When?
Before Marx came along, most Anglophone socialists were pretty Lockean. The usual argument, I think, was that (i) Locke was right to think that work created an rights-based property entitlement to the object produced; (ii) the division of labour meant that in the place of individual producers of Locke's Second Treatise we now had collective agents; so that (iii) these collective agents therefore owned the product of their collective labour.
On one view, Marx was the great critic of Lockean socialism, from which it never recovered. ("From each according to ability, to each according to need" is a profoundly anti-Lockean-socialist slogan). On another view, Marx was the greatest Lockean socialist of the lot of them. (For those people who insist that what ultimately is wrong with capitalism is that the capitalist expropriates something which _by rights_ belongs to the worker).
I've appended to this message a chunk of Thomas Hodgkin, "Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital" from 1825, which makes a typically Lockean argument for democratic socialism. (It's a terrific pamphlet).
Chris
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"Whatever division of labour exists, and the further it is carried the more evident does this truth become, scarcely any individual completes of himself any species of produce. Almost any product of art and skill is the result of joint and combined labour. So dependent is man on man, and so much does this dependence increase as society advances, that hardly any labour of any single individual, however much it may contribute to the whole produce of society, is of the least value but as forming a part of the great social task. In the manufacture of a piece of cloth, the spinner, the weaver, the bleacher and the dyer are all different persons. All of them except the first is dependent for his supply of materials on him, and of what use would his thread be unless the others took it from him, and each performed that part of the task which is necessary to complete the cloth? Wherever the spinner purchases the cotton or wool, the price which he can obtain for his thread, over and above what he paid for the raw material, is the reward of his labour. But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility. Wherever the division of labour is introduced, therefore, the judgment of other men intervenes before the labourer can realise his earnings, and there is no longer any thing which we can call the natural reward of individual labour. Each labourer produces only some part of a whole, and each part having no value or utility of itself, there is nothing on which the labourer can seize, and say: "This is my product, this will I keep to myself." Between the commencement of any joint operation, such as that of making cloth, and the division of its product among the different persons whose combined exertions have produced it, the judgment of men must intervene several times, and the question is, how much of this joint product should go to each of the individuals whose united labourers produce it?
"I know no way of deciding this but by leaving it to be settled by the unfettered judgments of the labourers themselves." --
----------------- Chris Brooke <editors at voiceoftheturtle.org> The Voice of the Turtle <http://voiceoftheturtle.org>