Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital
Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital

Author: Thomas Hodgskin

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 30

ISBN-13: 9781981621897

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Thomas Hodgskin (1787 - 1869) was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions. He used Ricardo's labour theory of value to denounce the appropriation of the most part of value produced by the labour of industrial workers as illegitimate. He propounded these views in a series of lectures at the London Mechanics Institute (later renamed Birkbeck, University of London) where he debated with William Thompson, with whom he shared the critique of capitalist expropriation but not the proposed remedy. The results of these lectures and debates he published as "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" (1825), "Popular Political Economy" (1827) and "Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted" (1832). The title of "Labour Defended" was a jibe at James Mill's earlier "Commerce Defended" and signalled his opposition to the latter taking sides with the capitalists against their employees. Despite his high profile in the agitated revolutionary times of the 1820s, he retreated into the realm of Whig journalism after the Reform Act 1832. He became an advocate of free trade and spent 15 years writing for The Economist. He worked on the paper with its founder, James Wilson, and with the young Herbert Spencer. Hodgskin viewed the demise of the Corn Laws as the first step to the downfall of government, and his libertarian anarchism was regarded as too radical by many of the liberals of the Anti-Corn Law League. He left The Economist in 1857, but continued working as a journalist for the rest of his life.

Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital
Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital

Author: Thomas Hodgskin

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2013-07-08

Total Pages: 54

ISBN-13: 9781490937779

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Thomas Hodgskin (1787 - 1869) was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions. He used Ricardo's labour theory of value to denounce the appropriation of the most part of value produced by the labour of industrial workers as illegitimate. He propounded these views in a series of lectures at the London Mechanics Institute (later renamed Birkbeck, University of London) where he debated with William Thompson, with whom he shared the critique of capitalist expropriation but not the proposed remedy. The results of these lectures and debates he published as "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" (1825), "Popular Political Economy" (1827) and "Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted" (1832). The title of "Labour Defended" was a jibe at James Mill's earlier "Commerce Defended" and signalled his opposition to the latter taking sides with the capitalists against their employees. Despite his high profile in the agitated revolutionary times of the 1820s, he retreated into the realm of Whig journalism after the Reform Act 1832. He became an advocate of free trade and spent 15 years writing for The Economist. He worked on the paper with its founder, James Wilson, and with the young Herbert Spencer. Hodgskin viewed the demise of the Corn Laws as the first step to the downfall of government, and his libertarian anarchism was regarded as too radical by many of the liberals of the Anti-Corn Law League. He left The Economist in 1857, but continued working as a journalist for the rest of his life.

Capital as Power
Capital as Power

Author: Jonathan Nitzan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-06-02

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 1134022298

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Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Thomas Piketty

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-08-14

Total Pages: 817

ISBN-13: 0674979850

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What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class
Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class

Author: Alberto Mingardi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-20

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0429513992

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Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) is today a largely unknown figure, sometimes considered to be a forerunner of Karl Marx. Yet a closer look at Hodgskin’s works reveals that he was actually a committed advocate of laissez-faire economics and enthusiastic about labor-saving machinery and the Industrial Revolution, with a genuine interest in the well-being of the working classes. This book places him in the tradition of classical liberalism, where he belongs—as a disciple of Adam Smith, but even less tolerant of government power than Smith was. Classical Liberalism and the Industrial Working Class: The Economic Thought of Thomas Hodgskin will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in the history of economic thought, economic history and the history of political thought.

Marx on Capitalism
Marx on Capitalism

Author: James Furner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-09-24

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 9004384804

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In Marx on Capitalism, James Furner offers a new answer to the fundamental question of Marxism: can a thesis connecting capital, the state and classes with the desirability of socialism be developed from an analysis of the commodity? The Interaction-Recognition-Antinomy Thesis is anchored in a systematic retranslation of Marx’s writings. It provides an antinomy-based strategy for grounding the value of social humanity in working-class agency, facilitates a dialectical derivation of political representation, and condemns capitalism as unjust without appeal to rights.