A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism
In this work, Lenin examines the theories of Sismondi and his followers. In so doing, he exposes the nature of the theories of the Narodniks, which are based on them. Those same ideas and theories that flow from a petty-bourgeois world view, can be found today in the politics of the “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”, liberal-interventionists and reformists. This work by Lenin is, therefore, one of the most important in understanding the roots of the politics of these petty-bourgeois trends today.
Marx refers to this petty-bourgeois trend, represented by Sismondi, in The Communist Manifesto.
“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.”
And, he also refers to this reactionary and Utopian nature of it, in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9.
“Sismondi is only right as against the economists who conceal or deny this contradiction. Apart from the barrenness of such edifying reflections, they reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals.” (p 117-8)
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx also says that those, like Sismondi, but also Proudhon, when they saw poverty, saw only poverty. They did not see that the process that led to the poverty also led to a revolutionising of production, to a transformation of the means of production, and social relations, which creates the objective material conditions for socialism.
Lenin begins by looking at Sismondi's argument that the development of large-scale production leads to a shrinkage of the home market, because it involves the ruin of small producers. This is the same argument that is put by the Narodniks. On the basis of this argument, Sismondi arrives at his theory of the overproduction of commodities due to under-consumption. The under-consumption is a consequence of social inequality, as the small producers are ruined. As wage labourers, their consumption is lower than as independent producers. Moreover, they could never consume all they produced, because, if they did, there would be no surplus product, and so no profit. The capitalist only employs them if they can produce profit.
As Marx describes, in Theories of Surplus Value, Malthus plagiarised these ideas of Sismondi, and turned them into his own theory of under-consumption. Malthus argued that this under-consumption could only be avoided if the landlord class and its lackeys in the state consumed a large part of the surplus product. In this way, the capitalists would not over-accumulate, but would be able to realise their profits. This under-consumption theory was taken up by Keynes from Malthus, a century later.
“A study of Sismondi is today all the more interesting because last year (1896) an article in Russkoye Bogatstvo also expounded his doctrine (B. Ephrucy: “The Social and Economic Views of Simonde de Sismondi,” Russkoye Bogatstvo, 1896, Nos. 7 and 8).
The contributor to Russkoye Bogatstvo states at the very outset that no writer has been “so wrongly appraised” as Sismondi, who, he alleges, has been “unjustly” represented, now as a reactionary, then as a utopian. The very opposite is true. Precisely this appraisal of Sismondi is quite correct. The article in Russkoye Bogatstvo, while it gives an accurate and detailed account of Sismondi’s views, provides a completely incorrect picture of his theory, idealises the very points of it in which he comes closest to the Narodniks, and ignores and misrepresents his attitude to subsequent trends in economic science. Hence, our exposition and analysis of Sismondi’s doctrine will at the same time be a criticism of Ephrucy’s article.” (p 133-4)
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