This is Richard Wolff from Democracy@Work responding to another one of our AskProfWolff
questions from our Patreon community, and I want to thank Brandon Warner for sending this question
to us. He asks specifically what the relationship is between John Locke's theory of property and
Karl Marx's labor theory of value. Very good question and is actually extremely pertinent
right now, and so that's why we chose it and I hope this answer is useful to you.
First John Locke. It's important to understand that he was a great philosopher
of the 17th century. That is the century before capitalism really gets going and has its champions
in people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and its critics like Karl Marx. John Locke
in England believed that the best economic system was the one that we in the United States
tend to call Jeffersonian democracy. And here's the idea or as John Locke put it in his own words:
every man should only have as much property as he himself can use to productive
purposes. Think about that. Any farmer should only have as much land as he himself could farm.
It's always ‘he’ because of the exclusion of the female gender from most of these people's
thinking as they were subordinated in social life generally. So the ‘he’
should only have as much property as he himself could cultivate. If he was a factory person,
a manufacturer, or a store keeper he should only have as much of that as he himself could work.
What does this mean? What is Locke's purpose in such a restrictive definition? The answer is
he already could see capitalism emerging and by capitalism I mean very clearly and simply:
the relationship of employer to employee–the notion that one person is in the position
of giving jobs to another and the other, the employee, is dependent for his or her livelihood
on the job that may or may not be given–that may or may not be preserved by the employer.
John Locke didn't like the employer employee relationship. In so many words he didn't like
capitalism. Didn't want it. Thomas Jefferson too was very hesitant. He wanted a country that
would be democratic because everybody would be equal, because everybody would only have as much
land as they could work themselves only so much in their shop that they could do themselves. There
wouldn't be the social division between employer and employee–a fundamentally unequal relationship
that would likely become more unequal over time which capitalism has proven itself to do.
Isn't that interesting? A property theory of economics–if you like a property theory
of value, what's valuable, how a society should be organized.
After Locke is dead at the beginning of the 18th century and capitalism really takes off
and gets its champions in Smith and Ricardo, they are the celebrants
of the division between employer and employee. They associate that with larger enterprise,
with greater division of labor, with improving productivity and they have a point,
but they give up the price they pay is to lose all connection with a land of equality
and democracy which they didn't face up to because they had to forget much of what John Locke taught.
And now here comes Marx. He understood what John Locke meant but he could see that the
world of the small self-employed person, which is what Locke celebrated, was being pushed aside,
subordinated, marginalized by the emergence of modern capitalism. Marx is a creature of the 19th
century much as Adam Smith and Ricardo were more of the 18th century and John Locke of the 17th.
So Marx is the most recent and Marx goes after capitalism with his labor theory of value that
what makes everything valuable is the labor in it. Part of what workers produce, the labor they give,
produces goods and services that go back to them to sustain them–food, clothing, shelter
of the worker. But a part of what they produce, Marx teaches, is a surplus; it's a quantity of
output over and above what they get back for their own consumption and that surplus is taken
by the employer. That's how capitalism works. And therefore the capitalist accumulates the surplus
as the property, the capital, he is in business to get and Marx says herein lies the instability,
the inequality, the injustice of the capitalist system.
So in an interesting way, Locke opposes capitalism in the name of an earlier system
of self-employed yeoman English farmers and small craftsmen and small merchants. Whereas Marx
comes after capitalism after it has become dominant in Europe and criticizes it
in the name of a better system to come when the workers displace the capitalists and become their
own bosses, so that the surplus they produce is their own to decide how to use. I hope this
explains the relationship between John Locke in the 17th century and Karl Marx in the 19th,
and you can see the relevance to our situation today. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy@Work.