A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, Chapter 1 - Part 52

Lenin correctly criticises Sismondi for his petty-bourgeois outlook, but his arguments against him are not soundly based. He notes that Sismondi does not deny the fact that capital had entered the agricultural sphere in England, and that the peasants were being displaced by it. But, there is no contradiction in this, and the argument that capital does not move freely into that sector. The argument is that it does not move freely, not that it does not move at all! Marx goes into great detail to note the extent to which capital is unable to freely move into agriculture, and, thereby, reduce market prices to the price of production. He set out extensively the way landed property inhibits development, because not only are surplus profits appropriated as rents, but any capital invested on the land, by tenants, is appropriated by landlords, at the end of the lease (encouraging ever shorter lease periods) but the higher fertility of the land, arising from the capital, is used to justify higher rents for future leases. Its this which means that capital can only move into agriculture when demand has risen significantly from the towns, causing prices to rise to levels where it becomes possible to obtain surplus profits, and so pay rents, whilst still making the average industrial profit.

Where Lenin is correct is that Sismondi sees these contradictions and posits the old paternalistic relations to them, rather than seeing that the solution was further progress, and development of the productive forces, with the workers themselves becoming the collective owners of the land, and agricultural capital.

“Our Narodniks behave in exactly the same way: none of them have attempted to deny the fact that commodity economy is penetrating into agriculture, that it must produce a radical change in the social character of agriculture; but at the same time none of them, in discussing the capitalist economy, raise the question of the growth of commercial farming, preferring to make shift with moralising about “people’s production.”” (p 176)

The same sentiments are put forward by assorted Third Worldists, environmentalists, “anti-imperialists”, and “anti-capitalists”.

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