IX - Machines in Capitalist Society
Lenin notes that Ephrucy is correct in saying that Sismondi was not an opponent of machines per se. Sismondi argued that machines were a bane where they increased production more than the increase in consumption and so resulted in labour becoming unemployed. This, of course, is a step forward compared with the view that saw machines themselves as the problem. It is also a step forward compared to the view of Mill, Say and Ricardo, which refused to recognise any such contradiction, as a result of their adherence to Say's Law.
But, the limit of Sismondi's advance is that what it amounts to saying is that machines would be a boon only if we had some different mode of production to the one we actually have, i.e. capitalism. Its precisely in this that the nature of romanticism lies. Sismondi's romanticism leads him to oppose machines and progress, precisely because he only deals with it in terms of the immediate negative effects he sees arising from it under capitalism. He fails, therefore, to analyse the positive effects it, and technological development, plays under capitalism, not just in developing the forces of production, but also of creating the working-class, the social force that is the means of creating that different mode of production, under which the use of machines and technology will be wholly beneficial, because the workers will be able to utilise it to increase their own consumption, and/or reduce the burden of their labour.
Sismondi cannot make such a step forward, because of the time he was writing. Even in the 1820's, the majority of the population were either petty-bourgeois, independent handicraft producers, like the English hand-loom weavers, and other artisans, or else were still peasant producers. If that was the case in Britain, which led the industrial revolution, it was all the more the case in the rest of Europe and North America, let alone in the other colonies, in Asia, Africa and so on. Sismondi necessarily looked at society from this perspective of the petty-bourgeois, independent producer, as indeed did Mill, Say and Ricardo, in their adherence to Say's Law.
As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, in his chapter on Richard Jones, it is only later developments which enter into the world view of economists, as they see those independent producers disappearing, with the onward march of capital and industrial development. Marx notes that Jones was perhaps the first to notice that this development, in Britain, placed it in a much favoured position, compared to the continuance of independent production elsewhere, and to see in its further development its own transitory nature.
Sismondi, then, could not be blamed for failing to step outside the world view of the petty-bourgeois, independent producer, who still predominated in his day. Marx makes a similar point, in respect of the views of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. It was only further development which produces the working-class as a visible new social force that enables Marx and Engels to view society, and social development from its perspective. Whilst Sismondi could be excused for failing to step outside the world view of the petty-bourgeoisie, however, no such excuse can be made for Ephrucy or the Narodniks.
The Narodniks adopted the utopian, romantic perspective of Sismondi by not examining the role of machines and technology in its entirety under capitalism, but contrasting only the immediate negative effect of machines against some positive effects available only under some non-existent alternative reality. The approach means opposing further current development, whilst proposing some alternative path of development towards the utopia they desired. In other words, rather than a scientific, materialist analysis of society and social development, it substitutes a romantic, subjective view of society, in which the future can be simply constructed on the basis of grand plans and daydreams sucked out of the thumbs of benevolent intellectuals guiding a class neutral state, along the correct path and pulling it back from unnatural paths of development.
“In that case Ephrucy might have understood that by substituting the question of the conditions under which machines can, in general, be “profitable” and “useful” for that of the historical role played by machines in existing capitalist society, Sismondi naturally arrived at the theory that capitalism and the capitalist employment of machines were “dangerous” and urged the necessity of “retarding,” “moderating” and “regulating” the growth of capitalism, and, as a consequence, he became a reactionary. The fact that Sismondi’s doctrine fails to understand the historical role of machines as a factor of progress is one of the reasons for the modern theory regarding it as reactionary.” (p 186)
The same can be said, today, of similar petty-bourgeois trends that express a similar romanticism from the standpoint of environmentalism, as well as “anti-imperialism” and “anti-capitalism”.
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