As Lenin says, Sismondi and the Narodniks did not want to accept the connection between small-scale capitalist production and large-scale capitalist production. They certainly did not want to accept the progressive nature of the latter vis a vis the former.
“Well, what about our modern romanticists? Do they think of denying the reality of the “money power”? Do they think of denying that this power is omnipotent not only among the industrial population, but also among the agricultural population of any “village community” and of any remote village you like? Do they think of denying that there is a necessary connection between this fact and commodity economy? They have not even attempted to subject this to doubt. They simply try not to talk of it. They are afraid of calling things by their real names.” (p 206)
Today, the “anti-capitalists” who propose “anti-monopoly alliances” are of the same order. They seek to focus their critique purely in moralistic terms on the iniquities of large-scale capital, thereby, denying its progressive nature, whilst staying quiet about the more reactionary forms of small scale capital. The “anti-imperialists” deny any progressive role for large-scale multinational capital, in developing the economies of the world, and indeed see the development of globalisation, of a global economy, as something to oppose. They equate imperialism only with military intervention, colonialism and neo-colonialism.
As I wrote some time ago, Michael Roberts, in his account of the development of capitalism, follows a similar course. He is unable to accept the development of capitalism as arising out of simple commodity production and exchange carried on in the towns that expanded during the Middle Ages. That requires an acceptance of the fact that the first industrial capitalists arose, partly, from amongst the commercial and financial capitalists, who began to use their money-capital as productive-capital, but also from amongst the small independent commodity producers themselves, who, for whatever reason, enjoyed the ability to produce commodities, and sell them, at prices below their competitors. They were able to grab market share, accumulate money, so as to improve their means of production, and then to convert that money into productive-capital by buying up the means of production of their failed competitors, and employing those former competitors as wage labourers.
As Engels explains in his Supplement to Capital III, this process explains why, in the formation of capital, it is in those cases where the organic composition of capital is high that capitalist production arises first, even though, theoretically, it would be thought that the opposite would be the case. In other words, when a handicraft producer fails, what is it that they cannot reproduce? It is their means of production. Most were still able to reproduce their labour-power, because they continued to have some small plot of land, even in the towns, to grow fruit and vegetables, and even have some livestock.
What they could not buy was the required raw materials, for which they needed money, and the greater the amount of raw material required, and/or the greater the cost of their raw materials, the less likely it was they could buy them. That is why its in those spheres where the organic composition of capital is high that capital arises first, as the merchants that sold it to the producers now supply it for free, in return for obtaining the end product in exchange for what amounts only to a wage paid to the producer. In those conditions, those independent commodity producers that produce below the market value, also reproduce their constant as well as their variable capital, and are able to accumulate surplus value as productive-capital.
As Lenin notes in the next chapter,
“As capitalism develops, agriculture always and everywhere, lags behind commerce and industry, it is always subordinate to them and is exploited by them and it is always drawn by them, only later on, onto the path of capitalist production.” (Note *, p 210)
As with Sismondi, the Narodniks, or today's “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists” this reality, of the connection between small-scale commodity production and capital, of the fact that the capitalists themselves arise out of the class of producers/labourers rather than being some alien class force that imposes itself upon them, seems to offend Roberts' moral sensibilities. Consequently, like Sismondi and the Narodniks, he is led to define industrial capitalism only as that large-scale machine production that develops rapidly after 1800, and to purvey the myth that capital somehow arises first in agriculture after 1400, as evil feudal landlords take it into their heads to become evil capitalist landlords instead, and to start evicting peasants from the land for that purpose.
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