Locke, Russel and Marx on the Ideas of Property, Labour and Their Inherent Value

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Throughout political and philosophical history, the ideas of property, labour, and their inherent value both in isolation from each other and together have been discussed many times, with different outcomes according to each philosopher. Three politicalphilosophical thinkers are discussed in this paper, with reference to their individual views on property, labour, and their value to different levels of society. Locke, with his Second Treatise of Government has his theories of the communal ownership of land looked at through the lenses provided by Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and the increasing urbanization which would follow his time, while Marx is looked at in terms of being a successor of those thoughts, though obviously his times, being firmly industrial and also in his eyes exploitative in nature, encouraged Marx to develop this line of thinking and broaden it in order to include the changed circumstances which he saw. Naomi Klein, with the chapter on the discarded Factory in her book No Logo, takes the ideas of property and labour still further than her two predecessors: she (as we all do) lives in the time when labour is contracted out of the country into the hands of foreign workers, in order to save money. The property/labour/value trifecta which guided the works of both Locke and Marx is thereby utterly destroyed, leading Klein to adopt a new approach to the themes of property and the value of labour in a time of increased consumption.
Where the twinned topics of property and labour are involved, Locke seems to be caught between the prevailing ideas and conditions of his time; where aristocratic families owned land and allowed peasant farmers to work on it for a price, and the ideals of his philosophical p...

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...wn work The Communist Manifesto. Marx realised that in the increasingly urbanised society around him, production had now become social in nature – the individual owning of property envisaged by Locke was no longer possible. So he moved property from individual leases to a communal lease, and made every worker an individually important part of the common whole. Klein comes from an even more industrialised version of the world than Marx: she realises that, since we have completely devalued labour, it can offer no compensating property or benefits to the workers involved, whether individually or communally. She takes Locke’s labour as value idea to the furthest extent possible. Since labour is no longer recognised for what it is, the workers have become property themselves, and the base of property has shifted to the owners of the company that employs the workers.

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