John Bray was born in the United States but spent his formative years (1822–1842) in England. His attention was drawn to social and industrial questions during a period as an itinerant printer in the early 1830s and also through his work with the unstamped Voice of the West Riding (1833–1834).

In 1837 Bray gave a series of lectures to the Leeds Working Men’s Association – lectures which were to form the basis of his one major work Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, published in 1839. Shortly after (1842) he emigrated to the United States. However, his letters to the American papers show that he remained concerned with social and political matters as they touched upon the interests of the labouring-classes; indeed, in the 1880s he became involved with the syndicalist Knights of Labor and was hailed in 1885, by the Detroit News, as the oldest living socialist born in America.

In Labour’s Wrongs Bray traced the impoverishment of the labouring-classes to the skewed distribution of the ownership of the nation’s productive capacity, which permitted the coercive exercise of economic power by the few against the interests of the many. This power was used to exploit those with only their labour to sell by means of unequal exchanges that reduced the value of labour to a bare subsistence level. Thus for Bray it was more by the infraction of the principle of equal exchanges ‘by the capitalist, than by all other causes united that inequality of condition is produced and maintained and the working man offered up bound hand and foot, a sacrifice upon the altar of Mammon’. For Bray, therefore, exploitation occurred in the sphere of exchange with the crucial intermediation of money, which he saw as instrumental in ensuring that everything ‘generated by the power of labour is perpetually carried off and absorbed by capital’. Further, the impoverishment of labour that resulted caused deficient demand and, in consequence, general economic depression.

Bray’s solution to the iniquities and inequities of competitive capitalism was the creation of an economic system that would guarantee ‘universal labour and equal exchanges’. Like other nineteenth-century socialist and anti-capitalist writers Bray sought to transmute the labour theory of value from a critical tool to an operational imperative. Thus goods should exchange at their labour values, for with labour exchanged against labour: ‘That which is now called profit and interest cannot exist.’ This was to be achieved by ensuring that the means of production were ‘possessed and controlled by society at large’ – something which was to be secured through purchase, the purchase price being met out of wealth created once the nation’s productive capacity was under collective control.

Bray does no more than sketch the operational outlines of this socialist commonwealth, but it is clear that although influenced by Owenite thinking, his conception of socialism involved a move away from the idea of self-contained, self-sufficient, cooperative communities in the direction of central control over output, pricing, allocation and distribution. In this respect, while bearing many of the hallmarks of early nineteenth-century Owenite socialism, Labour’s Wrongs points to the work of late nineteenth-century socialists where the market is supplanted by planning.

Selected Works

  • 1839. Labour’s wrongs and labour’s remedy or, the age of might and the age of right. Leeds. Reprinted, New York: A.M. Kelley, 1968.