John Francis Bray

Born 1809; died 1895. English economist, Utopian socialist, and follower of Robert Owen.

Bray was born in Washington, D.C., into the family of an emigrant from England. In 1822 he moved to England and worked as a typesetter. From the 1830’s he participated in the labor movement and was at one time close to the Chartists. Bray is the author of the work Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy … (1839), which Marx characterized as a “remarkable work” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 102). In this work attention was directed primarily to the theory and program of economic reform of bourgeois society. Bray thought that the elimination of private ownership of the means of production and the system of wage labor based on it could be realized by means of the reconstruction of commercial monetary relations (creation of a system of labor currency guaranteed by future labor) on the basis of strict observance of the equivalence of exchange and the replacement of capitalist economic forms by so-called workers’ joint-stock companies. Reflecting an undeveloped stage of the labor movement, Bray did not understand the necessity of a proletarian revolution as the decisive prerequisite for the elimination of the exploitation of man by man. P. J. Proudhon placed Bray’s Utopian ideas at the basis of his petit-bourgeois concept of socialism.