Lenin quotes Sismondi's claim that the English capitalist farmers, with all of their technology and equipment could not compete with the Polish peasant. In Capital III, Marx also deals with this fact. It did not at all speak against the efficiency of capitalist farming, but, in part, reflects the fact that large surplus agricultural profits were taken as rent by landlords, whilst discouraging additional capital investment to raise production and reduce prices, and partly the fact that large areas of land in Russia/Poland were farmed extensively, which also reduced the unit values of products. In other words, it led to land substituting for capital, and so producing lower rents per hectare. This is seen everywhere that agriculture is less developed, so that it is not only inefficient in terms of labour, but in relation to the use of land.
Again, Lenin points out that Sismondi, writing seventy years earlier, could be forgiven his naivete, as these phenomenon were still in their infancy, but the Narodniks had no such excuse.
“Thus, Sismondi’s arguments about protection show that the historical point of view was totally alien to him. Indeed, he argues quite abstractly, exactly like the eighteenth-century philosophers and economists, differing from them only in proclaiming the society of small independent producers and not bourgeois society to be normal and natural.” (p 196-7)
The question of protection or free trade is not one of a right or wrong path, as Sismondi presents the question, but of the interests of capitalists in different countries, or the interests of capitalists in the same country, but in different spheres.
“Comparing these two points of view on protection with the attitude towards it adopted by the Narodnik economists, we find that here too they fully share the romanticist viewpoint and associate protection not with a capitalist country, but with some abstraction, with “consumers” tout court, and proclaim it to be the “mistaken” and “unwise” support of “hothouse” capitalism, and so forth.” (p 197)
Lenin notes that this criticism of the Narodniks might meet the objection that Danielson had himself stated that the problem of free trade or protection was a capitalist problem. However, Lenin says, Danielson, in the Summary and Conclusions to his Sketches, also says that to support capitalism is to implant it,
“and states that the encouragement of capitalism is “a fatal blunder” because “we have overlooked,” “we have forgotten,” “our minds have been obscured,” and so forth (p. 298. Compare this with Sismondi!). How can this be reconciled with the assertion that support for capitalism (with export bonuses) is “one of the numerous contradictions with which our economic life teems; this one, like all the rest, owes its existence to the form which all production is assuming” (p. 286)? Note: all production! We ask any impartial person: what is the point of view of this author, who proclaims support of “the form which all production is assuming” to be a “blunder”? Is it the point of view of Sismondi, or of scientific theory?” (p 198)
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