A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, Chapter 1 - Part 62

X - Protection

Lenin now turns to Sismondi's views on protectionism, which, again, he analyses not from the perspective any particular mode of production or class, but abstractly from the point of view of “the nation”.

“Ephrucy assures the readers of Russkoye Bogatstvo that Sismondi was “one of the first and most talented forerunners of the modern historical school,” that he was “opposed to the isolation of economic phenomena from all other social factors.”” (p 191)

Lenin sets out to disprove this assertion. He quotes Sismondi's comment from Nouveaux Principes,

““The prohibition of imports,” says Sismondi in the chapter “Of Customs” (1. IV, ch. XI), “is as unwise and as ruinous as the prohibition of exports: it was invented in order to give the nation manufacture, something it did not yet possess; and it cannot be denied that for nascent industry it is on a par with the most powerful encouragement bonus.” (p 192)

Here we see that Sismondi adopts the perspective of the moralist, describing protectionism as “unwise” for “the nation”, without distinguishing which nation, which mode of production, or for which classes within this nation. So, far from analysing this economic question in the context of specific socio-economic relations, Sismondi does the opposite of what Ephrucy claimed.

“He takes no definite relations, he argues in general, about a nation as it should be, according to his conception of what should be. And as we know, this conception of what should be is based on the exclusion of capitalism and on the reign of small independent production.” (p 193)

In Sismondi's comment, he gives a simplistic example of how protection benefits a small minority at the expense of the large majority.

“There is no need to do so, for this is already evident from the very concept protection (whether it takes the form of a direct subsidy or the form of eliminating foreign competitors makes no difference). That protection expresses a social contradiction is beyond dispute. But are there no contradictions in the economic life of the system which created protection?” (p 193)

If Sismondi had examined this contradiction concretely then he would have found that it again reflects the contradictory interests of different fractions of capital, as well as of the owners of landed property to which some of those fractions are allied. Indeed, had he done so, then in his specific analysis of the Corn Laws he would have seen that they represented the interests of that landed property, who obtained higher rents from higher agricultural profits, as well as the capitalist farmers, whilst threatening the interests of industrial capital, which faced lower profits due to higher wages to cover higher food prices, as well as a lower rate of profit due to higher raw and auxiliary material prices. As Engels describes, in his later Prefaces to The Condition of the Working Class, the repeal of the Corn Laws, by contrast, reflects the domination of large-scale industrial capital over these other fractions.

“We see, therefore, that, contrary to Ephrucy’s assertion, Sismondi does isolate economic phenomena from the rest (by regarding protection apart from the economic system) and has no conception of the connection between economic and socio-political facts.” (p 194)

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