ABSTRACT
A naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars, and later a journalist, co-founder of the London Mechanics’ Institute and socialist economist, Thomas Hodgskin was a peripheral figure to the Owenite movement. Though he publicly dismissed Robert Owen’s belief in the community of property, his influence on early co-operators and later socialists was nevertheless strong, as his writings, often adapted from the classes on political economy that he gave at the London Mechanics’ Institute, helped popularise the socialist theory of labour exploitation. Published in 1825, Labour Defended was a response to James Mill’s Commerce Defended. In the context of the repeal of the Combination Acts, Hodgskin argued that it was skilled labour, not capital or commerce, that formed the most productive and dynamic element in the economy. Workers were consequently entitled to the full product of their labour, while trade unions should be allowed to “absorb profits into wages”, thus putting an end to the exploitation of labour by middlemen.
