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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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In the fall of 1822, Thompson did visit London. From October until February 1823, he stayed at Bentham’s townhouse. Evidently, he was an entertaining guest. A young woman named Henrietta Wheeler, whose mother knew the Irishman, and who was in attendance while Bentham sat for a portrait recounted Thompson insisting that he could play the part of the Harlequin, a popular comic figure in the theater of the time. After gathering his cloak around him, Thompson “capered, kicked, and frisked and flung about for some time à la harlequin, whilst his enlightened and discerning audience were in strong convulsions on the floor,” Wheeler wrote to her sister.10

Bentham advised Thompson to visit Hazelwood School, near Birmingham, a Utilitarian institution that the pupils ran themselves using a Benthamite rulebook. Among the public figures that Thompson met through Bentham were Joseph Hume, a radical member of Parliament; John Black, the editor of The Morning Chronicle, a Whig newspaper; and the Scottish intellectual James Mill, whose textbook Elements of Political Economy had recently appeared.11 Mill was also the author of a multivolume history of India, which portrayed the East India Company as a civilizing influence in a backward and morally degraded society. A couple of years after it was published, the Company gave Mill a lucrative sinecure as an advocate and “examiner of Indian correspondence.”12 (In subsequent years, Mill’s brilliant son, John Stuart Mill, would also work for the Company.)

There is no record of whether Thompson met David Ricardo, the economic theorist who was another member of Bentham’s circle. But his writings indicate that he studied Ricardo’s work closely, including his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which argued that the economy, like the rest of nature, was subject to inviolable natural laws. In Ricardo’s model of the economy, there are three inputs to the production process—labor, capital, and land—but it is only labor that creates value. (Raw materials, machinery, and buildings contribute merely their own value.) It is therefore the quantity of labor inputs that determines a commodity’s value in the marketplace. If a certain item takes one hour of labor to make and another item takes two hours, the second item will sell for double the price of the first. This labor theory of value, as it came to be known, can be traced back to Adam Smith and even to John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher. Ricardo expressed it most clearly, however.

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Thompson also studied the works of two radical continental thinkers: Henri de Saint-Simon and Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi.13 Saint-Simon was a French aristocrat who fought alongside Lafayette in the American Revolution, went into land speculation, and in his forties started publishing books about economics. He divided society into two groups: the productive industrial class (les industriels), which consisted of entrepreneurs, engineers, and manual workers; and the idle class (les oisifs), which included landlords, rentiers, and assorted loafers. In Saint-Simon’s technocratic vision of the future, enlightened businessmen (les grandes industriels) would replace the landed elite as the ruling class, but unlike the old aristocracy, they would rule benevolently, exploiting advances in science and technology to organize production for the benefit of all, including the poor. Saint-Simon’s ideas didn’t have much immediate impact on policy, but they attracted a group of followers, the Saint-Simonians, who continued to expound various versions of them after his death in 1825.

Sismondi, a Swiss scholar who started out as a disciple of Adam Smith, is best known for his 1819 book, New Principles of Political Economy, in which he reversed course and critiqued the laissez-faire ideas associated with Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, which posited that a market economy was self-organizing and stable. Reacting to the deep slump that afflicted France and other countries after the Napoleonic Wars, Sismondi took the Latin term proletarii, which referred to propertyless Roman citizens, and applied it to the industrial working class, which was experiencing joblessness and severe hardship.14 He called for extensive public welfare programs, including unemployment and sickness benefits, financed by progressive taxes.

Sismondi also warned that the very productiveness of the new system made it potentially unstable. He argued that as technical progress raised the economy’s capacity, the supply of goods could well exceed overall demand, which was limited by the level of wages. This imbalance could lead to lengthy gluts, in which businesses would be forced to lay off workers, resulting in widespread joblessness and hunger. “Let us beware of this dangerous theory of equilibrium which is supposed to be automatically established,” Sismondi wrote, referring to the reassuring doctrine of laissezfaire. “A certain kind of equilibrium, it is true, is reestablished in the long run, but it is after a frightful amount of suffering.”15

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★ ★ ★

Thompson never did deliver the brief lecture on political economy that he had planned to give. But in 1824, he published a lengthy book titled An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness. For readers who persevered with this hefty tome, it contained an original and broad-ranging analysis that began with Thompson highlighting what he viewed as the central paradox presented by British industrialization: rapid technological progress and unprecedented levels of production accompanied by widespread poverty and destitution. “How comes it,” he asked, “that a nation abounding more than any other in the rude materials of wealth, in machinery, dwellings, and food, in intelligent and industrious producers, with all the apparent means of happiness  … should still pine in privation?”16 The answer, Thompson went on, was to be found in the basic structure of the new economy: the rigid dividing line between propertyless “producers” of wealth—i.e., the workers—and the property-owning elite of “capitalists,” who owned the factories and machinery used in the production process. “The tendency of the existing arrangement of things as to wealth is to enrich a few at the expense of the mass of the producers,” Thompson stated bluntly.17

Having defined the nature of the problem as he saw it, Thompson shifted into prescriptive mode, setting down fifteen “natural laws” on which “all just distribution of wealth ought to be founded.” The first two laws amounted to restatements of Ricardo’s labor theory of value and Bentham’s admonition to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. The third law was more novel, and it was key to Thompson’s egalitarian philosophy: “All members of society … being similarly constituted in their physical organisation, are capable, by similar treatment, of enjoying equal portions of happiness.”18 In other words, all people are equally effective happiness machines.

These three principles, in themselves, were sufficient to justify an egalitarian outlook. Thompson further developed the argument by invoking another principle that he borrowed from Bentham, which can be summarized in the statement that an extra hundred pounds is worth a lot more to a poor person than to a rich one because the poor person’s need is far greater. This idea, which economists today refer to as the diminishing marginal utility of income, Thompson stated thus: “Of 1,000 portions of the matter of wealth, the first 100, suppose are necessary to repel hunger and thirst and support life. The use of this first portion is as life to death … The effect of these second 100 in intensity of enjoyment is so infinitely beneath that produced by the first 100 as to be incapable of any comparison.” He continued: “Every hundred added is less and less productive of absolute increase of happiness to the possessor.”19

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After establishing this key point, Thompson went on to argue that it was impossible to justify, on logical grounds, the diversion of income from poor workers to rich capitalists, because the “evil of the loss and its consequences to the productive laborer exceed in a degree very great, though not being capable of being put down in numbers, the advantages of the gain to the rapacious.” This is the classic utilitarian argument for equality of income and wealth. It can be shown mathematically that if people are equally effective happiness machines and the marginal utility of income is uniformly diminishing, the wealth distribution that maximizes total happiness is an equal one, with everybody enjoying the same level of riches. Thompson didn’t develop the argument formally, but in laying out its basic elements he was arguably the first economist to make a rigorous argument for socialism.

Unlike some of his socialist successors, Thompson didn’t demand perfect equality: he accepted that some inequity could be justified if it raised overall output and wealth. But he also insisted that the gaping chasms between rich and poor that were arising in the new industrial economy couldn’t be defended on this basis. They arose not from the greater productivity of the capitalist class but from its monopoly on the ownership of capital and the neediness of its workers, which enabled it to pay low wages and generate high profits. “What accumulated wealth there is in such a community, is gathered into the hands of the few; and as well from its bulk as from its contrast with the surrounding poverty, it strikes every eye,” Thompson wrote. “The productive laborers, stript of all capital, of tools, houses, and materials to make their labour productive toil from want, from the necessity of existence, their remuneration being kept at the lowest compatible with the existence of industrious habits  … The extremes of luxury and magnificence prevail. The evils of inequality are pushed to the utmost.”20

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This passage relied on the idea that wages would stay at or close to subsistence levels, which was a common theme of classical economics. Where Thompson departed from orthodoxy was in combining it with the labor theory of value to generate a general theory of exploitation. He pointed out that if workers’ wages were held at subsistence levels but the prices of the goods they produced reflected the amount of labor embodied in them, workers would get paid less than the value they created. Thompson referred to value that workers created but failed to receive in wages as “surplus value”—he seems to have been the first writer to use this term— and he identified it as the fundamental driver of economic inequality.21

In making this argument, Thompson zeroed in on a key issue in any economy. How should an individual capitalist, an investor, or a government be rewarded for supplying the funds that a business uses to buy the equipment and raw materials its workers require to produce goods (or services) that people want to buy? In Thompson’s time (and still today), orthodox economists glossed over this question by assuming that any revenues in excess of a business’s costs would naturally accrue to the supplier of capital as profit. Thompson pointed out that this wasn’t the only possible way to organize, or think about, an industrial economy. He suggested looking at things from the perspective of producers—i.e., workers—who have the ability to create value but lack the inputs and machinery they need to make marketable commodities. In an ideal world, how should they reward owners of capital for supplying them with these things? One option, Thompson said, would be to give the capitalist a sum sufficient to “replace the waste and value of the capital” he supplied, and also to provide him with the means to “support him in equal comfort with the more actively employed productive laborers.”22

The difference between this arrangement and the existing one was “immense,” Thompson noted.23 If it were ever adopted, he pointed out, it would enable workers to receive more of the value they created and raise their living standards. The capitalist mogul wouldn’t lose everything—his capital would still yield a steady return—but he would “be but reduced to a situation intermediate in point of wealth between his present situation and that of the present degraded labourer.”24 In a ringing passage, Thompson made it very clear which of the two arrangements he preferred. As “the idle possessor of these inanimate instruments of production,” he thundered, the capitalist “procures ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, as much of the articles of wealth  … as the utmost labour of such [an] efficient [worker] can procure for them.”25

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Thompson didn’t base his argument for radical changes solely on moral grounds. He also insisted that rewarding workers in the same manner as capitalists would generate higher levels of output and productivity. When workers’ wages were stuck at or near subsistence levels, they had little incentive to exert themselves or learn new skills, he pointed out. By contrast, in an economy where “the whole of the products of labour [are] ensured to the producer, the utmost energy would be employed in production, and necessarily in the acquisition and retaining of those means or instruments indispensable to render labor productive.”26 Switching to this type of compensation system would have a dramatic impact, Thompson argued: “Four times, or, perhaps, ten times the quantity of production, on the whole, would be obtained.”27

These numbers were outlandish: even a twofold increase in production would have been remarkable. But the novelty of Thompson’s analysis was striking. Combining an incentives argument that harked back to Smith and a labor theory of value derived from Ricardo, he made the case that it was feasible to simultaneously expand the economy and reduce inequality, which in turn would fulfill the utilitarian goal of raising human happiness. “The mass of national wealth would be immensely greater than at present, though no person might possess ten times more accumulated capital than his neighbour,” he wrote. “All the increase of happiness proved to arise from equality of distribution would prevail; and men would produce for the sake of the absolute comforts to be derived from wealth, not for the sake of mere relative comforts, of a comparison of their superiority with the wretchedness of their fellow-creatures.”28

★ ★ ★

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After this extended theoretical discussion of inequality and exploitation, Thompson moved on to the practical question of how to implement his egalitarian ideas, and the answer he provided was to organize the economy around self-governing cooperative communities. He said that establishing communal entities of this nature was the best way to create a more equal society and maximize human happiness. In arguing in this direction, he was following in the footsteps of two visionaries from either side of the English Channel.

The lesser-known one, at least in Britain and Ireland, was the Frenchman Charles Fourier. Born in Besançon, near the Swiss border, in 1772, Fourier, the son of a small businessman, spent the first half of his life in obscurity as a merchant and traveling salesman. In his thirties, he started to write and turned out to have a lively imagination. In a book published in 1808, he argued that human societies ascend and then descend through thirty-two periods, the highest of which was Harmony. To create this idyll, he proposed arranging the world on the basis of self-contained communities that he called “phalanxes,” each consisting of about sixteen hundred people. Members of a phalanx would live together in a large building, a phalanstery, which would have communal dining rooms and educational facilities, as well as individual apartments. Each community would be largely selfsupporting, and work would be divided equally, with tasks rotated to avoid boredom.29

Fourier’s ambitious vision initially attracted little interest outside France. Thompson was more heavily influenced by Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and philanthropist who was a major figure in early nineteenthcentury Britain. In 1817, during the economic slump after the Napoleonic Wars, when large numbers of unemployed workers were roaming the country, Owen had called for the creation of “Villages of Co-operation,” where jobless workers could live and grow their own food without being a burden on the state. Owen quickly came to view his proposed communities in much broader terms—as the basis for a society based on cooperation rather than competition, where technology would be exploited for the benefit of all rather than the few. “New scientific power will soon render human labor of little avail in the creation of wealth,” he declared during a speaking tour of Europe. “Wealth can be created in such abundance as to satisfy the desires of all.”30 The task was to spread it out effectively.

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Owen had risen to fortune and fame as a philanthropic cotton manufacturer. He was born in 1771, in the small market town of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, where his father was the local postmaster and ironmonger. After leaving school at ten, he took a job as a lowly draper’s apprentice, but his career progressed rapidly. When he was nineteen, he got a job managing a cotton mill in Manchester and was soon promoted to part owner. The callous treatment of workers that he saw in the new cotton factories appalled him. In 1799, together with some associates, he bought a complex of water-powered cotton mills at New Lanark, a village south of Glasgow, in Scotland, where he set out to demonstrate that workers could be more productive if they were treated as humans.31

The New Lanark mills didn’t pay particularly high wages, but Owen shortened the workday, built sturdy cottages for his employees, and provided them with cheap goods from a company store. He refused to employ children below the age of ten or eleven, which, by the standards of the day, was a progressive stance. Visitors from far and wide flocked to New Lanark, and Owen became a public figure. After the Napoleonic Wars, he launched a campaign to restrict child labor, which culminated in the passage of the Cotton Mill and Factories Act of 1819, which prohibited the employment of anyone under the age of nine and limited to twelve hours the workday of children ages nine to sixteen. Although the legislation lacked an effective enforcement mechanism, its passage helped establish the principle that factory capitalism should be regulated.

In Report to the County of Lanark, a pamphlet published in 1820,32 Owen expanded upon his vision of communal living, which shared some things with Fourier’s vision. Owen said the inhabitants of his new communities would live in purposefully constructed buildings arranged around a square. Each family would have a private apartment with its own bedrooms, but the sitting areas and kitchens would be communal. Owen was a believer in early education for children of both sexes. “Men are, and ever will be, what they are, and shall be made, in infancy and childhood,” he wrote. In each of his proposed communities, schooling would be mandatory. There would be two purpose-built schoolhouses: one for children ages two to six, the other for those ages six to twelve.

Owen’s proposals attracted the attention of some workers’ groups. In 1821 a meeting in London of printers and other tradesmen established a

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Cooperative and Economical Society. In its constitution, the new organization said its ultimate goal was to “establish a village of unity and mutual co-operation, combining agriculture, manufactures, and trades, upon the plan projected by Robert Owen of New Lanark.”33 This venture didn’t make much immediate progress, however, and Owen got frustrated. In 1825, the year after Thompson published the Inquiry, Owen and his son William sailed to the United States with the goal of establishing a new cooperative community in Harmony Township, Indiana, where land was cheaper than it was in Britain. The Rappites, a German community of farmers and artisans, had put their settlement on the banks of the Wabash River up for sale. In January 1825, Owen purchased the Rappites’ land, some twenty thousand acres. Weeks later, he went to Washington and addressed the House of Representatives about his ambitious experiment in communal living. By the summer of 1856, it had been renamed New Harmony and attracted hundreds of eager participants.

In the Inquiry, Thompson hailed Owen as a bold visionary and said his proposals for independent cooperative communities were “the result of a rare union of profound thought and unequalled practical knowledge.”34 He also endorsed some of the details of Owen’s plans, such as constructing housing in squares, or quadrangles, and providing schools and exercise grounds. But even as Thompson praised some of Owen’s practical ideas, he developed his own ideas for enacting them. While the two shared the same goals, they had different political and philosophical outlooks.

Although Owen was a radical, he believed in the possibility of reform within the existing political system. He held out hopes for the state endorsing his new communities and helping to finance their establishment. Thompson was far less hopeful about the prospects for peaceful reform. He wasn’t a revolutionary; he abhorred violence. “[T]he employment of such an instrument would annihilate production” and undermine any notion of economic security, he wrote.35 But he also believed that the British political system was utterly corrupted and that the state, far from being an agency of progress, served mainly to secure the property rights of the wealthy.

More orthodox scholars had recognized this function, of course, but they had viewed it in a positive light. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith portrayed the securing of property rights as the mark of human progress from the “Age of Hunters” to the “Age of Commerce.” The framers of the US Constitution held a similar view. By contrast, Thompson wrote: “What has been hitherto worshipped under the false name of security, has been the security of a few at the expense of the plunder, the degradation of the many, particularly of the whole mass of the operatives, the real producers of wealth.”36 Further on in the book, he added:

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As long as two hostile masses of interest are suffered to exist in society, the owners of labour on one side and the owners of the means of labouring on the other, as long as this unnatural distribution is forcibly maintained—for without force, wielded by ignorance, it could not be maintained—so long will, perhaps as much as nine-tenths of attainable human happiness never be brought into existence, and so long will ninety-nine one hundred parts of attainable human happiness be sacrificed.37

Unlike Marx and Engels, Thompson didn’t go quite so far as to call the state the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. He did write that excessive wealth inequality “necessarily leads to the usurpation of the powers of legislation, as well as of the executive and judicial authority, by those unqualified by education to exercise them aright, and with interests hostile to the general, or national interest.”38 As an example of this corruption, Thompson cited the British government’s repeated coddling of the East India Company despite its repeated abuses and financial problems. “Legally plundering the people with whom they trade, to make up for the balance of losses caused by every species of waste and abuse!” he wrote. “Why, then, does this Company continue to exist? Private sinister interest and political considerations support it.”39

To Thompson, government and “the whole system of human regulations”—by which he meant things like monopoly charters—were “little more than a tissue of restraints and usurpations of one class over another.”40 To someone with these beliefs, it was an illusion to believe that the state, at least in its current form, could play much of a productive role. Thompson was skeptical of all forms of authority. His socialism had an anarchistic streak that emphasized decentralization, individual initiative, and self-governance. In the second half of the Inquiry, he set out his proposals for a “System of Voluntary Equality” based on these principles and on “Mutual Co-operation.”41

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