Sismondi's petty-bourgeois outlook led him to even distort reality, in the same way the Narodniks did, but it is the same distortion that all Liberals and petty-bourgeois socialists undertake. Sismondi claimed that capitalism was artificial and dependent upon such protection and subsidies. He claimed that the real foundation of the economy was the small independent producer. Later bourgeois economists could not, and had no desire to, present capitalism as unnatural or dependent on governments, but their liberal ideology did lead them to present a world view in which society rested upon free competition between a myriad of small private capitalist enterprises, and that now it was only the large oligopolies and monopolies that had grown out of that competition that were artificial, an aberration, and so on. In the theories of such liberals as Hayek and von Mises, this same idea that these monopolies are also a function of the intervention of the state in the economy is to be found. And, for petty-bourgeois socialists like James Burnham, and others of the Third Camp, on their inevitable journey into bourgeois-liberalism, it is also the basis of new, post-capitalist, managerialist or bureaucratic-collectivist societies.
The concept of the monopolies being an aberration is simply a manifestation of the small business myth that I have discussed elsewhere. The Liberals cannot accept that monopoly is the inevitable consequence of competition, and that these new monopolistic forms are one component of the emerging new society. Another component is that these monopolies take the form of socialised capital - cooperatives, corporations - the collective capital of the workers, as transitional forms of property between capitalism and socialism. What is missing is only the control over that property by its collective owners – the workers.
The petty-bourgeois socialists also cannot admit this, because their focus rests upon a purely superficial, subjectivist moral aversion to such forms. They see only large profits, the corruption of officials and executives, the tax avoidance and so on, thereby, failing to see the fundamentally progressive nature of this large-scale, socialised capital. Instead of seeing the path forward as the control of these forms by the workers, via demands for industrial democracy, they focus instead on attacking the forms themselves, on trying to impose constraints on monopolies, measures to prevent tax avoidance, to impose heavier taxes on larger companies, and so on. In other words, all reactionary measures to promote the interests of small capital as against the more progressive large-scale capital.
But, the small capitalists and petty-bourgeoisie, of course, do not thank the liberals and petty-bourgeois socialists for their support. Instead, as they have themselves grown more numerous, and increased their own political influence, they have simply demanded even more protection against the onward march of history. They have demanded protection against foreign competition, and the requirement to meet basic civilised standards imposed by the EU, via Brexit, and so on, and the same trajectory was seen with Trump Republicans in the US.
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