American Forerunners of Marx: Langton Byllesby and Thomas Skidmore
Langton Byllesby was an American follower of Robert Owen. Born in Philadelphia in 1789, he worked in the printing trade and also built a flying machine as well as writing poetry on the subject of patent rights. In 1823-4, he edited newspapers in Pennsylvania and was a supporter of the radical democrat, Andrew Jackson. In 1826, he published Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth. Whereas Owen promoted new settlements, Byllesby argued that reconstruction should begin within existing urban centres. He supported the labour theory of value, while recognising that skills should be rewarded. He did not favour state intervention but supported voluntary association of producers. He believed that such an approach would eliminate unrestrained competition with its attendant evils of poverty and unemployment. He did not publish any further work or engage in political activity, returning to printing and farming. Byllesby died in 1871.
“The equal right of all to the pursuit of happiness. Inaptitude of the primitive and existing institutions to admit that right, by their generation of unequal wealth, and warlike inclinations, through the assumption of fixed property in the soil, the introduction and perversion of the uses of money and the system of trafficking.”
Thomas Skidmore was a radical American political philosopher who in 1829 help to found the New York Workingmen’s Party. The party won 31% of the vote and elected two members of the New York legislature. In the following year, forced out by more moderate colleagues led by Robert Dale Owen (Robert Owen’s son), he founded the Agrarian party, standing unsuccessfully for the United States Congress.
Skidmore was a writer as well as political activist. In 1829, he published The Rights of Man to Property? which was a critique of Thomas Jefferson’s view of private property as central to American republican democracy. He also published a book of political essays. Skidmore also criticised Thomas Paine for not understanding economic factors.
Skidmore argued for the end of the right of inheritance and for a one-time equalization of property among adults. His programme was straightforward: all property in the United States should be divvied up and redistributed, in equal shares, to American citizens. From that point on, Americans would own their share as private property, and would relinquish it only when they died. Private inheritance would be abolished, and the wealth of the deceased would be pooled into a fund and reserved, in the future, for young people when they reached the age of 18. Upon reaching that age, all Americans would inherit a generous sum of money, understood as their birthright, to get them started in adult life. The mechanism for change advocated by Skidmore was the convocation of a constitutional convention that would in one swoop abolish all debts and expropriate all property, productive and personal, on behalf of the state. Every citizen, regardless of gender or race, would be allotted an equal share of the combined property of the nation, with the system made permanent by the equal distribution of the property of the deceased to those attaining the age of majority. Skidmore also advocated state aid for child-rearing, the abolition of private charity, and the elimination of banks and corporate charters. Skidmore died in the cholera epidemic of 1832, at the age of forty-one. Anticipating Marx, Skidmore recognised the division of society into two classes.
“…proprietors, and non-proprietors; those who own the world and those who own no part of it. If we take a closer view of these two classes, we shall find that a very great proportion even of the proprietors, are only nominally so; they possess so little, that in strict regard to truth, they ought to be classed among the non-proprietors.” (Wikipedia)
“Let the parent reflect, if he now be a man of toil, that his children must be, 99 cases in 100, slaves, and worse, to some rich proprietor… Let him not cheat himself with empty pretensions; for, he who commands the property of the State, or even an inordinate portion of it, has the liberty and the happiness of its citizens in his own keeping…. He who can feed me, or starve me; give me employment, or bid me wander about in idleness, is my master; and it is the utmost folly for me to boast of being anything but a slave.”
Further Reading
Byllesby, Langston –Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (1826; reprinted 1961, Russell and Russell, New York)
Skidmore, Thomas – Rights of Man to Property (1829, reprinted Burt Franklin, New York)
Harris, D – Socialist Origins in the United States (1996, Van Gorcum, Assen for International Institute for Social History)
Hugins, Walter – Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (Stanford University Press 1960)
Pessen, Edward – Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labour Movement (University of New York Press 1967)
Wilentz, Sean – Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (Oxford University Press 1984)
Foner, Philip – History of the Labor Movement in the United States Vol 1 (International Publishers 1947)