Introduction
“In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.
This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.”
(Marx – The Communist Manifesto)
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx discusses a number of variants of Socialism. One of these variants is that represented by Sismondi. Unlike Ricardo, and other economists of the time, who denied the possibility of overproduction, on the basis of Say's Law, Sismondi recognised the contradictions within capitalist production that create the potential for crises of overproduction. Sismondi recognised the contradiction inherent in commodity production. The commodity itself is a contradictory unity of use value and exchange value. The more productivity rises, so that wealth, in the form of use values, increases, the more the unit value of each of these use values declines, and if the point of production is no longer the production of use value, but of exchange-value, a necessary contradiction, and potential for crises arises.
Malthus, as representative of the landed aristocracy, clergy and state functionaries, had no desire to hide these contradictions and potential for crises of overproduction, and so, where Malthus attacks everything in Ricardo that is progressive and revolutionary, he takes everything in Sismondi that is reactionary. Ricardo wants to push production and society ever forwards, whereas Malthus wants to hold it back, so as to protect the interests of the landlords etc. Malthus' solution to the potential for overproduction, identified by Sismondi, whose work he plagiarises, is to have the landlords, the state, etc. consume the surplus in their unproductive consumption. In that way, there is no glut; the capitalists sell their production and realise their profit, so as to encourage them to continue to accumulate, but capital accumulation is restricted, as a result of the landlords and state using rents and taxes to fund their consumption, and so Smith's concept that capital accumulation would outstrip growth of the working population, causing wages to rise and profits to fall, is avoided.
A modern version of Malthus' solution to overproduction is found in Keynes idea that the state can intervene to buy up surplus production, and set workers to work by the use of fiscal deficits.
Sismondi recognised this potential for crisis, as well as noting all of the horrors of capitalist production. But, he never really understood the way capitalism worked, and so he was unable to provide a progressive solution to those problems. As Marx notes,
“He wavers constantly: should the State curb the productive forces to make them adequate to the production relations, or should the production relations be made adequate to the productive forces? He often retreats into the past, becomes a laudator temporis acti, or he seeks to exorcise the contradictions by a different adjustment of revenue in relation to capital, or of distribution in relation to production, not realising that the relations of distribution are only the relations of production seen from a different aspect. He forcefully criticises the contradictions of bourgeois production but does not understand them, and consequently does not understand the process whereby they can be resolved.”
(Marx – Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 19, p 56)
This strand of Socialism, therefore, Marx says, always ends up as reactionary, because rather than seeking to push forward the productive forces, to see the resolution of the contradictions in the development of new social forms that capitalism itself throws up, it continually seeks to hold back that development, and to look backwards to some previous “golden age”.
As Marx says, in Value, Price and Profit,
“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material condition and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society.”
And, in Capital III, Chapter 27, Marx sets out what these new social forms are, in the shape of the joint stock companies (corporations) and cooperatives.
“The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage...
The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.”
But, the ideas of the Sismondists have found reflection in the labour movement throughout history. In more recent times, it found its reflection in the “anti-capitalist” movement, whose emphasis, as the name suggests, is on being anti-capital rather than for Socialism. It has been reflected in the attempts to curb the natural development of capitalism as an international or global system, a development of capitalism that Marx both predicted and would have seen as extremely positive, as a precondition for Socialism which itself can only exist as an international system.
Marx, who called on workers of all countries to unite, and who said that workers have no country, would have been horrified at calls from socialists to break-up the EU, for example. Lenin himself, who originally argued that a United States of Europe was desirable, but that the capitalist states in Europe, embroiled in their own colonial ambitions, could not bring it about, agreed with the position brought by Trotsky that, if such European unity were established, it would be no part of a socialist programme to break it apart.
Yet, all of these reactionary sentiments for trying to restrict the development of capitalism, and looking backwards towards the nation state, are to be seen in the ideas put forward by sections of the labour movement, including some who call themselves Marxists.
Another form of it is in the form of “anti-imperialism”, which is taken as meaning not just opposition to the militaristic activities of capitalist states – though usually only the militarism of some capitalist states are objected to, whilst other are essentially given a free pass – but also even the role of foreign capital in the industrialisation and modernisation of less developed economies. This view is often argued not in Marxist terms, and on the basis of Marx's analysis of the development of capitalism via the production of surplus value, but on the basis of the ideas of the Mercantilists, whereby profit arises via unequal exchange. In other words, it is a step back, not to a stage of understanding before Marx, but even before Adam Smith, and his explanation of the foundation of the wealth of nations. It is again a reflection of the ideas expounded by Sismondi.
A large theoretical weight is placed on Lenin himself as justification for these modern manifestations of Sismondism. In particular, the weight is placed on Lenin's polemical pamphlet, “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism”. But, the pamphlet was written in 1916, in the midst of an imperialist war, in which the socialist movement itself had split. Lenin's pamphlet is essentially a piece of propaganda aimed at Kautsky and his adherents. It neatly summed up the causes of war being that capitalism had reached a monopoly stage, whereby it was forced to expand and carve up the world into empires. Hence, the imperialist powers went to war over the division of the spoils. The problem was that the claims made by Lenin, in the pamphlet, were historically and theoretically wrong. The main reason for WWI and WWII was not a drive to capture colonial markets across the globe, but was actually to create a unified European state, in the same way that the US had fought its Civil War to achieve that end, and that Prussia had created a unified Germany, and indeed the way nation states had been established across Europe, as a minimum arena in which capital could function.
Many of the arguments that the modern day Sismondists/anti-imperialists put forward were themselves outright rejected by Lenin, both in “Imperialism” and after. One of the main sources of these ideas was Stalinism. Once entrenched in the USSR, the Stalinists set about justifying their positions by bowdlerising the ideas of Lenin. A classic example is the Theory of Socialism In One Country, developed by Stalin in 1924. As Trotsky describes its development,
“The large-scale defeats of the European proletariat, and the first very modest economic successes of the Soviet Union, suggested to Stalin, in the autumn of 1924, the idea that the historic mission of the Soviet bureaucracy was to build socialism in a single country. Around this question there developed a discussion which to many superficial minds seemed academic or scholastic, but which in reality reflected the incipient degeneration of the Third International and prepared the way for the Fourth.)
Not only is it antithetical to the position of Lenin, as set out by Trotsky, but it is entirely contrary to the ideas of international socialism as elaborated by Marx. Yet, the Theory of Socialism In One Country was the foundation of the ideas of national roads to Socialism, developed by the European Communist Parties, which, in essence, were nothing more than social-democratic programmes to be implemented within the constrictions of the capitalist nation state, around which protectionist barriers of import and immigration controls were to be established.
And, consistent with these Sismondist ideas about curbing capitalist development, one of the ideas promoted by the Stalinists was that of the “anti-monopoly alliance”, as the big capitalist corporations were identified as the enemy against which workers could wage common cause alongside the small capitalists who were seen also to be economically oppressed, much in the same way that it was argued that weak, less developed economies were economically oppressed by the big “imperialist states”. Ideologically, the “anti-monopoly alliance” and the “anti-imperialist alliance” are twins.
Again, here can be seen that same Sismondist approach of looking backwards rather than forwards. In reality, of course, it is usually the large industrial oligopolies that provide the best opportunities for workers to organise into trades unions, whereas it is the small capitalists that are the most reliant on paying low wages, and providing poor conditions as a means of making their profit. That is a point that Lenin makes in “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”, where he provides the data showing that the small handicraft factories provided better conditions than domestic handicraft production, and the larger industrial factories proper provided better conditions still, and the larger industrial enterprises, often foreign owned, provided better conditions still.
In “Imperialism”, Lenin, in opposing the reactionary Sismondist notions about opposing monopolies, writes,
““It is not the business of the proletariat,” writes Hilferding “to contrast the more progressive capitalist policy with that of the now bygone era of free trade and of hostility towards the state. The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition—which has now become a reactionary ideal—but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism.”
Kautsky broke with Marxism by advocating in the epoch of finance capital a “reactionary ideal”, “peaceful democracy”, “the mere operation of economic factors”, for objectively this ideal drags us back from monopoly to non-monopoly capitalism, and is a reformist swindle.”
And, similarly, in opposing the cross class popular fronts that the “anti-imperialists” propose, which sees them act as apologists for some of the most reactionary regimes and movements on the planet, which are the main immediate enemies of the workers in those countries, Lenin wrote in his Draft Theses on The National and Colonial Questions,
“second, the need for a struggle against the clergy and other influential reactionary and medieval elements in backward countries;
third, the need to combat Pan-Islamism and similar trends, which strive to combine the liberation movement against European and American imperialism with an attempt to strengthen the positions of the khans, landowners, mullahs, etc
fifth, the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends in the backward countries; the Communist International should support bourgeois-democratic national movements in colonial and backward countries only on condition that, in these countries, the elements of future proletarian parties, which will be communist not only in name, are brought together and trained to understand their special tasks, i.e., those of the struggle against the bourgeois-democratic movements within their own nations. The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form;”
In a series of writings, the best known of which is his “The Development of Capitalism In Russia”, Lenin addresses the Sismondist arguments put forward by the Narodniks. Over coming weeks, this series of posts will examine Lenin's writings arguing against economic romanticism/Sismondism, promoted by the Narodniks, but which have resonance amongst the reactionary ideas of the moral socialists of today manifest in the ideas of "anti-capitalism" and "anti-imperialism".
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