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

The central idea was similar to Robert Owen’s: establish new communities in which most of the property would be commonly owned, production would be organized on a communal basis, and income would be divided equitably, if not necessarily equally. In Thompson’s version, each community would consist of between five hundred and two thousand people; it would grow its own food and operate its own manufacturing workshops. Since each individual “co-operator” would be both a productive worker and a part owner of the community’s land and capital, class divisions would be eliminated. “There would be no other interest in the community, but that of producers; there would be no capitalists,” Thompson wrote.42 The members of the community would “be alternately employed in agricultural and manufacturing industry,” and the variety of work would make their lives “more productive, more healthful, and more pleasant.”43

Despite the clear echoes of Fourier and Owen, Thompson also had some distinctive ideas of his own about how to organize these new cooperative communities. To obtain items that they couldn’t grow or manufacture themselves, they would engage in trade with other communities. Exchange values would be set on the basis of how much labor each good embodied. In all transactions, “the greater interests, that of the labourer, would preponderate.”44 Inside each community, the communal principle would extend to domestic life. Everybody would be “fed and clad out of the common store,” and children and young people would sleep in “common dormitories for the different sexes and ages.” Single adults and married couples would have private apartments, but there would be “public rooms for dining, reading, lectures, amusements, &c.”45 Reflecting Thompson’s commitment to atheism and popular representation, the new communities would guarantee “entire freedom as to thought and worship,” and they would be run by committees “appointed by election, or rotation, or seniority, or any other manner that may be proposed to such community and by them agreed on.”46

Thompson envisaged the establishment of his new communities as a gradual process, with the early ones serving as models for later ones, but his ultimate objective was to replace the existing organization of society, not merely build a cooperative alternative alongside it. In keeping with his passion for local self-government and his skepticism about existing political institutions, he wanted to radically downsize the state. Once the principles of cooperation and self-governance had been established, they would have eliminated not just the “passion for individual accumulation and display of wealth,” Thompson wrote, but also the need for “almost all  … of the ordinary functions of government.”47 The central government would still provide for national defense and other public goods, but the individual communities would pay for it on a voluntary basis, and these financial contributions would be “inconceivably small.”

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Although Thompson was little known to the British public, his ideas about cooperative communities attracted some attention in metropolitan circles. In 1825 he and others engaged in a public debate at Chancery Lane with John Stuart Mill, who was then a teenage prodigy and a defender of economic orthodoxy. “The principal champion on their side was a very estimable man, with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thomson, of Cork,” Mill recounted in his autobiography, without revealing the outcome of the debate. Some accounts say Thompson had the better of the exchanges.48

Thompson also engaged with Thomas Hodgskin, a former officer in the Royal Navy, whose 1825 book, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, paralleled the Inquiry in some ways. Like Thompson, Hodgskin invoked the labor theory of value and argued that workers were being exploited by being deprived of their full product. He described the capitalist as an “oppressive middleman who eats up the produce of labor,” and he portrayed the state as an instrument of the ruling classes, averring that “no laws for the protection of capital are thought too severe.”49

Despite these similarities, Hodgskin’s approach differed from Thompson’s in important respects. He believed that the root of exploitation was the monopoly power employers exercised over their workers. In many cases, he pointed out, they refused to employ people who had quit other jobs in search of higher wages. In a truly competitive labor market, Hodgskin argued, workers would be able to obtain much higher wages. Thompson disagreed. In 1827, writing under the nom de plume “One of the Idle Classes,” he published Labor Rewarded, a book-length response to Hodgskin, in which he insisted that the only way to guarantee workers the full fruit of their labors was to abandon competition—i.e., capitalism—and move to cooperative production. “It is time to cast aside the little expedients of the day,” he wrote, “and the year, and to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society.”50

Although cooperative ideas were making some progress, the cooperative movement itself was running into difficulties. In 1828, Owen left New Harmony, where his new community had already dissolved. From the beginning, it had been plagued by practical problems, including a lack of detailed plans for production and a surfeit of dreamers and adventurers over industrious tradesmen and cultivators. After the community degenerated into splinter groups, and Owen fell out with his American partner, William Maclure, he decided to quit the venture and return to England. Once he got back, he resumed a leading role in the British cooperative movement, which in his absence had experienced mixed fortunes.51

On the positive side, following the founding of the London Cooperative Society, in 1824, similar organizations were being established in other cities and towns. They were often associated with labor groups. Initially, the new cooperative societies focused on establishing communityoperated stores, where workers could buy cheap, unadulterated goods, and on setting up labor exchanges, where people could find work. Some of these ventures showed great promise, but Thompson’s goal of setting up independent cooperative communities proved elusive.

The immediate challenge was money. Where would the funding come from to buy land and to build housing and workshops? In an article for Cooperative Magazine, published by the London Co-operative Society, Thompson claimed that a start could be made if workers saved as little as sixpence a week and deposited the money in a bank. “Resolve; make a beginning,” he wrote. “Your own happiness and that of your descendent will be secured; the selfish principle of competition will soon everywhere give way to the benign principle of universal Co-operation.”52 Thompson insisted that as few as two hundred people could create a viable new community, and that the minimum sum required, at least in Ireland, was only about twenty pounds per head. But despite his encouraging words, he couldn’t raise the money to get one of these ventures going. Neither could anybody else.

Evidently, Thompson wasn’t too disheartened. In 1830, he published a lengthy guidebook for organizers of cooperative communities, which included tips for cultivation and crop rotation, dietary suggestions, recommendations on what machinery to purchase, and much else besides.53 He continued to insist that communities as small as two hundred people would be viable, although he said the ideal number would be about two thousand. His guidebook said that the new communities would eliminate the “master evil” of the competitive system: enforced joblessness and the poverty that accompanied it.54 Once cooperation replaced profit-making as the fundamental organizing force, employment would be guaranteed for everybody, and poverty would be eliminated. This was “the simple basis of Co-operative Political Economy.”55

Thompson’s enthusiasm for forming small communities created a rift between himself and Owen, whose failure in Indiana had convinced him that the only practical way to establish a cooperative economy was through large-scale mobilization of people and capital, with extensive government support.56 In a March 1830 letter to Owen, Thompson tried to keep relations cordial: “While you are boldly operating on the whole mass, I am endeavoring to arrange a little part of the social machine, not forgetting its connections with the whole.”57 The differences between the two men couldn’t be papered over, though. In April 1832, at a national Co-operative Congress held in London, Owen refused to associate himself with any new community that hadn’t raised at least £240,000 in seed capital. The dispute between the two leaders of the movement dragged on. At a second congress in the autumn of 1832, Owen again opposed Thompson’s plans. In a speech cited by the biographer Richard Pankhurst, he expressed “the greatest possible esteem for Mr. Thompson,” but he also “begged leave to assure him that he knew little of this matter.”58

Despite Owen’s opposition, the Co-operative Congress approved a motion to press ahead with plans to establish a modest-size new community somewhere in Britain. In theory, that was a big victory for Thompson. In practice, the local cooperative societies couldn’t raise enough money to make his ideas a reality.59 Owen’s goal for a government-led initiative to establish larger cooperative communities was frustrated, too. Once the members of the traditional British ruling class realized that he and his fellow cooperators were intent on replacing the existing economic system rather than merely reforming it, they turned against the cooperative movement. Naturally, the new industrial elites weren’t in favor of supplanting industrial capitalism either, and they were rapidly gaining political strength. In passing the Great Reform Act of 1832, Lord Grey’s Whig government expanded the voting franchise to include many male members of the propertied middle class, but continued to exclude virtually all the working class. Between 1832 and 1867, when the Second Reform Act was passed, the House of Commons represented an alliance of landed, financial, and industrial capital, to which the socialistic schemes of Owen, Thompson, and their followers were anathema.

In believing that the economy and the class system could be transformed by voluntarism and appeals to reason rather than by mass political action, Owen and Thompson were naive. And yet, despite the demise of the New Harmony experiment and the failure to establish similar ventures in Britain, the “co-operators” left an impressive legacy. Even today, Britain’s Co-op (formally known as the Co-operative Group Limited) operates more than two thousand retail stores, an insurance company, a legal services provider, and a funeral company. Elsewhere, in many parts of the world, there are cooperative consumer unions, retailers, banks, farms, energy companies, and manufacturers. (The largest such entity is the Mondragon Corporation, a federation of local cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain.) But Thompson’s legacy was also an intellectual one. In combining the labor theory of value with a subsistence theory of wages, he created an analytical framework that Marx and his disciples would adopt and develop. And in formulating a utilitarian case for equality and wealth distribution, he created a template that socially minded liberals, Fabian socialists, and social democrats could use to their advantage. Not many figures in the history of socialism would manage to straddle the divide between revolutionism and social democracy: Thompson did. And that wasn’t his only contribution. In the context of his time, he was also an early feminist.

“In speaking of the degraded position of my sex” Anna Wheeler and the Forgotten Half of Humanity

At some point during the early 1820s, when Thompson was working on his first book, he met Anna Wheeler, a learned and well-connected Irish widow. It’s not clear how the meeting came about. Wheeler, whose husband, a dissolute Irish aristocrat, had died several years earlier, lived in Paris, where she maintained a literary salon that was frequented by followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier. She was a frequent visitor to London, where she mixed in Owenite circles and was acquainted with Jeremy Bentham. The philosopher’s papers indicate Wheeler dined at his home twice in May 1824. He sent her several of his books, including one on prison reform, Panopticon. It seems likely that Wheeler and Thompson met through Bentham. In any case, the two forged a deep and enduring friendship, which was based on their shared interest in progressive politics, the cooperative movement, and women’s rights.

In early nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, even upper-class women like Wheeler couldn’t escape systematic discrimination. Family property was passed down to male heirs, and girls of all backgrounds rarely received any advanced education. Once a woman got married, which usually happened early in her life, she effectively became a dependent of her husband. If she earned any money, it belonged to him. Although a mother was expected to keep house and bring up children, the legal power to determine her children’s future rested with the father. A woman couldn’t file a court case, sign a legal contract, demand a divorce, or even make a will on her own account. And she couldn’t vote to change this oppressive system because the suffrage was restricted to men.

In 1825, just a year after the appearance of Thompson’s Inquiry, he published a second book, which addressed gender inequality and discrimination. Like its predecessor, it had a long title, but this one was more pointed: Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery.1 In searing prose, Thompson lambasted the patriarchy for keeping women down for thousands of years and demanded fundamental changes, including the abolition of “that disgrace of civilization, the present marriage code.”2 Thompson was the sole author of the Appeal, but in an “Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler,” which appeared at the beginning of the text, he informed his readers that its contents reflected his conversations with Wheeler and made clear that he regarded it as a joint work. Addressing Wheeler directly, he said he had “endeavored to arrange the expressions of those feelings, sentiments, and reasonings, which have emanated from your mind.”3

Wheeler was born Anna Doyle in 1785 in Clonbeg Parish, County Tipperary, which is about fifty miles northeast of Thompson’s Cork. Her mother, Anna Dunbar, was a homemaker. Her father, Nicholas Doyle, was a senior cleric in the Protestant Church of Ireland, but he died when Anna was two years old. She grew up with her mother and two siblings, Bessie and John. An uncle, John Doyle, who had served as a British Army officer in the Peninsular Wars, became a surrogate father to the family. Although the Doyles weren’t particularly rich, they were socially prominent and well educated. Anna’s godfather, Henry Grattan, was an Irish patriot and statesman who opposed the 1800 Acts of Union, which made Ireland officially part of the United Kingdom.4

Despite the social privilege that Anna’s family enjoyed, she was still a female in a deeply patriarchal and conservative society. “Anna’s early role models for worldly success, freedom and mobility, were predictably men,” Dolores Dooley, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cork, wrote in her deeply researched 1996 book Equality in Community, which examined the writings of Wheeler and Thompson. “Early on she learned how to collaborate with men even if, later on, the project would be the emancipation of women!”5

When Anna was fifteen, a young heir named Francis Massy-Wheeler, whose family owned an estate in the neighboring county of Limerick, spotted her at the horse races and took a shine to her. According to Dooley’s account, Anna’s mother regarded Massy-Wheeler as spoiled, rich, and irresponsible. Despite her protests, Anna agreed to marry him and take his name. The union, which began in 1800, turned out as Anna’s mother had feared. Massy-Wheeler was a gambler, an idler, and a heavy drinker. He was also abusive. The couple had six children, four of whom died in infancy. The two survivors were both girls, Henrietta and Rosina.6

Despite her domestic troubles, Anna was a dedicated autodidact with a passion for serious books. Her daughter Rosina would later recount her “stretched on a sofa, deep in the perusal of some French or German philosophical work that had reached her via London.”7 Rosina said that Anna’s views were “strongly tainted” by the works of the English author Mary Wollstonecraft, the early English feminist, whose 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, argued that women were the intellectual equals of men and should be afforded the opportunity to contribute equally to society.8 Wheeler also read the French rationalists Baron d’Holbach and Denis Diderot, which may have contributed to her growing skepticism about organized religion.9

In 1812 Anna left Massy-Wheeler and took her daughters to Guernsey, a British dependency off the coast of Normandy, where her uncle John— who by then had risen to the title of Sir John Doyle—was serving as the lieutenant governor. The move to Guernsey’s Government House, a grand eighteenth-century building overlooking the sea, opened a new world to Anna. She socialized with eminent visitors from Paris and London, and traveled to the French capital. After Sir John’s term as governor ended, she moved to the nearby French city of Caen, in Normandy, where, according to one of her grandsons, “she became the bel esprit of a little group of socialists and freethinkers.”10

In 1820 Massy-Wheeler died, leaving his wife and daughters practically nothing. Evidently, he had gambled and drunk his way through the family estate. Thereafter, Anna, who kept the surname Wheeler, seems to have relied on the financial support of her uncle and on her own efforts to earn money. For a period, she lived in London. One job she took on was translating the works of progressive French writers, including Fourier. It may have been from her reading of Fourier that she became interested in the idea of setting up new cooperative communities that would redefine the role of women. Like Thompson, Fourier described women as the slaves of men. In his phalanxes, the sexual division of labor was to be largely abolished. Cooking and childrearing were to be communal activities, women were to engage in work tasks that agreed with them, and the institution of monogamous marriage was to be gradually replaced with more open-ended relationships.

Given Wheeler’s experience of marriage, it is easy to see why Fourier’s ideas appealed to her. In his “Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler,” Thompson provided a fairly detailed description of her commitment to female liberation and wholesale social change. “You look forward, as I do, to a state of society very different from that which now exists,” he wrote.

You look forward to a better aspect of society, where the principle of benevolence shall supersede that of fear, where restless and anxious individual competition shall give place to mutual co-operation and joint possession; where individuals in large numbers, male and female, forming voluntary associations, shall become a mutual guarantee to each other for the supply of all useful wants  … where perfect freedom of opinion and perfect equality will reign amongst the co-operators; and where the children of all will be equally educated and provided for by the whole.11

Thompson also noted that he had encouraged Wheeler to write about sexual politics herself—to “take up the cause of your proscribed sex … in your own name.” The “leisure and resolution to undertake the drudgery of the task were lacking,” he added.12 This statement doesn’t entirely clear up the question of why Wheeler didn’t write her own book. Sexism may well have played a role. Despite the pioneering efforts of Wollstonecraft, it was still extremely difficult for female authors to find a publisher or get taken seriously. When, some years later, Wheeler did compose some essays, she published them under a pseudonym. Another thing that may have weighed on Wheeler was that, unlike Thompson, she didn’t have a generous family inheritance that would enable her to pursue a literary career. It seems likely that these factors were at least as inhibiting to her as an aversion to the “drudgery” of writing.

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The Appeal originated, and was structured, as a response to an article opposing woman suffrage that the philosopher and historian James Mill published in 1820 as a supplement to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Writing on the subject of government, Mill made the argument that representative democracy and broad suffrage were the best guarantees of good governance. But in defining broad suffrage, Mill excluded women, citing as his justification a legal doctrine known as “coverture,” which claimed that men were best situated to represent the interests of their wives and families. The spectacle of an eminent scholar associated with the Philosophical Radicals making this antediluvian argument outraged Thompson and Wheeler, who waited for someone to issue a rebuttal. After Bentham and other leaders of the utilitarian movement failed to rise to the challenge, Thompson decided to compose something himself.13

Thompson began the Appeal by turning Mill’s argument about coverture against him. How, he asked, could the interests of all women be adequately represented in Parliament by men, when about one in six women had neither a father nor a husband?14 Based on Mill’s logic, Thompson pointed out, all fatherless and single women, at least, should be enfranchised, whereas many adult men—those who still lived at home and had a father to look out for them—didn’t need a vote. This was an effective debating point and typical of Thompson’s didactic style. He followed it up by going beyond logic chopping to insist that the male monopoly of the suffrage wasn’t based on any high-minded theories at all: it was simply “an engine of ulterior oppression” designed to help men maintain their power and privileges.15 Far from using their votes to better the lives of the female members of their families, men had reduced their wives to “involuntary breeding machine[s] and household slave[s]”16 and raised their daughters within “artificial cages of restraint and imbecility.”17

The Appeal was particularly scathing about the idea that women freely entered marriages. “Each man yokes a woman to his establishment, and calls it a contract,” it said. “Audacious falsehood! A contract! Where are any of the attributes of contracts, of equal and just contracts, to be found in this transaction? A contract implies the voluntary assent of both the contracting parties.”18 The reality was that women, lacking any prospect of making a living of their own or establishing any financial independence, were forced to marry “on whatever terms their masters have willed, or starve: or if not absolutely starve, they must renounce at least all the means of enjoyment monopolized by the males.”19 With men holding all power, including the power of the purse, the family home became the “eternal prison-house of the wife.”20