The Continuing Appeal of William Thompson

This was a paper I presented at the 2011 London Historical Materialism Conference. The person chairing the panel suggested I write it up and submit it to HM, but I never got around to developing it further. I leave it here, with all its unedited lacunae and faults, for general reference because there’s still a parlous lack of material on the Father of Socialism (which he indisputably is) and the writer who had such an electrifying effect on the young Karl Marx when he read him, on his visit to Manchester in 1845 and read the phrase “surplus value” for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is not to introduce William Thompson as an historical figure, as fascinating as that story is. In that matter I refer people to the work of Dolores Dooley and, most recently Fintan Lane, both formerly of UCC. Nor, perhaps somewhat perversely given the common areas of interest of the Historical Materialism conference, am I going to focus on Thompson’s influence on the development of Marx’s ideas. Instead I am going to focus on the ideas of Thompson that, in my opinion, still have some contemporary relevance today. My principal reasoning being that if I can awaken your interest in this last point then interest in the previous two follow naturally, whereas if Thompson is only of historical interest as a forerunner of Marx, then you might reasonably assume that your limited time would be better spent on the study of the latter.

Now is a particularly auspicious time for the revival of the study of Thompson’s ideas. Thanks to Google’s evil master-plan for world domination, his long out-of print major works have now (mostly) been digitised and are freely available online in PDF or ebook format. This at a step removes the issue that has plagued scholarship on Thompson up until now. Mainly that authors were free to allege what they liked of Thompson’s views, secure in the knowledge that none of their readers would have the access to the source material necessary to check their contentions.

Having said that I won’t address Thompson as a historic figure, I still need to give you some reference points as it’s fair to assume that many of you will not have heard of him or have at most a vague awareness of the name only from some footnote references in Marx’s works.

William Thompson was born in Cork City in 1775, the son of a prosperous merchant member of the local Protestant Ascendancy. Although he later became the owner of an estate out in West Cork in the area between Rosscarbery and Glandore, he remained primarily a merchant by trade all his life. His involvement with politics first comes to our notice in relation to letters of protest he wrote to the local paper in relation to the Cork Institution, of which he was a “proprietor” (shareholder), which he accused of squandering public funds on leisure pursuits for the upper classes, rather than more practical educational activities for middle and lower class men and women for which those funds were nominally provided.

One of the lectures on the new science of political economy given at the Institute by a Malthusian enthusiast, proclaiming the impoverishment and periodic starvation of the lower orders to be according to the natural laws of economic providence, so incensed Thompson that he embarked on a project of research into political economy that resulted in his first major work, “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to human happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth”. More commonly referred to as the “Inquiry” for obvious reasons.

In that process he made contact, through Jeremy Bentham with Anna Doyle Wheeler who was to connect him to a network of early proto-socialists such as Charles Fourier and the St Simonians in France, and Robert Owen in Scotland. Thompson was to become a member of the London Co-operative Society (LCS) and frequently travelled to London from Ireland, taking part in the debates of the society against the Political Economists lead by John Stuart Mill in the Chancery Lane and Red Lion Square debates of 1825.

At this stage it is useful to move on to a few counters to some popular mischaracterizations of Thompson for the purposes of inoculation.

The first, and most common mis-characterisation is that of “Owenist”. In actual fact Thompson came to be a leading figure within the LCS during Owens absence in America. Particularly in the Chancery Lane debates, to distinguish themselves from some of Owen’s positions, particularly those regarding the likelihood or desirability of state sponsorship for cooperative community schemes, Thompson’s wing of the movement described themselves as partisans of the new “social science” (of which more in a minute) and this was eventually shortened to “socialist”.

In its origins then, the socialist party within the LCS defined themselves as distinct from “Owenite” positions. This came out into the open in the first national conference of the Cooperative movement, held in Manchester in 1831, in which the Thompsonite or socialist wing clashed with Owen and his supporters over the future direction of the movement. Whether to adopt the new National Equitable Labour Exchange (labour notes) scheme or continue with the project of setting up an exemplar community run on communist lines. Owen and John Gray supported the labor notes scheme whereas Thompson’s analysis led to the rejection of exchange based-schemes and the need for communities of producers to gain control of the necessary means of production to support their efforts.

The arguments involved in this debate naturally interested a young Karl Marx when he was visiting Manchester’s Co-operative movement libraries in 1845 in search of arguments with which to critique Proudhon’s remarkably similar scheme a generation later.

Having dealt with the “Owenite” tag, we move on to the “Ricardian socialist” and “Utopian socialist” labels. In relation the first, I refer you to the work of Noel Thompson (1984) and others who have convincingly deconstructed the category of “Ricardian socialist” in relation to Thompson, Hodgskin, Gray or Bray, demonstrating a greater genealogical relation in their notions of value and the relatively more confused value theory of Adam Smith.

In fact in relation to value theory, a caveat needs to be raised here in relation to Thompson’s work. Despite being the coiner of the term “surplus value”, anyone looking for a precursor of Marx’s value theory in Thompson is going to be disappointed. In fact Thompson’s critique of capitalist political economy does not rely on any development of value theory beyond the general classical principle of labour being the source of all value.

So finally to the “Utopian socialist” label. At first sight, Thompson’s attachment to the tactic of establishing exemplar intentional communist communities, adheres to the archetypal utopian socialist trope. However, this would be to confuse the tactical form with the strategic content. In opposition, in contrast to Owen, Thompson always emphasised that the working class could never expect to receive aid from the class of their oppressors, hence the need for self-reliance as far as practicable, and that control over the necessary means of production was a prerequisite even for an isolated exemplar of an alternative “system of production” or “mode of exertion” (Thompson does also use “mode of production”, but that was a relatively common formula for production methods at the time).

Secondly, although Thompson explicitly rejects violent insurrectionary or revolutionary methods for social change, it is historically incorrect to state, like such as E. K. Hunt (1979) does, that his position was akin to a kind of “Pareto optimality” in that generalised social change would have to wait until the last capitalist was convinced it was in his interests. Bearing in mind that Thompson was writing in the context of the Ireland of the failed insurrection of 1798, whatever the soothing phrases in his already borderline treasonous books (calling for abolition of all inherited titles and properties for e.g.), Thompson’s enthusiastic statements of welcome for the 1830 revolution in France, when news of it reached a public meeting he was at, together with his hopes for similar events “nearer home” was the cause of panic amongst the chairs of the meeting who directed that his statement be struck from the record. Whatever else might be said about the 1830 revolution in France, that it waited on unanimous support as a precondition, is not one of them.

Having dispensed with the preliminaries, let us move on to some of those ideas of Thompson’s that might still interest us today.

The first is his project of “social science”. The term is first introduced to the language in printed form in the introduction of Thompson’s Inquiry. There, aside from the incident at the Institute already mentioned, he declares the twin motives for his work could be summed up by his simultaneous admiration for, and frustration at, the works of William Godwin and Thomas Malthus for opposite reasons.

He admires Godwin’s commitment to liberal political principles, but despairs at his patent impracticality when it comes to matters of material productivity. By contrast Malthus’ dogged attention to absolute levels of production and aggregate demand are of vital interest, but his callous indifference to the welfare of the vast majority of society is equally at odds with Thompson’s somewhat unique brand of utilitarianism. In fact Thompson finds it a general fault of the political economists that they pay attention only to maximising overall wealth production without any attention as to how the distribution of that wealth may best provide the “greatest happiness for the greatest number”.

It is to transcend this dichotomy between the political justice of Godwin and the political economy of Malthus that Thompson proposes a new “social science”. That is the conscious redesign of the social relations of distribution so as best to reconcile the demands of stimulating production and ensuring maximum aggregate happiness. As previously mentioned it is from this project for a social science that the word socialism itself derives.

In fact, it is in Hayek’s reaction to the influences of Thompson’s socialism in John Stuart Mill’s “Principles of Political Economy”, that we see a clear, if distorted, reflection of this association.

Going further than his anti-socialist contemporaries, Hayek diagnoses the illness of socialism in this very project of consciously designing mechanisms of distribution. A position that leads, inter alia, to his infamous comment that “democracy is socialism”. For Hayek only unconsciously, spontaneously emergent mechanisms such as the market, are socially optimal. Aside from the obvious secular theism, the remarkable negative symmetry allows us to see Hayek as the prophet of an anti-social science, perhaps an apt moniker for his “Austrian” epigones.

Following from his outline of the project, in which he acknowledges the influences of Condillac and Condorcet, Thompson launches into a detailed step by step argumentation to find a socially optimum method of distribution in accordance with utilitarian principles.

His use of the concept of marginal returns allows him to argue that, on average, the increase in utility of additional portions of the social product, to given individuals, declines as the latter accumulate wealth. This is then combined with an argument about the impossibility of objectively determining potential individual capacities to experience higher or lower utility from a given good, along with a political ‘quis custodiet’ argument about who would be given the power to make such determinations, that concludes that for practical purposes we can assume equal capacity to experience the same or similar levels of utility from a given good, all other things being equal.

There is an obvious parallel with the argument for equal voting rights even if the parallel is not explicitly drawn. The conclusion of this argument is that an egalitarian distribution of the social product maximises social utility.

In the first part of the Inquiry, this egalitarian principle is balanced against the need to assure that motivation for producers is maintained, such that differences from an egalitarian distribution are allowable to the extent of guaranteeing the return to the producer of the full value of their own labour. There is a subtle distinction here from the normal “right to the full product of labour” in that this return is not seen as some “natural right” but only justifiable to avoid any potential disincentive to production that might potentially be the result of a distribution that forced the producer to accept less than the full product of his or her labour without any compensatory gain.

Some, such as E. K. Hunt (1979), have suggested that Thompson’s utilitarianism is in conflict with his use of the labour theory of value. There isn’t the space here to go into a detailed deconstruction of Hunt’s argument, but suffice it to say here that it relies on the construction of an a-historic and idiosyncratic definition of utilitarianism, from which not only Thompson but also J. S. Mill are excluded, in which Bentham is most authentically interpreted by Jevons and Marshall, from which position Thompson’s communism is held to be inconsistent.

In fact it is the duality inherent in a consequentialist ethic such as (classical) utilitarianism that drives Thompson’s critique far beyond that of a purely moral rejection of the ills of capitalism.

In a peculiar kind of way, utilitarianism for Thompson serves a similar role as Hegelianism does for Marx, that is a foundation from which to take a step back from a purely moral rationalist framework and look at economic relations on the basis of how people actually behave rather than how they “ought” to.

In Thompson’s case this dual framework initially guides his support for Bentham’s bourgeois economic principle of “security” — i.e. that if people are deprived of their property, they lose the incentive to produce — albeit that Thompson, from the outset, dismisses Bentham’s defence of inherited property. But it also later is crucial in effecting his conversion to communism, again based on a consequentialist ethos, rather than a purely apriori moralism.

In passing, we can see a contemporary resonance for those interested in the reconstruction of a communist project. There is a certain tendency amongst those trapped in circular orbit around Marx as singular point of reference, to believe that the only possible philosophical basis for any communist critique must be to go “back to Hegel”. Whatever path people chose to take in the elaboration of critical theory is of course up to them, but my point is here that if the first socialist was able to move from an acceptance of bourgeois political economy to its radical communist critique, without passing via Hegel and the latter’s mystified world where self-moving abstractions generate history without the intervention of human agency or the real class struggle, then so can anyone else.

Of course this is not entirely a new idea, the post-autonomists have played with the idea of using Spinoza as an alternative philosophical point of reference, rather than Hegel. Just as a link, it’s worth pointing out that consequentialism is also an immanent ethic, rather than a transcendent one. Not that I’m suggesting anything as absurd as a putative “return to Mill” or, god forbid, a “return to Bentham”. But Thompson’s argument for an egalitarian distribution based on a utilitarian framework, is worth taking seriously, on its own terms.

There is however one point of Hunt’s critique that is worthy of further attention, even if he only sees its import one-sidedly, missing its potentially greater significance. That is, the apparent similarity in form of Thompson’s articulation of the empirical unverifiability of individual differences in utility derived from the same goods, as a means of undermining any argument that an unequal distribution may produce greater overall utility, and the later marginalist arguments of the likes of Jevons and Pareto to defend unequal distribution against any redistributive claims.

But whereas Hunt sees this apparent similarity as a reason to dismiss Thompson’s utilitarian argument, the equally likely possibility that the converse is also possible — i.e. that Thompson could be used to deconstruct the foundations of Pareto efficiency, for example, does not seem to occur to him. Again there is not the space in this paper to pursue this line of enquiry further, but it appears, apriori, potentially of interest.

Although Mill mentions his Chancery Lane debates against Thompson in his “Autobiography”, he neglects to mention what the actual outcome of the debates were. William Lovett’s account gives us the reason for Mill’s silence. Mainly that Thompson wiped the floor with the young Mill and his companions from the Utilitarian Society. It is notable that Mill’s nervous breakdown occurred after an abortive attempt by him to reconvene the debate a month later after Thompson’s departure back to Ireland fell flat, as he accounts in his Autobiography.

In fact, despite Mill’s statement later in that same account, that his gradual conversion to a more socialist-influenced outlook came later on in his life from the, safely Christian, French socialists, via the good offices of his (later) wife, Harriet Taylor, the very layout and schema of his Principles of Political Economy into the different books reflects directly the acceptance of Thompson’s critique of political economy.

Why Mill’s was so coy about more openly admitting his debt to Thompson we can only speculate on. It could be simply a case of injured ego for his drubbing in the debates of 1825, however it is possible that he was more concerned at avoiding the scandal of association with such a notorious atheist.

Despite almost certainly being a closet atheist himself, Mill never admitted this in public and this may perhaps have been related by his desire to defend the reputation of Harriet Taylor against the charge of being an adulteress for the period of their 21 year close “friendship” during her previous marriage — a strong sub-text of the Autobiography as a whole. Given the social mores of the age, it would have been impossible for him to declare “on his honour as a gentleman” that their relationship in that period was in no way scandalous, if he was a known atheist. Despite Hayek’s ‘cherchez la femme’ efforts to blame Mill’s corruption from decent liberal into socialist degenerate on Harriet, structural and textual comparison between the Inquiry and the Principles put the question beyond doubt.

In his mention of Thompson’s Inquiry, the anarchist historian Max Nettlau notes “having started with a demand for the full product of labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with his own conversion to communism, that is, unlimited distribution”. This most basic fact of the Inquiry, that it starts in one mind and ends up in a different one, seems to have escaped a surprising number of commentators on the politics and economics of the Inquiry. It also doesn’t help that the study of Thompson appears to have mostly been divided between either those interested solely in his “economic” works or those only interested in his feminist book the “Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, To Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery”. Such that many of the various socialist commentators who have waded through the Inquiry, appear not to have bothered reading Thompson’s subsequent book, the Appeal, where he in fact clarifies a good number of the results of the transition effected in the course of the Inquiry.

This is particularly important in clarifying his change of position of human nature from the eternal homo economicus of conventional utilitarianism, to a more historicised appreciation of the plasticity of human nature in reflecting the social relations of production that form them. It is more a comment on our own biases that today we tend to divide Thompson the communist from Thompson the feminist, when for him, the two aspects were always, from the very beginning, inseparably connected.

But returning to the Inquiry itself, the transition is made explicit in Chapter 5 where Thompson announces his intention to drop his original plan for his original “programme” for a radical market socialism (initially called by him the “Natural Laws of Distribution”) and instead investigate the “evils inherent in the very workings of the system of production by individual competition”. There follows the section of the chapter entitled the Evils of the Principle of Individual Competition (EPIC). In it he demonstrates an inversion of his previous acceptance of the positive social effects of competition into a number of negative effects that, ultimately, come to dominate his very characterisation of the contemporary economic system.

It is the centrality of the role of competition in the evils of the capitalist system that leads Thompson to eventually shorten his repeated categorical phrase “the system [or mode] of production by individual competition” to the “competitive system”. This adjectival form of the word was in fact a neologism. It is one of the ironies of history that the very word that is now conventionally taken to sum up the most positive aspect of the capitalist system, was originally coined by the first socialist as its most fundamental evil.

The evils that Thompson adduces are five fold: 1) That it retains the principle of selfishness in all the affairs of life; 2) It paralyses the productive powers of women and makes attaining their equality with men, difficult or impossible; 3) Leads to waste of effort and resources due to hiding “commercially sensitive” information; 4) It affords no adequate or independent and secure welfare provision for the sick, the young old and infirm; 5) It obstructs useful and productive education by the tyranny of patriarchal familial control reinforced by private property (then only legally held by men, NB) and it obstructs the progress of general knowledge from the incentive to keep improvements in science and art hidden, so as to make them sources of private gain.

Surprisingly, Gregory Claeys’ (1987) otherwise measured account of Thompson’s Inquiry in “Machinery, Money and the Millenium”, characterises these objections as being “[of a] conspicuous moral rather than economic bent”. Despite the first impression given by the language, Thompson’s elaboration of these headings makes clear that his dual methodology of balancing the moral with the pragmatic is still very much in operation.

In fact, to understand the turning point in Thompson’s thinking we need to look at the chapter that precedes the pivotal Chapter 5. That is Chapter 4 on “The acquisition and diffusion of Knowledge, as one of the means of increasing production and enjoyment, and securing the permanence of the Natrural Laws of Distribution”. It is within this crucial chapter that we see Thompson moving from a fairly conventional enlightenment appreciation of the role of knowledge in increasing production to his characteristic critical analysis of the role of class and power in the monopolisation of access to knowledge, stemming back to his battles of 1818 in the Cork Institute. It’s following this, where he considers the unique nature of knowledge as a force of production that can not only be shared freely relative to its labour of production, but that in fact progresses faster the more widely it is shared — the “secret sauce” that has made free software the perplexity of conventional economics — that we see the penny begin to drop. In fact, of the above points, it is the fifth one that most affects Thompson’s change in outlook and his inversion regarding the systemic social impact of competition. This is borne out by his last major written text, a long letter published in 4 or 5 installments in the Weekly Free Press where he focuses on this single aspect to the exclusion of all others. To whit that the effect of competition between workers obstructs the transference of productivity related knowledge between them and thus the speed of development of such knowledge. The driver here is more the pragmatic focus on output, than moral considerations. Again, if we are looking for modern resonances here, we see in Chapter 4 and it’s role on Thompson’s conversion to communism, a prefiguration of the questions around “General Intellect” raised by many of the post-autonomia tendency.

Another point to mention is the mutually determining relation that Thompson sees between the mode of distribution and production itself. He makes this clear, not only in the evils of the EPIC, but even in the terminology he uses, slipping back and forth between “distribution by individual competition” through to “system of production by individual competition”, “competitive system” and even “mode of production by labour with individual equal competition”. In the Grundrisse Marx makes a similar point that the relations of distribution are a determinative part of the relations of production. That hasn’t prevented a number of Marxists from interpreting the precept that exploitation occurs only in the sphere of production and not the sphere of circulation, as implying that changes in the relations of distribution are somehow unrelated to the communist project. At the limit this can lead to a view of the “transitional stage” as basically a state-backed version of the very labour notes schemes that both Thompson and Marx originally set out to combat.

It is this role of Thompson’s critique against market socialism — especially that of Thomas Hodgskin, whose “Labour Defended” inspired Thompson’s third tome, “Labour Rewarded” (1827) that is another area for contemporary development. The confusion already mentioned on the part of some from the orthodox Marxist background, schooled in Lenin’s interpretation of the Gothakritik, in relation to market socialism was not so long ago exposed in a debate between Bertell Ollman, James Lawler, Hillel Ticktin and David Schweikart and in “Market Socialism: The Debate Between Socialists” (1998). Despite Ollman making some great points on the evils of markets, Schweikart was more or less successful in getting away with the provocative chutzpah of claiming Marx as the original market socialist, based on that orthodox interpretation of the Gothakritik.

For people of a more libertarian communist or anarchist background, there are elements of Thompson’s critique that go well beyond the arguments marshaled by Kropoktin and his predecessors. Coming from the continental revolutionary republican tradition they did, the classical libertarian communist discourse tended to rely on that same political justice logic as Godwin and the Jacobins. Kropotkin’s principal argument against the wages system is in effect a version of the same attribution problem (how to apportion which quanta of contributed social labour has been contributed to each worker in a collective labour process) originally raised by Hodgskin to justify market distribution, and turned back onto its originator by Thompson in Labour Rewarded. Of the more pragmatic productivity related issues around the development of knowledge as a force of production on the other side of Thompson’s dual methodology, there is nothing. This one-sided promotion of principle over pragmatism, may well have much to do with the descent of a number of the libertarian communists of the classical era into inert sectarianism or the more active, but no less self-defeating, excesses of “propaganda by the deed”. But that is another topic.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Thompson, William, “An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most conducive to human happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth”. London, 1824. (Google books copy, full view http://bit.ly/sQ72GZ)

Thompson, William “Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, To Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery”, London, 1825. (republished 1997, Cork University Press, with foreword by Dolores Dooley)

Thompson, William “Labor Rewarded”, London 1827. (Google books copy, full view http://bit.ly/uVLzST)

Thompson, William “Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities”, London, 1830.

Thompson, William, letters to the Weekly Free Press, 1831, London.

London Cooperative Society, Journals 1824–1830, British Library.

Mill, John Stuart, “Autobiography”, Penguin Classics, 1990 (orig. 1873, London).

Mill, John Stuart, “Principles of Political Economy”, London 1848. (7th ed. text http://bit.ly/eB1uOk)

Secondary sources

(the first two are recommended as the most up to date and comprehensive sources for the historical William Thompson)

Dooley, Dolores, “Equality in Community”, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996.

Lane, Fintan, ‘William Thompson, Class and his Irish Context, 1775–1833”, chapter in “Politics, society and the middle class in modern Ireland”, Ed. Lane, Fintan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Pankhurst, Richard “William Thompson, Pioneer Socialist”, Pluto Press, 1991.

Claeys, Gregory, “Machinery, Money and the Millenium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860”, Polity Press, 1987.

Thompson, Noel, “The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–34”, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Hunt, E.K., “Utilitarianism and the Labor Theory of Value: a Critique of the Ideas of William Thompson”, History of Political Economy, Vol 11, no 4, 1979.

Lawler, James, Ollman, Bertell, Schweikart, David, Ticktin Hillel, “Market Socialism: The Debate Between Socialists”, Routledge, 1998.