“... how capitalism removes the difficulties of social development provided by history in the shape of various barriers—communal, tribal, territorial and national.” (p 165)
The Narodniks did not discuss the specifics of the development of such foreign markets, because “all he wants is a moral condemnation of this process.” (p 165) And, here, Lenin says, the position of the Narodniks was identical to that of Sismondi. It is also identical to that of today's “anti-imperialists”. To illustrate this identity Lenin gives a number of quotations from Sismondi to this effect, including that cited earlier in relation to capitalist development in the US.
Sismondi, at the start of the 19th century had said that “the world market is already sufficiently supplied”, and argued the need to choose a different path than capitalist development.
“He assured the British employers that capitalism would not be able to give jobs to all the agricultural labourers displaced by capitalist farming (I, 255-56). “Will those to whom the agriculturists are sacrificed derive any benefit from it? Are not the agriculturists the nearest and most reliable consumers of English manufactures? The cessation of their consumption would strike industry a blow more fatal than the closing of one of the biggest foreign markets” (I, 256).” (p 166)
In fact, the numbers employed on the land continued to fall, and those employed in industry to rise. Today, in Britain, less than 2% are employed in agriculture, compared to around 80% in 1800. But, the same arguments have been raised as the numbers in manufacturing industry declined and the numbers employed in service industry rose. In the early 1980's, I predicted not only this shift, but that it would also go along with a shift of manufacturing production to the newly industrialising economies, as part of a new international division of labour was established. I wrote,
“If these trends continue and the kind of division of labour referred to earlier is extended we may be witnessing the beginning of a new phase of imperialism with new relations and a new structure of trade in the world market. Production is moving increasingly into automation and computerisation. Both Japanese firms and GEC are working on factories free of all labour. Intellectual production will become, therefore, an increasingly important source of value creation for capital. As has been said earlier, educational centres are concentrated in the large cities of the ACC’s. Just as Marx criticised the Physiocrats for not recognising that land had been replaced by Capital as the major source of value creation, so now the emphasis may be moving not away from Capital per se, but from material production towards intellectual production as the only avenue for the employment of labour.”
(Imperialism, Industrialisation, Trade and Sub-Imperialism)
Martin Thomas responded,
“… it would take well into the 21st century for anything like the picture he paints to emerge. To extrapolate trends that far is unsound; all such trends are relative to a given basic social/international framework, and it is unscientific to suppose that the basic framework could continue unchanged through such a process.”
In fact, I was only wrong in underestimating the size and speed of the movement I had outlined.
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