John Gray (socialist)

Life and views

Very little personal information about John Gray is available. He lived mostly in Edinburgh. According to his own account, he was a poor student who dropped out of school early, went to London and took up factory work as a youngster. His hardships first convinced him of the ills of the economic system and drove him to read the writings of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other economists, and to take an interest in various schemes of social reform. Gray was involved in the newspaper business and is said to have been a failed businessman. He was an admirer of the social reformer Abram Combe. Gray was for a while associated with the co-operative movement of Robert Owen and was one of the so-called Ricardian socialists, along with Thomas Hodgskin and John Francis Bray. Named after the economist David Ricardo, the Ricardian socialists asserted that labour was the source of value. The Ricardian socialists argued that the equilibrium exchange value of commodities in elastic supply tend to coincide with producer prices, which represent the labour embodied in the commodities. Profit, interest and rent are deducted from this value and are, in the view of the Ricardian socialists, illegitimate for that reason. Gray argued that the producers receive only about a fifth of the value of their products, whereas their labour creates 100% of that value. He also argued that competition hampered the economy's productivity because, under free-market competition, incomes remain low, limiting demand and therefore production. To overcome the limits competition places on social production, the hardships it imposes on all competitors and the injustice of the extraction of surplus value from labour (as he saw it), Gray proposed a central bank which would issue a 'labour currency', to be used as a generalised medium of exchange of equivalent amounts of labour value, as well as a system of co-operative associations to organise supply and demand. These would be co-ordinated by a central 'National Chamber of Commerce'.

John Gray wrote several books, including Lectures on Human Happiness (1825), The Social System: A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange (1831), An Efficient Remedy for the Distress of Nations (1842), The Currency Question (1847) and Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money (1848) and several others. In 1825, John Gray and his brother James founded the Edinburgh and Leith Advertiser, an unstamped paper. This was replaced in 1826 by a stamped paper, the North British Advertiser. In 1829, John Gray is said to have suffered a mental breakdown, and his brother James came from Glasgow to Edinburgh to nurse him back to health. In 1830, John turned over management of the Advertiser to James. In 1830, John Gray tried to set up a printers' hall with a steam-driven printing press, but he was forced to relinquish the project. He is said to have published directories for Edinburgh for several years. In 1842, Gray was associated with a co-operative project at Falonside, Galashiels. The preface of his book on the Effective Remedy of the Distress of Nations is dated from there. In 1844–49 we find the brothers listed as proprietors of Gray's Local Advertiser in Glasgow. The brothers do not seem to have seen eye-to-eye politically; at any rate, John Gray publicly dissociated himself from the political line James Gray pursued in the Edinburgh and Leith Advertiser. John Gray also contributed articles to a variety of journals in Britain and even in the United States. (For example, an article on 'Industrial Reform' was published in 1848 in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review.)

Gray first wrote to Robert Owen in 1823, having noticed that some of Owen's ideas resembled those he had reached independently. He subsequently visited New Lanark and at first publicly supported Owen (though he claimed later that he was never fully convinced of Owen's theory). By 1826, however, Gray had become disillusioned with Owen, and their quarrel soon became public; The Social System contains a long critique of Owen. They disagreed over whether production as well as distribution should be organised co-operatively (Owen favoured this, Gray apparently not). Gray was also critical of Owen's management of his co-operative at New Lanark. Gray seems to have been involved in the early trade union movement; there is some evidence that he was involved in the printers' union in Edinburgh. In 1830 he published An Address to the Printers of Edinburgh. He was in contact with the London Co-operative Society and was a supporter of the Chartist movement. He also gave an address to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute. Karl Marx cited Gray, along with other Ricardian socialists, in his polemic against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to dispute Proudhon's priority claim. He subjected Gray's ideas and those of other Ricardian socialists to a critique in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), alleging that Gray had not understood that money represents a definite system of relations of production. Not much else is known about John Gray. In 1846 there is a reference to him in the Law Times as 'a bankrupt whose estate has been fully administered.'

Though 1883 is given as the year of his death in most of the more recent sources, many sources give the year as 1850.