The interests of the large-scale socialised, industrial capital is initially represented by the Liberal Party, in Britain, that dragged behind it a long proletarian tail, until the tail broke free, and established its own party – The Labour Party – but, with essentially the same ideological basis. The interests of the financial and landed oligarchy are represented by conservative parties and politicians. It was one of Ricardo's disciples, J.S. Mill, who, therefore, represents the pinnacle of liberal-democratic thought, and its transition to social-democracy. As C.B. Macpherson says, Mill refused
“... to allow that the market should determine the value or worth of a man. It put other values higher than market values. Yet, in the end, Mill found himself helpless, unable to reconcile his notion of values with the political economy he still believed in. The world's work had to go on, and he could see no way in which it could be carried on except by competitive private enterprise. He saw clearly that the prevailing relation between wage labour and capital was condemned by his own criterion of good, and he thought that it would before long become insupportable by the wage labourers. His only way out was to the hope that a network of co-partnerships in industry, or producers' co-operatives, might turn every worker into his own capitalist, and so enable the system of enterprise to operate without the degradation of wage labour.”
(“Post-Liberal Democracy?,” in Ideology in Social Science, Robin Blackburn Ed., p 21-22)
Marx also makes the point, in Capital III, that this socialised capital, be it in the form of these co-operatives or joint stock companies represents a transitional form of property between capitalist property and socialism. For Marx and Engels, these transitional forms of property are the material basis for that transition, but which requires a political struggle by the workers to gain control over those forms. But, for social-democracy, they represent rather the means of containing the contradictions between capital and labour, and thereby as an end in themselves.
“The fact that bourgeois production is compelled by its own immanent laws, on the one hand, to develop the productive forces as if production did not take place on a narrow restricted social foundation, while, on the other hand, it can develop these forces only within these narrow limits, is the deepest and most hidden cause of crises, of the crying contradictions within which bourgeois production is carried on and which, even at a cursory glance, reveal it as only a transitional, historical form.” (p 84)
Sismondi correctly grasped this as a contradiction between production for the sake of production, which Ricardo saw as an end in itself, and Marx sees as the basis for socialism, and the mode of distribution, which prevents the absolute development of productivity. Hence, Ricardo refuses to recognise any contradiction, whilst Sismondi only sees the contradiction, without seeing any means of transcending it, and so is thrown back on to attempts to curb the development of production.
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