Arguments And Debates Among Early Socialists

1. Introduction

Early socialists did not always agree. I provide an account of an idiosyncratic selection of a couple of Ricardian socialists, including a later dispute about priority and a debate with philosophical radicals, that is, liberals. I have been reading John Cassidy's new book. He has a chapter on William Thompson.

2. William Thompson, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Anton Menger

I start with William Thompson, the author in 1824 of An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness. Thompson built upon the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and David Ricardo. Apparently, Thompson was to first to argue for equality of distribution on the basis of utilitarianism. An extra $100 has a lot more utility to a poor man than a rich one. He coined the term "surplus value", and his political economy had a structure much like Karl Marx's later system, with some differences. Thompson advocated, along with Robert Owen, for mutual co-operation, as in intentional communities.

"it was Ricardo's crude generalisations which gave modern socialism its fancied scientific basis, and provoked, if they did not justify, its revolutionary form… Ricardo ... did more than any intentionally socialist writer to sap the foundations of that form of society which he was trying to explain, and which he believed to be the typical and natural, if not, indeed, the ideal social state...

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. His first section has the familiar Ricardian ring. 'Wealth is produced by labor: no other ingredient but labor makes any object of desire an object of wealth. Labor is the sole universal measure, as well as the characteristic distinction of wealth.' Give the word 'labour' its popular meaning, and it is merely an affair of logic to deduce a large part of modern socialism from this position. Whatever qualifications Ricardo may have made upon it in his own mind, ninety-nine readers out of a hundred took him literally, and the main impression left by his book was that while wealth was almost exclusively due to labour, it was mainly absorbed by rent and other payments to the unproductive classes. This was the text which Thompson and the English socialists proceeded to elaborate." -- H. S. Foxwell

Anton Menger says that Marx basically copied Thompson and other Ricardian socialists:

"Marx is completely under the influence of the earlier English socialists, and more particularly of William Thompson. Leaving out of account the mathematical formulae by which Marx rather obscures than elucidates his argument, 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. Only Marx, in accordance with the aim of his work, pays special attention to the one form of unearned income (interest on capital), and fails to give either that juridical criticism of private property in instruments of production and useful commodities which is the necessary supplement of the theory of surplus value, or a rigorous exposition of the right to the whole produce of labour. In all these respects Marx is far inferior to Thompson." -- Anton Menger

Engels would have none of it:

"In order, to drag Marx down, his achievements are attributed to other socialists in whom no one is interested, who have vanished from the scene and who have no political or scientific importance any longer. In this way they hope to dispose of the founder of the proletarian world view, and indeed the world view itself. Mr. Menger undertook the task. People are not professors for nothing. They want to make their mark, too...

The present social order gives landowners and capitalists a 'right' to part - the bulk - of the product produced by the worker… So whoever first said that the present right of those who own the soil and the other means of production to part of the proceeds of labour is a wrong is the great man, the founder of 'scientific' socialism. And these men were Godwin, Hall and Thompson. Leaving out all the interminable economic fripperies and getting to the legal residue, Menger finds nothing but the same assertion in Marx. Consequently Marx simply copied these old Englishmen, particularly Thompson, and took care to keep quiet about his source. The proof has been adduced.

We give up any attempt to make this hidebound lawyer understand that nowhere does Marx demand the 'right to the full proceeds of labour', that he makes no legal demands of any kind at all in his theoretical works. Even our lawyer seems to have a faint inkling of this when he reproaches Marx for nowhere giving 'a thorough presentation of the right to the full proceeds of labour'.

In Marx's theoretical studies legal right, which always merely reflects the economic conditions prevalent in a specific society, is only considered as a matter of purely secondary importance; his main concern is the historical justification for certain conditions, modes of appropriation and social classes in specific ages, the investigation of which is of prime importance to anyone who sees in history a coherent, though often disrupted, course of development rather than, as the eighteenth century did, a mere muddle of folly and brutality. Marx views the historical inevitability of, and hence the justification for, the slave-owners of classical times, the feudal lords of the Middle Ages, etc., as the lever of human development for a limited historical period. He thereby also recognises the temporary historical justification for exploitation, for the appropriation of the product of labour by others. Yet at the same time he demonstrates that not only has this historical justification disappeared, but that the continued existence of exploitation in any form, far from furthering social development, is daily impeding it more and more and involving it in increasingly violent collisions. Menger's attempt to force these epoch-making historical investigations into his narrow, legalistic Procrustean bed only goes to show his total inability to understand things that go beyond the narrowest legal horizon." – Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky (1887).

Both Menger and Engels and Kautsky have a lot more to say.

3. William Thompson and J. S. Mill

William Thompson and others had a public debate with John Stuart Mill in 1825. Mill was then a teenager, a liberal, a philosophical radical, and an utilitarian.

"There was for some time in existence a society of Owenites. called the Cooperative Society, which met for weekly public discussions in Chancery Lane. In the early part of 1825, accident brought Roebuck in contact with several of its members, and led to his attending one or two of the meetings and taking part in the debate in opposition to Owenism.

Some one of us started the notion of going there in a body and having a general battle: and Charles Austin and some of his friends who did not usually take part in our joint exercises, entered into the project. It was carried out by concert with the principal members of the Society, themselves nothing loth, as they naturally preferred a controversy with opponents to a tame discussion among their own body. The question of population was proposed as the subject of debate: Charles Austin led the case on our side with a brilliant speech. and the fight was kept up by adjournment through five or six weekly meetings before crowded auditories, including along with the members of the Society and their friends, many hearers and some speakers from the Inns of Court.

When this debate was ended, another was commenced on the general merits of Owen's system: and the contest altogether lasted about three months. It was a lutte corps-@agrave;-corps between Owenites and political economists, whom the Owenites regarded as their most inveterate opponents: but it was a perfectly friendly dispute. We who represented political economy had the same objects in view as they had, and took pains to shew it; and the principal champion on their side was a very estimable man, with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thompson. Of Cork, author of a book on the Distribution of Wealth, and of an Appeal in behalf of women against the passage relating to them in my father's Essay on Government.

Ellis, Roebuck, and I, took an active part in the debate, and among those from the Inns of Court who joined in it I remember Charles Villers. The other side obtained also, on the population question, very efficient support from without. The well known Gale Jones, then an elderly man. made one of his florid speeches; but the speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thirlwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a Chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences. I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him." – J. S. Mill, Autobiography

In his autobiography, Mill makes clear that those on his side are his friends from university.

3. William Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin

Thompson had a disagreement with Thomas Hodgskin who published in 1825, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. Hodgskin's explanation for profits is a matter of selling commodities over their value, with force and monopoly power.

"But if [Hodgskin] is in favour of competition as the principle by which to determine the division of labour's share between the various ranks of labourers, he is for combination against capital in order to make labour's share as large as possible. By combining, the journeymen 'may reduce or destroy altogether the profit of the idle capitalist ... but they will augment the wages and rewards of industry, and will give to genius and skill their due share of the national produce.'" – H. S. Foxwell This is the sort of explanation and remedy that Thompson rejected. His 1827 book Labour Rewarded is an answer.

"Thompson urges that 'individual competition is incompatible with equal remuneration, as it is also with securing to labor the entire products of its exertions'. '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. All other advocates of individual competition look on the notion as visionary, under the Competitive System'. We know Thompson's solution of the difficulty. Labourers must become capitalists, and unite in communities to regulate their own labour. To ascertain for each the exact product of his own labour is impracticable. If this could be done, then justice would give each individual a property in that product. But moral considerations would force him to share that product with others. The human race could not otherwise be preserved. This voluntary distribution is best carried out under the equitable arrangements of co-operative communities, with their regulated exchanges. 'It is on the regulation of exchanges', he concludes, 'that the industrious classes must depend for realising the general proposition that "the whole produce of labour should belong to the labourer."'" – H. S. Foxwell

We see here the distinction between each individual worker obtaining his product and the working class as a whole obtaining and deciding on the use of their product. Thompson advocates the latter.

4. William Thompson and Robert Owen

Thompson had a later disagreement with Robert Owen. This disagreement, at the 1832 Co-operative Congress in London, arose after Owen's experiences in the USA, at New Harmony, Indiana. Owen thought co-operatives needed much larger initial investments than Thompson.

Selected References

• John Cassidy. 2025. Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
• Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. 1887. Lawyer's Socialism. Die Neue Zeit.
• Anton Menger. 1899. The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour. With an introduction by H. S. Foxwell.