Thomas Hodgskin

Born 1787; died 1869. British economist and Utopian socialist.

Hodgskin criticized capitalism in his works Labor Defended Against Capital (1825; Russian translation, 1938) and Popular Political Economy (1827; Russian translation, 1938). Continuing the best traditions of bourgeois classical political economy, Hodgskin demonstrated that the sole .source of value was labor and that the capitalist appropriated part of the worker’s labor. Hodgskin understood capital not as a thing but as a social relationship of producers, as a means of acquiring power over labor. K. Marx noted that Hodgskin had “correctly grasped the nature of capital” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 26, part 3, p. 308).