Micahel Perlman says:
<< John Stuart Mill expressed more humanitarian sentiments more frequently than than other political economists. Even so, you can find much the same values in Alfred Marshall, who also declared himself to be a socialist of sorts, but still called for the total defeat of the engineers union.
> When you look a little bit more deeply behind the humanitarian rhetoric, these bourgeois socialists really mean that they look forward to the day when all workers will share their middle-class values. Till then, they have no choice but to support capital against labor.
He has written a book on calssical political economy that is supposed to come out in a couple months.
Michael,
You almost certainly know more about Mill as a political economist than I do. I am basing my remarks on a few things, Mill's chapter on The Probable Futurity of the Labouring Class in the Principles (ch. VII), and the very left wing discussion of socialism and communsim in chapter II of that book, as well as the essay on socialism. Mill seems to say here that private property in the means of priduction a d wage albor will become increasingly intolearble to workers, and that the bosses must either reconcile themselves to peacably handing over the goodies, which Mill hopes will happen, or expect to face real trouble, which he thinks (unlike Marx) would be bad for everybody.
Mill thinks that what we call market socialism would be best for everyone. He is even open minded about communism a la Fourier. He has a lot of worries about how capable currently uneducated workers are of running the factories and fields, and a lot of elitist suspicions generally. But I don't see him as saying, well, hell, all that would be nice, but until you do dump the bosses off your back, I'm on their side. Mill did want to see workers sharing middle class values broadly congruent to his. He called this education; perhaps his view of it was too narrow , but it was a lot broader than a lot of people's today.
However, I don't pretend to be a Mill scholar, least of all of his Political Economy, and I may be just tearing stuff out of context and misreading it.
--jks