Bray’s Lockean Socialism

John Bray, whose transatlantic career reached its height around 1840, follows Locke in arguing that all people have a natural common right to the world and a natural private right to the fruits of their labor. But unlike the libertarian radicals, Hodgskin and Spooner, Bray interprets our common right to the world in strongly positive terms. According to him, the world is common in much the way that a public library is common: We all have an equal right to use it for our own purposes so long as everyone else is equally able to use it for their own. In practice, this requires people to form political communities wherein the means of production are public, but in which people maintain private ownership in their share of what the community produces. Thus, Bray attempts to solves Locke’s property problem through socialist political economy, which provides an avenue to reconstitute common ownership under advanced economic conditions. Although Bray’s left-Lockean picture has several attractive features, it stumbles on Bray’s implausible conception of economic value, on which he relies in his argument against incorporating market competition into his left-Lockean picture. According to Bray, all economic value is accumulated labor, which in turn means that economic transactions are zero-sum and that someone (usually workers) must leave market exchanges worse off. Thus, Bray’s Lockean socialism raises, but does not answer, an important question: Is there room for an egalitarian resolution of Locke’s property problem that does not rely on a mistake about economic value?