Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 11:02:00 -0700
From: Lisa Rogers <eqwq.lrogers-AT-state.ut.us>
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject:  Hunt on Thompson and Hodgskin, part 2



E.K.Hunt 1992 _History of Economic Thought: a critical perspective_,
HarperCollins

Chapter 7 Political Economy of the Poor: the ideas of William
Thompson and Thomas Hodgskin

summary by Lisa Rogers [PART 2 of 2]

	A Critique of Thompson's Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism provides the philosophical foundation for the
neoclassical utility theory of value, which supports a general view
of the harmony of all interests.  This tradition if the most profound
intellectual defense for / ideology in support of , market
capitalism.  Utilitarianism cannot support radical reform of society,
it inherently tends to support the status quo.

It is both a psychological theory of how people behave and an ethical
theory of how they ought to behave.  It may seem egalitarian because
it states that the pleasures of all people are of equal importance. 
However, pleasure and pain ar the *only* moral criteria of good and
bad, but these are subjectively experienced.  There is no direct
means of comparing the intensities of pleasures of various
individuals.  Therefore, there is no way to make moral judgments
between them.  This is what Bentham saw when he wrote "quantity of
pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry." [Pushpin was a
popular working class parlor game, poetry was wealthy leisure ?art?.]

Therefore, a consistently utilitarian anti-capitalist can only say "I
want change because it would give me more pleasure than capitalism
does."  Utilitarianism offers no criterion other than personal
preference by which one can judge the best of various preferences.  

Thompson concluded that an equal distribution was morally superior by
starting with an assumption of equality, claiming that people have
equal capacity for pleasure, and showing that we cannot defend any
change upon utilitarian grounds.  Unfortunately, the argument is
equally valid in reverse.  One cannot show that people do _not_ have
equal capacity for pleasure, _or_ that they do.  Besides, subjective
pleasures are not comparable.  So one cannot show that taking money
>from the rich and giving it to the poor _would_ increase aggregate
pleasure/ utility.  No change from any status quo can be supported on
utilitarian grounds alone.

The central theme of this book is seen here in the normative
difference between labor theory perspective and the utility/exchange
perspective.  Exchange always increases utility for all parties, it
is unanimous and harmonious, but it always assumes that the present
distribution of wealth, i.e. capitalist status quo, is "a given",
unexamined, un-questioned.  

The labor theory perspective always emphasizes that all that wealth
was created by labor, and draws attention to the historically evolved
property relations that enable owners to appropriate the products of
the labor of others.  It places conflict at the crux of the matter.
 Thompson's utilitarianism creates yet another insoluble
contradiction.  The fundamental utilitarian assumption is that all
[significant, economic] motives can be reduced to the rational
pursuit of self-interest.  There is then no way to consistently argue
that cooperative socialism will promote benevolent motives and
competitive individualism will promote antisocial, selfish motives. 
In Bentham's words "Self-preference has place everywhere."

		Thomas Hodgskin's View of the Source of Profit

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) was very influential in the British
labour movement around the 1820's.  His theory of capital and profits
was consistent with the LTV tradition, but his radical conclusions
contributed to most conservatives of that time abandoning Ricardo's
LTV.  In 1813, he wrote that property exerts an "unjust and injurious
influence" because property "absolutely...takes from the daily
labourer to give to the idle gentleman", although  he did not offer
much argument or understanding of the origin of value or profit.

Hodgskin explained rent and profit as legal robbery, the result of
the rich controlling the laws and government and thus perpetuating
their own wealth and power. 

     "Laws...are everywhere a trap for the unwary, an instrument
employed by a particular class to enrich themselves at the expense of
other men." 
     "It is not enough, in the eyes of legislators, that wealth has
of itself a thousand charms, but they have ...given it a multitude of
privileges.  In fact, it has now usurped all the power of
legislation, and most penal laws are now made for the mere protection
of wealth."  1820

Hodgskin advocated the elimination of governments and laws, and
tended to agree with the views of Godwin and Smith.  Although
associated with Ricardo's LTV by others, he actually held to Smith's
'summing-up' theory of prices, i.e. wages plus rent plus profit price.  Hodgskin used Ricardo's terms "natural price" and "social
price" but he defined them quite differently.

The "*natural* or necessary price means ... the whole quantity of
labour nature requires from man that he may produce any commodity.
... Labour was the original, is now and ever will be the only
purchase money in dealing with Nature.  There is another description
of price, to which I shall give the name of *social*; it is natural
price enhanced by social regulations."  1827

Those "regulations" were the laws that yielded unearned income to
landlords and idle capitalists, i.e. it included rent and profits, as
Smith's exchange price did.  Hodgskin held that the laws of private
property, through which rents and profits were extracted, were
unnatural and hence inherently unjust.  Without them, each one would
possess the products of one's own labor.

	Hodgskin's Conception of Capital

Hodgskin held that profit and rent were a tribute coerced from
workers, and did not pay for anything inherently necessary for
production.  He tried to refute the idea that capital was a separate,
independent factor of production.  Since all capital itself is
produced, and is basically coerced from workers, it is merely some
aspects of the labor process, labor relations and products of labor
that are called 'capital'.  

Capital includes everything except worker subsistence itself, capital
is all given up by the workers "for the privilege of eating the food
we have ourselves produced, and of using our skill in producing
more." ... "Capital is a sort of cabalistic word, like Church or
State, or any other of those general terms which are invented by
those who fleece the rest of mankind to conceal the hand that shears
them."  (1825)  [There's a different take on the 'invisible hand'!]

	Hodgskin's Utilitarianism

Hodgskin was not strictly a socialist, because he did not advocate
the collective ownership of all means of production.  He believed in
the private ownership of the means of production by those who used
those means.  His last book was _The Natural and Artificial Rights of
Property Contrasted_ 1932.  "Nature bestows on every individual what
his labour produces, just as she gives him his own body."  It was the
ownership of capital by those who did _not_ produce that he believed
to be unnatural and to cause most social ills.  

In an ideal society, that would not be permitted.  There would be no
rent or profit, and quantity of labor would be the only determinant
of price.  Only then would Ricardo be correct that commodities
exchange at their labor-values, and the worker would get the full
value of one's labor, by exchange in a free market. 
 
His utilitarian defense of the market under those circumstances was
the same as Thompson's.  His ideal society was competitive capitalism
without capitalists.  Hodgskin thought that self-education of workers
would be sufficient to bring about these reforms.

Hodgskin's analysis was better than Thompson's in his description of
capital as both the produced means of production and a coercive
social relationship, but it founders on the same problems with
utilitarianism.  Thompson was one of his biggest critics, as Thompson
held that even in Hodgskin's ideal society, competitive individualism
was socially and morally inferior to cooperative socialism.

[end chapter 7 part 2, of 2]



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