaries of life.²

It is a recurrent thought in Hall that the impotence of the poor springs from the fact that they are thus cut off from the possession of some part of the earth. ‘If every person had an allotment of land,’ he says in one place, ‘the labour of the people would remain free, and under their own direction’³ Such an arrangement would, in more modern phraseology, restore equality of bargaining power; the poor would no longer be under that ‘absolute necessity’ which now subjects them to the will of others.

As against agriculture (at least of the peasant-proprietor type) which stimulates men to industriousness and restores to them their freedom, trade and manufactures exist exclusively for the rich, and are merely additional means of exploitation. Take, for example, trade. The essence of trade is to send out of the country what the poor, the great mass of mankind, have occasion for, and to bring back ‘what is consumed almost wholly by a small part of these nations, viz. the rich.’⁴ Very few imported goods, he argues, come down to the use of the poor. The rich are thus enabled to consume in a short time the work of many people: or, if the phrase be preferred, it enables them ‘to commit greater waste than it would otherwise be in their power to do.’⁵ This is almost the voice of Veblen, analysing the phenomenon of ‘conspicuous waste.’ Nor will Hall have anything to do with the antiquated argument that the expenditure of the rich is ‘good for,’ and gives employment to, the poor. Very tersely he observes that ‘the rich are employed in the consumption, not in the production of things.’⁶ Moreover (and it is an echo of scholasticism) all trade is a species of exploitation. These articles which are the subject of trade are all the products of labourers, manufacturers¹ and others, ‘from whom they are obtained for less than their full value: a profit otherwise could not be made on them.’² Thus the traders also subsist on ‘the fruits of the labour of the poor.’ Nor is the position more favourable if we turn to ‘manufactures’ in the more modern sense of the word. It is true that Hall distinguishes between manufactures ‘of the grosser kind,’ that is to say, of articles in general use, and those manufactures which are ‘more refined.’³; and he is certainly more indulgent and tender to the former. But the impulse given by the rich is all in the direction of ‘refined manufactures’⁴ which the poor produce, but may never enjoy. Indeed, with a touch of paradox, Hall claims that extensive manufactures are both a cause and a sign of poverty in a nation, the argument resting on the contention that none but the poor and the destitute would ever consent to engage in industry:

The great quantities of manufactured goods suppose a great number of manufacturers,⁵ who, if they were not poor, would not submit to the employments that produce them.⁶

The remedies which Hall suggests spring from his general views of what constitutes a healthy society, rather than from the Marxian elements with which he spices his discussion. In his description of what is required in the ‘happiest state,’ where activity and rest are held in harmonious balance, he postulates two governing principles. The first is that each man should labour so much only as is necessary for his family; and the second is that each should enjoy the whole fruits of his labours.⁷ They are alike principles which tend to give a somewhat elusive answer when it is sought to apply them to specific instances. It is unnecessary to consider in any detail Hall's more detailed proposals. He would abolish primogeniture.⁸ Refined manufactures—the particular object of his detestation—he would either entirely prohibit by law, or alternatively he would burden them with such taxation as would effectively limit their production.⁹ Taxation, indeed, should be imposed on none but the rich. Lastly, he proposes a scheme of extreme agrarian reform, whereby land would be vested in the State, and distributed among the entire population, remaining inalienable but subject to periodic redistribution.¹⁰ He dreams wistfully of the Mosaic Law, of the year of Jubile, and of Sparta. In an odd way, since the two men are entirely different, there is nevertheless in the final result a certain kinship with Mably. Hall also would lead us back to a simpler life, to a world which has forsworn luxuries and ‘refined manufactures,’ where everyone, in the secure possession of a few acres, will live happily even if plainly, tyrannised by none,. content with nine bean rows and a hive for the honey-bee. It is easy enough to criticise Hall: he doubtless lacked a rigorous economic discipline. Even in his time it may be doubted whether foreign trade could be discussed on the simple assumption that we exported the necessities of the poor and imported the luxuries of the rich. It may be doubted whether he is quite right in his interpretation of human psychology, whether in fact the comparative allurements of agriculture and manufactures, so far as concerns vast numbers of the population, are quite in accordance with his interpretation. Nevertheless, The Effects of Civilisation is a book with a peculiarly persuasive quality. The argument marches in an orderly manner; the case for the oppressed is all the more cogent, because it is stated with admirable restraint; behind the fines there is very obviously a large-hearted man. Of all the English anticipators of Marx, Hall is the one whose greater acquaintance one would most ardently desire. A day with Hall visiting his patients would have been a day well spent.

(d) WILLIAM THOMPSON

William Thompson, according to Foxwell, ‘deserves to be regarded as chief of the English Socialist School’; Menger refers to him as ‘the most eminent founder of scientific socialism’¹ Yet most readers who turn to his chief work, known for short as An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824),² will doubtless experience a numbing sense of disappointment. A man of ample leisure, he devoted his leisure to the leisurely exposition of his views. In his style, he is something of a hangover from the eighteenth century, and he moves unhurriedly through his 600 closely printed pages, saying what he has to say at inordinate length (and not infrequently saying it oftener than once); unveiling the obvious with dignity and decorum, taking delight in expanding a sentence into a paragraph, a paragraph into a page. ‘Why demonstrate what no one disputes?’ he asks on one occasion, and the reader is startled into momentary attention by this psychic example of thought-reading stretching across the ages. Thompson has great merits; but he torpedoes himself by his unconquerable dreariness and prolixity. Even though for some reason he was reprinted in a third edition (abridged) as late as 1869, it is a fairly safe assumption that never hereafter will anyone read all, or most, of Thompson unless goaded on by a misplaced sense of duty.

Thompson adopts as his starting-point an extreme and repulsive form of Utilitarianism. ‘The greatest possible quantity of human happiness,’ ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number,’ ‘the happiness of the community,’ and ‘the happiness of the whole,’ are expressions which he considers may be indifferently used.¹ It is for the ethical expert to follow Thompson into this field, but the innocent non-ethical outsider may be allowed a certain scepticism regarding the perfect interchangeability of these phrases. In any case, he comes down in the end in favour of accepting as the criterion ‘the greatest quantity of happiness, wherever it may be found to alight.’ If one human being could prove that he was so fashioned as to be endowed with an indefinitely greater capacity for happiness than the rest of his fellow-men, then wealth and all the other means of happiness ought to be ‘applied’ to him.² Consistently with this, if out of ten men, the slavery of nine and the superlative happiness of the tenth were to represent together a higher sum-total of human happiness than that attainable by any other possible arrangement, then this distribution should be adopted.³ Here indeed is a glad gospel for those who attach importance to their capacity for enjoyment.

But indeed, although Thompson commits himself to these startling theoretical possibilities, he does not in practice allow things to work out so favourably for the expert in pleasures. For he tells us on the next page that ‘all sane individuals are capable of equal enjoyment from equal portions of the objects of wealth.’⁴ This proposition is not only extremely doubtful in itself, but it also raises the awkward question of the position of one who is not sane. Should we all sacrifice ourselves to enhance the ecstasy of an unusually potentially cheerful idiot? But again, it is hardly claimed that this basic proposition is in fact true; it is rather that any contrary proposition would be incapable of proof: ‘to us therefore such inequalities of capabilities of enjoyment do not exist, because they are by us inappreciable;... they can no more than the galvanic fluid be seized and measured.’⁵ In other words, the calculus of happiness does not enable us to calculate. These are deep and troubled waters; but so much had to be said to show how whole-heartedly Thompson believed that the increase of the sum-total of human happiness should be the end of all human endeavour; and inasmuch as wealth is produced to create happiness, that distribution of wealth is best which yields ‘the greatest possible quantity of happiness to those, the society or community, that produce it.’⁶

What then is the nature of this wealth, which is to be so distributed as to maximise human happiness? It is noteworthy that Thompson, like others of his school, defines wealth in such wise that the definition already contains implicitly the distant end which he hopes to prove. Wealth is defined as ‘that portion of the physical materials or means of enjoyment which is afforded by the labor and knowledge of man turning to use the animate or inanimate materials or productions of nature.’¹ Not merely is it true to say that ‘without labor there is no wealth’; but likewise ‘Labor is the sole parent of wealth’² Petty had allowed wealth to have a father and mother; Thompson assigns to wealth a parthenogenetic origin. Neither rarity, nor beauty, nor the pleasure to be derived from it; neither necessity nor utility can make an object wealth. Wealth springs from labour alone—always assuming that desire is present.³ Without suggesting any dishonest intent (for Thompson was the most honourable of men) it should be obvious that if the definition selected gives in advance an assurance that labour is the sole parent of wealth, this ought to be a considerable aid towards proving that wealth may be attributed entirely to labour.

We reach the central point in Thompson's thought, if we reflect that wealth is produced by labour, and that accordingly labour requires a stimulus to induce it to maintain the maximum of production. Is it, consistently with justice, possible to find such a stimulus? Or is there an everlasting conflict between the claims of justice and the claims of efficiency? It is a difficulty that Thompson never solved, perhaps for the adequately excellent reason that it is insoluble. It is, moreover, a difficulty which lies, an ineluctable stumbling-block, at the threshold of many socialist systems. If we attain justice, assuming that we know what justice is, do we run a fair chance of drying up the world's production? Putting it otherwise, if we concede as just the workers’ ‘right to the whole produce of labour,’ may we not be opening the door to the horridest inequality, of all things the most unjust? How far are certain of the ideals of socialism indistinguishable from the extremest and most selfish individualism? In the last analysisputting it in ethical terms—may we not each individually be acting with extreme selfishness in insisting that we receive the tribute of our just rights?

The dilemma is a familiar one and has often been urged by bourgeois economists; but it has never been more clearly stated than by Thompson. The inferences which he draws from the utilitarian theory impel him to regard equality as the ultimate expression of justice; but the necessity of finding a ‘stimulus’ simultaneously impels him to give the worker the whole fruits of his labour: for is not labour the sole parent of wealth, and accordingly is not the acknowledgment of this claim not merely another form of justice, but also the most cogent encouragement the worker can receive? For clearly the strongest possible stimulus is to be found in giving to the worker what Thompson calls ‘security.’¹ ‘Security,’ as he is well aware, is here used in rather a special sense. In fact, he distinguishes in this matter between genuine and false or spurious security.² Genuine security, as he understands it, means ‘the exclusive possession by every man of all the advantages of his labour’—in other words, the right of each worker to the whole produce of his individual labour; moreover, without security in this sense, ‘labour would not be called forth.’ False or spurious security, on the other hand, is something designed ‘to soothe the imaginary alarms of the rich, protecting mere possession, however acquired.’ But clearly, in so far as equality is attained, it will in general be at the expense of ‘security,’ in Thompson's sense of the word, and therefore will stultify the workers' stimulus to production. The application of equality would accordingly in such cases destroy the source of supply. Moreover, in an unexpectedly frank phrase, Thompson acknowledges that ‘non-production is a greater evil than inequality of distribution’³; likewise he acknowledges that the individual producers, unable to fight down the old Adam, would never consent that what they had produced for their own purposes and enjoyment should be taken from them and distributed to increase the happiness of others.⁴ Thus we see Thompson, confronted with the familiar difficulty that a theoretically more equitable system of distribution may get you no further, if its effect is to dry up the flow of production; or, to put it otherwise, we observe him torn between two conflicting ideals of justice, endeavouring to attain a basis of reconciliation.

Thompson's solution is not very satisfactory, and obviously he did not find it so. His general principle is that ‘wherever equality does not lessen production, it should be the sole object pursued. Wherever it decreases really useful production... it saps its own existence, and should cease.’⁵ In amplifying his argument, he postulates, after the manner of the theoretical economist, a hypothetical world where the necessary goods are produced independent of human effort, but only in quantities sufficient to give a limited supply. In these imaginary circumstances, an entire equality of distribution is the only equitable rule.⁶ But as soon as we turn to a world where these same goods are produced by labour, a new law of distribution must be introduced, since ‘every one sees that the blessings of equality cannot in this case be obtained without injury... to those whose exclusive labor has been employed in the production of the articles in question.’¹ The new law must seek to give the worker Thompsonian security, to which absolute equality must be sacrificed. But the resulting inequality, so far as it is regarded as permissible, must be reduced to a minimum. To the two fundamental principles that labour shall be free and voluntary, and that labour shall have ‘security’ as here understood, he now adds, as a step to the realisation of his compromise, a third condition, namely, that all exchanges, which inevitably arise in a world of division of labour, shall likewise be free and voluntary. It is in his discussion of this third principle that Thompson comes into the full stream of pre-Marxian thought. For in the past, and in the world as he saw it, there have been no ‘voluntary exchanges.’ The sole consideration has been ‘to enrich the dominant party, at the expense of the greater number of the community, of the productive laborers, seizing the products of their labor by force.²’ Force, in fact, has been universally prevalent: only in the United States of America (though Bray, now waiting to testify, might have taught him otherwise) have exchanges been voluntary. The whole tribe of ‘bounties, protections, apprenticeships, guilds, corporations, monopolies,’ and much more, all alike invade the sacred principle of security, and the no less sacred principle of equality, ‘which should never be departed from but in obedience to security,’ thus depriving the worker of his due.³

Among these deductions or ‘defalcations’ abstracted from what would otherwise be the reward of the worker, rent and profit naturally call for special consideration.⁴ It is significant that Thompson does not entirely wipe the capitalist out of the picture, as perhaps on the logic of his assumptions he ought. ‘Doubtless,’ he says, referring to capital products, ‘the laborer must pay for the use of these, when so unfortunate as not himself to possess them.’⁵ All these deductions, whether called profits, or taxes, or theft, discourage production.⁶ Moreover these capital goods are entirely attributable to the worker, and without the worker they are useless: ‘'Twas labor that gave to all these their value as wealth, before they came into the hands of the mechanic; and by his additional labor alone can their value be still further increased.’⁷ Nevertheless, despite his use of such unambiguous words as ‘defalcation’ and ‘theft,’ the only question raised by Thompson in confronting the problem of the relation of the worker to the employer relates to the amount payable for the use of capital goods: ‘the question is how much of the products of his labor ought to be subtracted for their use.’¹

Here then is the central problem: what should the worker pay for the hire of capital? And here he suggests, perhaps in rather misleading phraseology, what he called ‘two measures of the value of this use,’ according as the problem is viewed by the worker or the employer, respectively.² From the point of view of the worker, the contribution would be, briefly, the cost of replacement of the capital over the period of its depreciation and exhaustion, together with compensation to the owner to enable him to live ‘in equal comfort with the more actively employed productive laborers.’ The capitalist, on the other hand, looks for the additional value produced by labour in consequence of the use of machinery: ‘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.’ The ‘surplus value’ here spoken of by Thompson is not quite the same as the more notorious ‘surplus value’ of a later date; nevertheless the first, even if perhaps fortuitous, collocation of these two words on page 167 of Thompson's work almost deserves to rank as an event in socialist literature.

We thus arrive at Thompson's analysis of exploitation. In one place he states that the constant effort of the whole machinery of society has been ‘to deceive, and induce, to terrify and compel, the productive laborer to work for the smallest possible portion of the produce of his own labor.’³ This, of course, is merely crude and unrefined Ricardo, as later distilled into Marx. In the passage in which he alights on the phrase ‘surplus value’ the test is somewhat different. Here it is rather that the labourer shall be allowed to enjoy what he formerly enjoyed: ‘Before the invention of machinery... what was the amount of produce which the unaided powers of the laborer produced? Whatever that was, let him still enjoy’—along with the comfort of working with better tools.⁴ On the other hand, all the additional wealth due to the use of machinery goes to the capitalist, ‘as a reward for and stimulus to his superior intelligence in the fabrication or acquisition’ of the necessary buildings and machinery. While the worker's position thus remains stationary, the total fruits of progress fall to existing wealth. On the basis of the employers’ interpretation of what is due (and this is what is operative), it is inevitable that there should be vast accumulations of wealth in the hands of those who possess, at the expense of the less fortunate; and Thompson, in a glowing passage, which is singularly suggestive of the more prophetic pages in Marx, denounces the greed and the rapacity of the capitalist.¹

Perplexed by the insoluble problem of reconciling the conflicting claims of equality with those of the worker's right to his product (‘security’), Thompson turned more and more to what he called ‘voluntary equality in the distribution of wealth.’ By this phrase, in effect, he meant co-operation along Owenite lines, and the concluding part of his Distribution of Wealth and the later pamphlet, Labor Rewarded, tend to be expositions of the co-operative gospel. Labor Rewarded, it may be noted, professes in the first edition to be written by ‘One of the Idle Classes.’² In this later work he realises, more clearly than before, the impracticable selfishness implicit in the socialist ideal, if interpreted to mean that each worker should be individually assured of the entire product of his labour. ‘Were every active laborer strictly to consume himself the whole produce of his labor, what would be the consequences? The aged would starve. The very young would starve. Many women in producing and rearing children would starve.’ In fact, though he does not carry the argument so far, if all the farmers all over the world consumed all that they produce, the bulk of the world would starve. Thompson's difficulty has merely to be stated in order to indicate that what each produces is in fact indeterminate. The conclusion that he draws, however, is merely that ‘a necessity for mutual co-operation, for the mutual insurance of numbers, to a certain extent, immediately presents itself.’¹ Into his plea for co-operation it is not possible to enter here. But Labor Rewarded, though not adding much to its ponderous predecessor, has its interests. As the title may suggest, it is written in partial criticism of Hodgskin's Labour Defended; and, odd as it may appear, it is written as a mild plea on behalf of the capitalist against the harshness of Hodgskin. For Hodgskin would have entirely cut off all supplies from those living on interest and profit. That they ought not to fare better than other people Thompson readily admits: ‘but that they are not entitled to any share of the national produce will perhaps be conceded by few.’² On the other hand, he protests against the ‘preposterous claims of mental laborers to an exorbitant portion,’ such as he imagines he detects in Hodgskin. Why should he ‘shove capitalists out of the field of competition altogether,’ merely in order that ‘he himself and his associates may step into their vacant places.’³ It would, Thompson says, be a sorry exchange if the productive classes Were to pamper ‘a new host of conceited swaggerers... instead of the old stupid herd of capitalists.’⁴ Thompson, of course, was a landlord and a capitalist; Hodgskin looked upon himself as an intellectual. But, apart from this interchange of courtesies, which is of some slight entertainment-value in illustrating how hard it is, even for an enlightened altruistic utilitarian, to suppress the whisperings of self, Thompson is surprisingly sound in pointing out how difficult it is to eliminate the capitalist. From free exchanges (a principle dear to his heart) there springs the possibility of accumulation; from accumulation there springs the capitalist in posse: ‘you cannot abridge the exchanges and consequent accumulations of the capitalist without at the same time abridging all barter.’⁵ And no less searching is the question, springing from his love of unlimited freedom in all exchanges and contracts: ‘Why not permit the laborer to exchange for the use of a house, a horse, a machine, as well as for its possession?’⁶

Enough has perhaps been said to indicate the core of Thompson's criticisms, his perplexities and hesitations. But though they may not have much relevance to his place in the development of socialist doctrines, there are two passages which linger in the memory, revealing the man. The first is in the section dealing with the evils of competition, and for a moment the reader feels transported to the extravagant world of Fourier, whom it would be pleasing to think that Thompson had read. In words which come very closely to those used in one of Fourier's immortal libels, Thompson tells us:

In medicine, it is the interest of the physician to cure diseases, but to cure them as slowly and with as much profit as the competition of other medical men will permit. It is the interest of all medical men that diseases should exist and prevail, or their trade would be decreased ten or one hundred fold.

This criticism, of course, mutatis mutandis, applies to the whole world, and is so applied by Fourier, and indeed by Thompson, who finds everywhere a conflict between competition and benevolence. But having pointed to the doctor's natural tendency to cure disease as slowly as possible, carefully nursing a good illness, fearful lest it may be terminated by an untimely recovery, Thompson proceeds to add an illuminating comment:

Hence the almost universal inattention, nursed by the interests of physicians, to regimen, to the preservation of health, by attention to food, air, moisture, cleanliness, and all other circumstances influencing it.¹

That Thompson should thus, in 1824, so seize on the essentials of preventive medicine, italicising the crucial words, places him in the heart of one of our current controversies.

The other incidentally interesting point shows him in line with Bray in rebelling against the tyranny of parents. All parents, he finds, have a ‘tremendously despotic power’ over the minds and the bodies of their offspring; and this power, which is inseparable from the system of individual competition, is ‘liable to enormous abuses.’ Accordingly, this part of parental power, tending to evil purposes, should be ‘lopped off,’ leaving only that part that can be turned to ‘purposes of beneficence’—doubtless the equivalent of Bray's caressings of parental love. The same idea, of course, occurs in Fourier. On the whole, the best authorities seem to agree that there is much to be said in favour of the abolition—or the ‘lopping off’—of parents.

(e) THOMAS HODGSKIN

Among the English forerunners of Marx, it is Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) who gives most clearly the impression of intellectual eminence and distinction, and who leaves most acutely a feeling that here was one designed for greatness which, owing to the misfits of time and of life, was never attained. An officer in the Navy, his lively sensitiveness to injustice impelled him to publish in 1813 An Essay on Naval Discipline, which naturally resulted in the enforced abandonment of his profession. In 1815 he went abroad in order to observe the world and its ways, and for three years he wandered about France and Italy, but above all Germany, doing most of his travels on foot. After his return, he published in 1820 two very weighty volumes of Travels in the North of Germany, in which innocent Reisebtlder are interlarded with anarchistic and revolutionary digressions, doubtless to the amazement and perturbation of many of his readers. As one of his contemporaries complained, the information which the author conveyed was ‘interspersed with remarks, not in the best taste or indicating the soundest judgment and principles.’ In 1825, he wrote the short pamphlet which gives him his place in history, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital. Meanwhile he had become active in the establishment of the London Mechanics' Institution, where he delivered lectures which subsequently developed into Popular Political Economy (1827), where ‘popular,’ as Hodgskin himself points out, does not mean ‘amusing,’ but rather that the subject is approached from the point of view of the people. Somewhat later he published a volume in the form of letters addressed to Lord Brougham on The Natural and Artificial Rights of Property Contrasted; and thereafter in the lugubrious and pathetic phrase of M. Halévy—sombre as an epitaph—Hodgskin ‘disparaït, après 1832, dans l'obscurité du journalisme anonyme.’¹

Somewhat curiously, perhaps, the fundamental element in Hodgskin is a blend of Adam Smith and Godwin. He has the liberal distrust of the State, which in the anarchist becomes an obsession; and never by any chance does he shed his individualism. His very extensive book of travel is now chiefly of interest because of his reactions to the spectacle of ‘the much governed countries of Germany,’² and he eagerly seizes every opportunity of underlining the evils of government interference. Thus one typical comment is that ‘we may conclude that the real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.’³ This sentiment may indeed rise to a full confession of anarchist faith as in the following disturbing conclusion to a general chapter on the government of Hanover:

When it is remarked, that the prosperity of every nation is in an inverse proportion to the power and to the interference of its government, we may be almost tempted to believe the common opinion, that governments are necessary and beneficial, is one of those general prejudices which men have inherited from an ignorant and barbarous age, and which more extensive knowledge and greater civilisation will shew to be an error full of evil.⁴

Elsewhere he throws doubts on the utility of legislative assemblies generally, pointing out that ‘the whole of European legislation, in so far as the production of wealth is concerned, is, and has long been, a violation of all those natural laws by which wealth is produced.’¹ Nature, he reminds us, in a phrase reminiscent of the Physiocrats, has already made laws for the conduct of individuals and of nations, and further legislative assemblies would but increase the evils of too much government. Indeed he supports the extreme anarchist view that the existence of a penal law defeats its own end: it puts evil thoughts into our minds, and perversely we are beguiled into doing something which otherwise would never have entered into our heads to do: ‘when men are told they must not do any certain action under the penalty of being hung, they are immediately persuaded that it will be a great advantage to them to do it, provided they can escape detection.’² The ultimate ideal, in short, is to get away from the House of Commons and other similar institutions, looking forward to a time when the human race ‘will lose the idle reverence with which it now worships some individuals, and submit itself only to reason as its natural lord and sovereign.’³ In the unpublished correspondence with Place, and in his later writings which M. Halévy has piously retrieved in part from the tomb of anonymous journalism in which they were interred, there are even more extreme statements of his leanings to anarchism. It is, however, clear from what Hodgskin published under his own name, that the framework of his thought was fundamentally anarchistic.

No less interesting is it to note the sanity and the tolerance of Hodgskin in unexpected places. On the whole anarchists are somewhat innocent of the ways of the world which they condemn; but this criticism cannot be levelled against Hodgskin. His observations with regard to Trade in his Poptilar Political Economy are singularly appreciative. Retail dealers are ‘indispensable agents,’ and he sniffs at Mr. Owen, who imagines that in his co-operative parallelograms he can do without this useful race of men.⁴ When he turns to the wholesale trader, his dissertation resolves itself into a hymn in praise of trade and of the blessedness of free trade, which Adam Smith himself could not have bettered.⁵ Moreover his defence of this race of men is on familiar lines. ‘They take to their business with no such high object in view; they are led to it by an instinctive view of their own interest.’ But, while labouring for themselves they are useful to others. Their motives may be selfish, but the consequences of their proceedings are none the less beneficial.⁶ This is not merely the shadow of Adam Smith's invisible hand: it is the hand itself. Moreover, bankers—a much abused tribe—‘are still very important, and have long been very useful labourers.’⁷ Even here Hodgskin's laissez faire principles do not desert him: ‘Banking, let us never forget... is altogether a private business, and no more needs to be regulated by meddling statesmen, than the business of paper-making.’¹

One further example of surprising orthodoxy may be cited. Although Hodgskin has much to say of money-price and natural-price, his discussion leads to no revolutionary proposals. Indeed, his conclusion is that the price system is not merely the index to the wants of society; it is even ‘the finger of Heaven, indicating to all men how they may employ their time and talents most profitably for themselves, and most beneficially for the whole society.’² Even an orthodox economist of these days, brought up on Tales from the Viennese Woods, may well be forgiven if his faith falters when invited to identify the price-system with the finger of Heaven.

This extreme individualism, overflowing into anarchy, might, of itself, place Hodgskin in the line that runs from Godwin to Bakunin, and beyond. Within this framework, it is necessary to seek for those elements that make him a forerunner of Marx. Here the essential point in Hodgskin is to be found in the supreme importance which he attaches to labour in the scheme of things, and to his development of ideas which, on this point, he can claim to derive from Smith and Ricardo. For Hodgskin, labour is everything. In what is doubtless a rhetorical hyperbole, he tells us that ‘Labour, enlightened, well-directed labour, converts the sterile rock into a fertile field; and it is no exaggeration to say that it gathers bread from the salt wave.’³ In other words, his purpose is to eliminate land and capital, the other so-called factors of production, or alternatively reduce them to labour.⁴ Land does not create wealth, any more than rain or sunshine; and in a lengthy letter to Place, quoted by M. Halévy, he subjects the whole of the Ricardian analysis of Rent to a destructive criticism which is far from ineffective.⁵ Apart from human labour, there are, he argues, no original and indestructible qualities of the soil, and wages on the land are determined by the fact that the soil of Europe was formerly cultivated by slaves, and by memories of the remuneration formerly given to slaves.⁶ That the days of slavery and of bondsmen cast their shadows over the present is an idea that frequently recurs in Hodgskin's writings.

In the small pamphlet, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital,⁷ Hodgskin is chiefly concerned with the elimination of Capital as an agent of production, relying on an analysis of the teaching of economists on the question. First of all, what is this circulating capital, on which, according to McCulloch and the elder Mill, the worker is dependent while he is working?¹ Clearly, no capitalist possesses stores of commodities which he advances to his workers. Those things which the worker requires are produced as operations advance. Bread, for example, is baked daily; the capitalist does not start off with a store of bread which will see the job through. No worker depends on a previously prepared stock, for no such stock exists.² What he does depend on is the ‘co-existing labour’ of other workers. In short,

all classes of men carry on their daily toils in the full confidence that while each is engaged in his particular occupation some others will prepare whatever he requires, both for his immediate and future consumption and use.³

Turning to fixed capital, it is not merely that the necessary instruments and tools are nothing more than the products of labour: more emphatically the argument rests on the fact that in themselves these are but’ inert, decaying and dead matter,’ unless they are’ guided, directed and applied by skilful hands.’⁴ In short, ‘fixed capital 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.’⁵ Thus capital becomes ‘a sort of cabalistic word’⁶; ‘it is a miserable delusion to call capital something saved.’

With this emphasis on the supremacy of labour, implicit in the Ricardian theory of value, Hodgskin is able likewise to appeal to the Ricardian teaching on wages. Waiving reservations and refinements, in the gloomy Ricardian world wages are naturally such as will enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist, and perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution. ‘Such,’ comments Hodgskin in confirmation, ‘is all which the nature of profit or interest on capital will allow them to receive, and such has ever been their reward.’⁷ Thus while the benefits of division of labour should naturally belong to the labourers, ‘all the produce of increasing skill and knowledge, falls into the power of the rapacious landlord, the usurious capitalist, and the profligate dependents on, and profligate supporters of, profligate governments.’⁸ Capital, the universal middleman, is in a position to exact, and its demands are without bounds.

There are three points of general interest in which Hodgskin is more enlightened than some other members of this group. The first relates to the vexed question of the right of the worker to what he has himself produced. At times Hodgskin, perhaps incautiously, uses language in this matter which tends to a somewhat revolting and selfish individualism¹; but in his guarded moments, as in Labour Defended, he realises that in a complex world, resting on division of labour, it is impossible to speak of anyone producing anything, since everything becomes a joint venture: ‘there is no longer anything which we can call the natural reward of individual labour.’ There is nothing the worker can seize and say: ‘this is my product, this will I keep to myself.’² This is a just observation, and it is a consideration which torpedoes much socialist argument, including also some of Hodgskin's own most effective passages. Nor is it easy to devise a solution. Hodgskin's own suggestion is futile to the point of fatuity. It is that the question be left to be settled by ‘the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves,’ but when the meaning of labour is extended, as Hodgskin is willing to extend it, this assuredly offers no broad highway to the paradise of industrial peace. The second point of some interest is that Hodgskin finds it expedient to enter a mild protest against the tendency to restrict ‘labour’ to manual labour. Mental skill is as important as muscular exertion, and accordingly Hodgskin, writing anonymously as a ‘Labourer,’ reinforces his nomde-plume by cautioning his fellow-labourers ‘not to limit the term labour to the operations of the hands.’³

And thirdly, Hodgskin is extraordinarily clear as to the distinction between the capitalist and the undertaker, whose functions are frequently merged in one person. ‘Masters,’ he says emphatically, ‘are labourers as well as their journeymen,’ and in so far as they are labourers, their interests are identical with those of their men. It is as capitalists that they appear as middlemen and oppressors, and for correct reasoning it is necessary to divide that part of the master which makes him a labourer from that other part in virtue of which he is a capitalist and an oppressor.⁴ The wages of the master have been ‘blended’ with the profits of the capitalist,⁵ and though doubtless their labours have been remunerated too highly, it is clear that Hodgskin has no objection to ‘wages of management’ as such. Indeed, he rather casts a fly over the noses of the employers by suggesting that in the event of the profit of the capitalist being diminished, ‘the masters, as skilled labourers, will share in the increased rewards of industry.’⁶

Hodgskin's pre-eminent service is thus in pushing towards their final conclusions the implications of classical political economy, above all as represented by the Ricardian theories of value and wages; and his criticism is accompanied by a generous sentiment of indignation which at times rises to eloquence, as in a notable passage towards the end of Labour Defended:

I am certain, however, that till the triumph of labour be complete; till productive industry alone be opulent, and till idleness alone be poor, till the admirable maxim that ‘he who sows shall reap’ be solidly established; till the right of property shall be founded on principles of justice, and not on those of slavery; till man shall be held more in honour than the clod he treads on, or the machine he guides—there cannot, and there ought not to be either peace on earth or goodwill amongst men.¹

Yet, after a full diet of Hodgskin, most readers will feel a certain sense of disappointment that so little is said as to the path to be followed to realise his dreams. Hodgskin is in no way hostile to property. Property, he assures us, is the result of natural laws, and indeed he speaks of the ‘sacredness of the present right of property’—although, it is true, this sacredness is chiefly emphasised against ‘the aggressions and violations of government.’² But property, to be justified, must be based on individual industry: the ideal is that ‘labour shall be opulent and idleness have nothing.’³ But although in the passage from Labour Defended cited above, Hodgskin recognises the difficulty, under modern conditions, of saying what any one produces, nevertheless in general he continues to think in terms of an individual worker producing something which will be irrevocably his, to the exclusion of all others. Property, indeed, is defined as a man's right ‘to appropriate whatever he creates by his own labour.’ He is, however, somewhat vague as to his ultimate ends, as to how these aims may be attained, as to how, if attained, they may be preserved, unless serious limitations are imposed on that right of property which he regards as essential. In short the stubborn individualism, not to say anarchism, which lies at the foundation of Hodgskin's thoughts exercises throughout a somewhat paralysing influence on his aspirations to socialism.

(f) J. F. BRAY

Of J.' F. Bray, the author of Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy (1839), very little is known beyond the fact that his name appears on the title-page of this book. Of all the pre-Marxian writers, he is perhaps in places the most Marxian. Though at times not wholly guiltless of a certain repetitiveness, he nevertheless writes with fire in the essential passages, so that even after more than a century he holds the attention more than most of his contemporaries. His background is not markedly dissimilar from that of other members of the group, and may be described as a blend of Owen and Godwin. More specifically, he is frankly utilitarian. Like others of his age, he can claim insight into the mind of the Almighty and is zealous for the reputation of his Creator. ‘To assert that, amidst a universe of joy, man alone is born to sorrow and to trouble, is to commit a foul libel upon the Almighty and perfect disposer of all things!’¹ ‘The Creator,’ as he elsewhere observes, ‘intended all creatures to be happy’²; if a man is now unhappy, it is because he exists in an unnatural state. Further, he is at one with Owen and Godwin in his extreme belief that men are made by their environment, and that by the application of the appropriate environment they can be made into anything. Character, whether good or bad, is but a factitious quality acquired by man. The European and the Ethiopian, different as they may be, could be made to change characters and opinions by effecting an exchange of the influences to which they have been respectively exposed.³ ‘Circumstances,’ that blessed word that fascinated Owen, ‘furnish the seed of good or ill, and man is but as the soil in which they grow.’⁴ Lastly, Bray is a most thorough-going pessimist with regard to things as they are: ‘it is certain that a worse system than the present one can by no possibility be devised.’⁵ The voice of pessimism could not be more emphatic.

If men, despite the intention of the Creator, are thus, and ever have been unhappy, what is the secret enemy, ‘the Great Enemy,’ that has thus frustrated the scheme of things?⁶ With a great cloud of other witnesses, Bray points to the ‘institution of property as it now exists’; later, and perhaps not wholly consistently, he follows Rousseau in declaring that ‘all the wrongs and the woes which man has ever committed or endured, may be traced to the assumption of a right in the soil, by certain individuals and classes, to the exclusion of other individuals and classes.’⁷ The secret enemy is thus to be found in the existence of property, especially in land, and in the fact that whereas man was meant to live ‘in communion,’ there is division between employers and employed, between idlers and workers. Also this is not a question of Government: Bray glances at the conditions of republican America, and witnessing there the extremes of inequality, he is content to shrug his shoulders.⁸

In seeking to refashion the world it is necessary to go to the root of the matter and to adhere to first principles, and Bray takes pride in doing so. Of such first principles, he enunciates four which, he claims, are ‘promulgated in the great book of Nature.’ The first is that all men are alike; their nature and their wants are the same Secondly, with reasons annexed, every human being ought to labour. Thirdly, since men are alike, their rights must be equal, and consequently the earth, from which all draw their sustenance, must be the common property of all its inhabitants. To these he adds, fourthly, on a somewhat different plane, that equality of labour ought to receive equality of reward.¹ As against these first principles, instituted by the Creator for the guidance and welfare of man, we are confronted with a world in which property in land has led by degrees to what in effect is property in man, in which all laws are tyrannical and all known governments are irresponsible.²

Proceeding, Bray calls the exponents of Political Economy to the witness-box; for it is a favourite sport of the time to cross-examine these hostile witnesses, and extort from them damaging admissions, thus ‘fighting them upon their own ground and with their own weapons.’³ The economists, who are here a somewhat shadowy race, have laid down three conditions for the production of wealth; firstly, that there shall be labour; secondly, that there shall be accumulations of former labour, known as capital; and thirdly, that there shall be exchanges.⁴

How in the eyes of Bray, looking around him, are these conditions observed? With regard to the first, it is argued that the injunction to labour applies to society as a whole; it is a general law to which there are no reservations. Somewhat absurdly, we are told that ‘the ban—“THOU SHALT LABOUR”—rests alike on all created beings. To this great law, from the minutest animalcule in a drop of water, to the most stupendous whale which dives beneath the waves of the ocean, there are naturally, and there should be artificially, no exceptions.’ The ban can only be avoided by one man at the expense of another; if some escape labour, the burden rests heavier elsewhere. Moreover, although with less felicity of expression, he anticipates Browning's observation that all service ranks the same with God. Inequality of value in labour is no reason for inequality of reward. Convenience and justice alike are on the side of equality of reward, provided there has been equal application of labour. We are all ‘links,’ and in effect one job is not more important than another. If the inventor wants more than the man who works his invention, he can rely on ‘the tribute of our admiration.’ Such in outline is Bray's argument, in which, as might be pointed out in a junior debating society, the condition that ‘there shall be labour’ is surreptitiously changed in mid-stream to the divine injunction, ‘Thou shalt labour,’ addressed alike to the minutest animalcule and the most stupendous whale.⁵

With regard to the second of the conditions fathered on the ‘econo mists,’ that of the necessary ‘accumulations,’ Bray endeavours to eliminate the individual from the picture, and to make wealth a national inheritance and its continuance a national responsibility. Our ‘accumulations’ come from preceding generations, and we ‘merely hold them as it were in trust, for the benefit of ourselves and our successors’¹ It is our duty to hand on these accumulations with an appropriate increase: but it is vain to ask the ‘productive classes,’ as Bray almost invariably calls them, to accumulate, since the existing accumulations ‘which have been handed down for the benefit of the present generation as a whole,’ have been appropriated and are enjoyed exclusively by particular individuals and classes. It will be observed that, without expressly saying so, Bray makes the nation, or the State, the universal heir on the demise of each of its citizens: all inherited wealth belongs to the community. It is an approach to the view, if not of Saint-Simon, at least of the Saint-Simonians.²

It is with regard to the third condition, namely, that there shall be exchanges, that Bray is most effective and most obviously the begetter of Marxian thought. An exchange takes place between two parties, each of whom gives to the other something which he desires less than that which he receives in exchange.³ The example to which he devotes his entire attention is the pre-eminently Marxian one of the labour contract between the worker and the employer. In a system of exchange, it is necessary that the parties should be not merely mutually benefited, but also equally benefited. ‘Equal values should always exchange for equal values’—a dark saying which postulates that we know what value is. Exchange should therefore be ‘equal’: it is Bray's thesis that in this imperfect world all exchanges are ‘unequal exchanges,’ and it is in the curse of unequal exchanges that we must look for the root of all our troubles. For what happens now is that the worker gives the capitalist the labour of a whole year in exchange for the value of only half a year⁴; he gives the employer six days’ labour for an equivalent worth only four or five days’ labour.⁵ Indeed it is an understatement to say that we are here dealing with unequal exchanges: strictly speaking, there is no exchange whatever. For the capitalist gives nothing. He gives no labour, for he is innocent of work; he clearly gives no capital, for by definition a capitalist is incessantly growing more and more wealthy. What really happens is that ‘the capitalists and proprietors do no more than give the working man, for his labour of one week, a part of the wealth which they obtained from him the week before!’ He gives the worker nothing for something. The whole transaction is thus, in the words of Bray, a palpable deception, a mere farce, a barefaced though legalised robbery.⁶ All this is of the essence of Marx, and it is perhaps not wholly insular pride that makes one feel that in some ways it is rather better done than in Marx. Nor does Bray fall behind in his purple passages, as when he declares that ‘this wealth has all been derived from the bones and sinews of the working classes during successive ages, and it has been taken from them by the fraudulent and slavery-creating system of unequal exchanges.’¹ It is also due to the unseen magic of these unequal exchanges that Capital and Labour have become two separate and antagonistic powers; and that the wealth and supremacy of one class is based upon the poverty and degradation of the other.² It is only an extension of the same argument that, in the matter of taxation, the whole burden rests on the workers, since the capitalists, inasmuch as they give no aid in production, have nothing of their own with which to pay taxes. Likewise, of course, the establishment of equal exchanges would compel the idler to work.³

To meet such a situation, a complete change of system is necessary. Bray devotes considerable space to proving what he calls the ‘Inutility’ of the remedies ordinarily advanced. All suggestions fail because they aim at effects, leaving causes sacred and untouched⁴: but what else is to be expected from ‘shallow-pated drivellers’? Political remedies are useless; so likewise are the efforts of Trade Unions. In an illuminating phrase, these aim merely at ‘the partial amelioration of the condition of the working class as a working class.’⁵ In other words, Trade Unions would leave the employer-employed nexus intact. Emigration, then a popular remedy, would under existing conditions merely alter the scene of the workers’ injustices. As to the form of society which should replace that in which mankind now suffers, Bray is clear that ‘community of possessions is in every respect the most perfect form of society which man can institute,’⁶ and the phrase is almost an echo of Plato. Unfortunately, it demands a ‘corresponding degree of excellence’ of those who would enter this earthly paradise. Bray is clear-sighted here on a point where many visionaries have been blind. He realises that past communistic experiments have often failed because those who entered ‘were taken almost promiscuously from the world at large, and they carried with them their old feelings, prejudices and habits.’⁷ There is a certain danger in filling the streets of the New Jerusalem with the damaged goods of this world, tainted by ‘the foul and loathsome selfishness which now more or less accompanies every action, clings to every thought, and pollutes every aspiration.’⁸ Consequently, those who seek to introduce the new system must be possessed of sufficient capital to tide over the period of man's regeneration, or alternatively we must be content for the present with a half-way house.¹

To the elaboration of such an ‘intermediate resting-place,’ which he describes elsewhere as ‘fitted to take society as it is, and to prepare the way for other and better changes,’² Bray devotes considerable attention; but on this point it is perhaps unnecessary to follow him in any detail here. He was obviously impressed by the progress and efficiency of Joint Stock Companies, and he had the insight to realise that ‘these companies are usurping, in all directions, the places and occupations hitherto confined to individual capitalists and traders.’³ He is accordingly inspired to propose that there should be a ‘jointstock modification of society.’⁴ Each trade is to establish within itself the germs of a future company. In the end, society will be ‘as it were, one great joint-stock company, composed of an indefinite number of smaller companies, all labouring, producing and exchanging with each other on terms of the most perfect equality’⁵; and, of course, the individual employers and capitalists will be superseded. Bray's account, especially on the side of finance (where he is invariably weak) is not wholly clear; but the end result, so far as it is possible to visualise it, would appear to yield a society which would be something like a cross between the projects of Robert Owen and Louis Blanc.

There is, however, one point in this ‘joint-stock system’ which is of more than topical interest. Bray is one of the earliest and most extreme advocates of Family Endowment, and would end the dependence of wives on their husbands and of children on their parents. ‘The maintenance and education of children by their parents is,’ he declares, ‘a glaring defect in every social system in which the practice prevails.’ Every child should be looked upon as the child of society, and parents should have ‘no offices to perform but the caressings of parental love.’⁶ Bray is entirely silent as to the machinery, financial and otherwise, required to realise his scheme of family endowment; but as an instalment towards the complete ‘community’ which is his ultimate aim, the disappearance of the family is almost inevitably imposed upon him.

From the point of view of persuasive propaganda, Bray is probably the most effective of the English pre-Marxians. Perhaps on a second, and still more on subsequent perusals, the reader may have an uneasy feeling that not infrequently he contrives to smuggle the thesis to be proved in amongst the definitions and the postulates from which he starts out. But, of course, he is not unique in this respect. Indeed, it is perhaps the essence of successful propaganda.

(g) JOHN GRAY

John Gray is one of the liveliest of the early English anticipators of Marx; but his greater liveliness has not prevented him from becoming, like some other members of the group, a somewhat shadowy figure. He is said to have been of Scottish extraction, to have worked in London in his younger days and to have returned to Scotland later, where, contrary to the views of Dr. Johnson, greater prosperity awaited him. After the manner of mankind, he would seem to have become less revolutionary with advancing years. Here we are concerned with his earlier days as represented by his Lecture on Human Happiness, which, published in 1825, when Marx was seven years old, provides in many ways a somewhat remarkable anticipation of certain of the cornerstones of the Marxian edifice.

Gray's starting-point is in some ways reminiscent of Adam Smith, who placed Division of Labour in Chapter 1 of Book I, and founded it on a peculiar ‘propensity to truck.’ According to Gray it is a ‘propensity to exchange labour for labour’ that enables men to leave the lower creation behind.¹ It is through barter, and not through the defects of government, that the possibility of tyrannising was introduced into the world; it is on barter and barter alone that society is founded; on barter and barter alone that all institutions rest. This startingpoint is cunningly chosen in order to emphasise later the importance of just exchanges. Further, Gray, as becomes his times, is undilutedly utilitarian: happiness is ‘the end and object of every human pursuit.’² Nor will he be fobbed off with the soothing consolation that happiness consists in the pursuit and not in the possession of the object desired. With the voice of common sense, Gray makes it clear that when he pursues, he means to get there; that while he is prepared to travel joyfully, he also means to arrive.

Which of us, when overtaken with hunger or thirst, ever found more pleasure in the pursuit than in the enjoyment of food? Which of us, if by chance exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, drenched with rain, or frozen with cold, ever experienced more pleasure in the search of a fireside than in the enjoyment of it?³

To the importance of barter as the basis of civil society, to the utilitarian assumption that happiness is alone what matters, it is necessary, in order to complete Gray's fundamental assumptions, to add the distinction between productive and unproductive labour—that evil legacy of the Physiocrats. Every necessary, convenience or comfort of life comes from labour. Various types of labour are indicated, and all who do not fall within this classification are unproductive and useless members of society, and are (in the largest capitals) a. ‘DIRECT TAX’ on the productive classes.¹ Moreover, Gray's idea of productive labour is extremely narrow. As he says elsewhere, with all the added emphasis of italics, ‘they only are productive members of society who apply their own hands either to the cultivation of the earth itself, or to the preparing and appropriating the produce of the earth to the uses of life’²; beyond this, he makes a somewhat grudging concession in the case of merchants, manufacturers and others (‘mere distributors of wealth’) who are ‘useful only in a sufficient number.’

With these guides to our footsteps, let us see what society, as we know it, looks like. Gray's general view, disclosed in a passing observation, is that it is wonderful that ‘the existing arrangements of society drive comparatively so few men mad.’³ He had been much impressed, as were all his generation, by Colquhoun's General View of Society, which purported to show, for 1812, how the New Property in Great Britain and Ireland, arising from various sources, was distributed among the various classes of the community.⁴ On the restricted definition of ‘productive labour’ to which Gray adheres, his conclusion, on the figures given by him, is that the productive classes fall considerably short of half the total population, and that they receive only about a fifth of what they produce.¹ Gray is most interesting and at times most spicy in the comments which he adds on the fifty-one categories into which, building on Colquhoun, he divides the population, and which indeed he annotates seriatim. Thus in sweeping aside that comprehensive group labelled ‘Nobility, Gentry, Knights, Esquires, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he adds, very much in the manner of Owen, the extenuating plea, that ‘it has been the misfortune, not the fault, of the higher classes, to be born under an unjust system.’² On his modest proposal for the abolition of every kind of lawyer ‘without a single exception,’ Gray speaks with the authentic voice of Godwin. Like many others, he seems to be under the curious impression that all law is criminal law, and that all lawyers spend all their waking hours in trafficking with crime and criminals. The argument for abolishing lawyers is that punishment, so far from preventing crime, has an invariable tendency to increase it. The magnitude of crime keeps pace with the magnitude of punishment. ‘Invariable kindness’ is the only effective prescription. We must exhibit to the understanding, without anger, the effects which bad actions produce in society. It is gratifying to know that this mode of treatment can never fail to produce the desired effect—although, admittedly, it must be persevered in.³ Could Godwin himself have put it more clearly?

In his comment on the group of ‘Shopkeepers and Tradesmen retailing goods,’ Gray achieves an effect of extravavagant fantasy which is more in line with Fourier. The number of these, he remarks with sobriety, is ‘limited not to those who are really required to transact the business of a town in a rational and proper manner, but to those who can get a living in it.’ As for the race of shopkeepers themselves, he says with a fine irony:

Certain it is that these men are not unproductive, for never, upon the face of the earth, was there anything half so productive of deception and falsehood, folly and extravagance, slavery of the corporeal, and prostitution of the intellectual faculties of man, as the present system of retail trade.... A fourth or fifth part of their time is expended in decorating their shop windows, that is, in spoiling goods, and at least half of it in waiting about for their customers or doing nothing useful.⁴

Somewhat in the same spirit, and on this same question of retail trade, there is a passage elsewhere to the effect that false representation is the inevitable end of competition. Equal capitals, with equal skill and industry, will command goods at equal prices; and consequently, there follows a never-ceasing competition in which each strives to make his goods appear cheaper than his neighbour's. Truth is of no use here, and it follows that falsehood must be resorted to:

What says experience? There is not one advertisement in one hundred, which appears in the public prints, relating to the prices of goods in retail shops, but what is untrue. Let any man deny this, who knows anything of business. The printers of newspapers ought to place all advertisements from retail shops, under the head of ‘Falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.’ Can general sincerity exist in such a state of society as this?¹

Without venturing on an assessment of the justice of Gray's final conclusion, it will be observed that the underlying postulate is that there exists everywhere ‘equal industry and skill’—in other words, he assumes the existence of that uniformity of man which so frequently emerges in the socialist tradition.

In this analysis of society, what are we to make of the ‘independent classes’? Remembering the primary assumption that everything comes from labour, then these independent classes are of all men the most dependent. They are indeed doubly dependent: they are dependent on the industry of their fellow-creatures, and they are dependent on the injustice which enables them to command it. The first point is proved by an obvious train of reasoning:

They are dependent upon the baker for their bread, and upon the butcher for their meat. They are dependent upon the bricklayer for their houses, and upon the upholsterer for the furnishing of them. They are dependent upon the tailor and upon the dressmaker for their clothes; and upon their valets and maids to put them on. If there is a name which, better than any other, will describe this class of men, it is the word DEPENDENTS.²

If it be argued in rebuttal that they live on their property, then Gray replies, almost in the words of Marx, that’ Labour is the sole foundation of property, and that, in fact, all property is nothing more than accumulated labour.’³ If the defence further is that they give an equivalent in money for what they consume, then it may be answered that the money is not theirs to give. It springs from Rent and Interest, which have no foundation in justice, and therefore the independent classes are solely dependent upon injustice for their daily bread. To us in these days there again appears to be undue emphasis on rent and interest, which are not the sole, nor, in our times, the main sources of excessive gains. Whatever breeds millionaires nowadays, it is certainly neither rent nor interest in any exact sense. So far as rent is concerned, in Gray's view it rests solely on the ‘power and custom of obtaining it.’⁴ Interest is merely another method of obtaining labour without giving an equivalent for it. In a rather ridiculous illustration, he imagines a manufacturer of hats, accumulating 10,000 hats valued at 20s. each. He turns these into money, and after living well for a lifetime, he still has intact the equivalent of his 10,000 hats. ‘Can the bee do this? Can the ant do this?’ he pertinently asks.¹ It is like a burlesque inversion of a music-hall song of a generation ago, which, after reciting the accomplishments of a hen, asked with equal relevance: ‘Could Lloyd George do it?’ As St. Paul observed, there are diversities of gifts.

As against this type of spoliation, ‘all just contracts have for their foundation equal quantities of labour.’ This, of course, is drawn from Ricardo unalloyed, slurring all the points of difficulty; but it is in line with Gray's starting-point that society is based on barter, and that it is by the door of barter—unjust barter—that tyranny enters into the world.

In contrast with the sorry state of the world as we see it, what, Gray asks, would be the position if the ‘useful labourer’ were allowed to ‘keep for his own use the property he creates’?² For this is the only reform required: and it will be observed that it has the strict individualistic tendencies of all rigorous announcements of the right of each to his entire produce. To take only one suggestive point in passing, this right of each to his whole produce without impairment, is clearly inconsistent with any form of Poor Law or public assistance, otherwise than on a voluntary basis. Logically, indeed, it may be doubted whether it can be reconciled with any system of taxation, other than that which might be imposed by a State ridden by the extremest laissez faire doctrine. The result of such a reform, in Gray's opinion, would however be to produce a state of universal opulence for all, at the cost of but a few hours’ daily work; for Gray, like most of the group, is a convinced adherent of the ‘poverty-in-the-midst-of-the-possibility-of-plenty’ idea. He refers to the most important truth ever submitted to the mind of man, which is that, while poverty prevails,

those very inhabitants, aided by the great mechanic power of which they are possessed, are capable of creating, by their own labour, all those necessaries and comforts of life to an almost unlimited extent, certainly to an extent amply sufficient to supply the wants of every member of their respective communities.³

In analysing why society falls short of its potentialities in this respect, Gray in part discloses points of view with which we are, now at least, familiar; in part also he dwells in darkness. Fundamentally, he endeavours to show that at present Capital is brought into competition with Capital, instead of being brought to act in conjunction with it. This is a clear pointer in the direction of the replacement of competition by co-operation. There are, it is argued, two natural limits to the production of wealth, to be found, firstly, in the exhaustion of our productive powers, or, secondly, in the satisfaction of our needs. But we have created a third, and unnatural, limit to production, as represented by Competition.¹

This third limitation of production springs fundamentally from the fact that, as things are at present, production is determined by, and is dependent upon, demand. The question is never that of ascertaining how much is required to satisfy the needs of mankind; but rather, how much can be disposed of at a profit. What is produced has no regard to the satisfaction of our wants or the extent of our powers of production; it is determined solely by a calculation as to how much the market can absorb and still yield a profit.² It is unnecessary to observe that this argument is one of the corner-stones of Guild Socialism of a later generation, crystallised in the familiar phrase that production, as we know it, is for profit and not for use.

So far, we are on easy and familiar ground. If, however, production is limited by demand, the next stage in the argument is to enquire what it is that limits demand. Demand is nothing more than the aggregate quantity of wealth which ‘the labour, the services, and the property’ of the whole community will command.³ But this, in each case, according to Gray, is kept down to a minimum by the influence of competition. So far as concerns wages, the argument is obvious, and in the circumstances of the time sufficiently cogent. It is a straightforward invocation of Ricardian and Marxian ideas. The competition of the unemployed, ‘candidates for employment,’ has the effect of ‘keeping down the quantity obtained by the mass, to that portion which is just sufficient to support bodily strength and to continue their race.’⁴ But Gray is not content with an Iron Law of Wages: he will have an Iron Law operative throughout the whole of society, manifesting itself in an Iron Law of Profit, and an Iron Law of Interest, and so on. Thus profits are cut down to a minimum by competition, each being compelled by competition to sell as near as may be to cost price; and the same, mutatis mutandis, applied to the rent of houses and the interest on money. These conclusions lead to a general principle:

That, therefore, the income of EVERY INDIVIDUAL, and consequently of the WHOLE COMMUNITY, except only those persons who have fixed money incomes, is LIMITED BY COMPETITION, and that each obtains the LEAST that his labour, his services, or the use of his property CAN POSSIBLY BE OBTAINED FOR.⁵

This analysis, be it said with all respect, is not merely confused; it defeats the end of Gray's argument, if it does not border on the absurd. The exploitation of the worker under a Ricardian-Lassallean Iron Law is a sufficiently comprehensible concept; but the exploitation, where it exists, is to the advantage of the other party to the transaction. Here we are asked to view (sympathetically) the landlord and the capitalist being ground down to the lowest rent or the lowest rate of interest he can possibly accept (as doubtless he may be under the inexorable law of Austrian economics where the margin dominates the situation); but a society which is characterised by exploitation must manifest exploiters and exploitees. Gray's world is one consisting entirely of exploitees—apart from those who are in receipt of fixed money incomes. Even these, it may be observed incidentally, will doubtless have their incomes fixed as low as possible: in a world where the Iron Law of Wages is stalking about seeking whom it may devour, even an Education Authority, in fixing the wages of its teachers, will obey its stern behests.

The final result of this unnatural restraint on production is more clearly stated than the argument on which it rests. It is that the inhabitants of this country are now ‘in possession of powers by which they can create wealth without any known limits, and yet one-half of them are in a state of actual poverty.’¹

Perhaps Gray tails off in cogency towards the end of his argument. His diagnosis—which is broadly that of an insufficiency of purchasing power everywhere—would seem to point to a monetary solution; and indeed it was the question of money with which Gray concerned himself in his later years. At the stage of the Lecture on Human Happiness he is content to say that competition, the unnatural barrier which forces poverty upon us, must be abolished. But apart from giving an assurance that it could be abolished at any time, without the slightest difficulty, it cannot be said that he is very helpful to any crusader who would seek to follow in his footsteps. No doubt he appends articles of agreement for the formation of a community on principles of mutual co-operation, which seem to foreshadow a cross between Owen and Fourier. Those who are interested in the affiliation of ideas will note with interest how much of Fourier there is in the seventeenth of these articles, which lays down that every species of co-operative exertion is to be rendered attractive to the members; and that one way of engendering attraction is ‘by the facility and variety of occupations, no one occupation continuing, except by choice, for more than two or three successive hours.’² Fourier's butterfly, while demurring to the monstrous and inordinate length of these ‘sessions,’ would have conceded that Gray was on the right lines.

Such is John Gray, and though he may not have completed the journey to the Finland Station, his place as an exponent of Marxism at a time when Marx was still playing marbles, or should have been playing marbles, in the streets of Trier, is sufficiently remarkable. He taught that property was but accumulated labour; he taught the doctrine of exploitation, indeed of robbery and of spoliation; he taught that the competition of the unemployed (later to be enrolled as the Industrial Reserve Army) pressed down wages until they were merely sufficient to enable the workers to continue their race. If something more specifically Marxian in phraseology is required, let it be recalled that Gray explained the poverty of the poor by the fact that there are ‘persons who buy their labour from them at one price, and sell it at another.’