On the one hand there was the revolutionary pessimistic school, represented by James O'Brien, who pushed the apparent admissions of Ricardo (with whose views Malthus was associated) to a terrifying conclusion, and prophesied a revolutionary termination to the oppression of capital. The present system condemned the poor to eternal and undiminishing poverty, whilst the rich throve on the surplus value extracted from the labour of the poor. The right of the labourer to the whole produce of his labour became an axiom. But the gulf between the practical wrongs of labour and its theoretical rights would grow until it was filled with the debris of the shattered capitalistic system. Then would militant labour march across and take possession of its true and undiminished heritage.
The other school, represented by William Thompson and J. F. Bray,[1] was more scientific in its methods, more positive in its conclusions, and less militant in its language. Thompson and Bray devoted themselves to further analysis of the conception of surplus value—the five loaves which Hodgskin's labourer produces but does not receive; they also examined the mechanism of exchange, through which, as Hodgskin suggests, the extraction of surplus value is accomplished. In both respects they left very little for later thinkers to add to the results of their inquiry. Both writers were much under the influence of Robert Owen, and saw in Owen's co-operative communities the solution of the problem. The labourer could only obtain the full produce of his labour in communities in which co-operative production, voluntary exchange, and co-operative distribution were the basis of industrial organisation. They were therefore enthusiastic advocates of the Owenite schemes. They were not popular writers in the sense that Hodgskin was. Their works were excellently written, but they were without popular appeal. They wrote with the serene tranquillity of men who awaited with sure and certain hope the accomplishment of their highest desires. They wrote for a small circle, and their task was to give a scientific foundation to the purely empiric notions of Owen. But the mass of working people whom the teachings of Owen reached interpreted them in the light of bitter experience, and had little patience with the ideal schemes of Thompson and his friends.
Manifold was the influence of this body of doctrine upon
