VI - Corn Tariffs in England as Appraised by Romanticism and by Scientific Theory
Lenin now turns to an issue that is of particular interest for comparing the views and approach of Sismondi with those today of the Brexiters and Lexiters. It is the attitude of Sismondism to free trade as contrasted to the position of Marxism. It is illustrated in the opposing positions taken by Sismondi and Marx to the practical issue of repeal of the Corn Laws.
Reminiscent of the fact that, in the EU referendum, half those voting backed Brexit, whilst half opposed it, Sismondi, in a chapter added to the second edition of his Nouveaux Principes, on laws governing trade in grain, wrote,
““Half the English people today are demanding the repeal of the Corn Laws, demanding it with extreme irritation against those who support them; but the other half are demanding that they be retained, and cry out indignantly against those who want them repealed” (I, 251).” (p 253)
What this fails to acknowledge, as with the division of the Brexit vote, is that those on either side represent two antagonistic class camps, not just some random division of “the people” into two groups who have randomly chosen to support one position or the other! The only difference between the issue of the Corn Laws and Brexit is the composition of these two class camps, itself a reflection of the further development of capitalism in the intervening period. In the case of the Corn Laws, as Marx and Engels describe, on one side stood the landowners, together with the elements of the capitalist class they had been aligned with, during the Mercantilist period, the financial oligarchy, the stock jobbers, and so on. On the other side stood the industrial bourgeoisie that was now exerting its dominance. And, just as the industrial bourgeoisie had been backed by the growing industrial proletariat, and the differentiating petty-bourgeois handicraft workers, in the previous thirty years struggle with the landed aristocracy, for democratic rights, for example at Peterloo, so too now, the workers lined up with them against the landlords.
In relation to Brexit, on the one side stands all of that plethora of small private capitals, the owners of the 5 million small businesses, their family and associates. They are similarly joined by all those that derive an interest from national division that create the potential for profits from arbitrage, from currency dealing etc., (Farage being the epitome of such elements). On the other side, stands the representatives of large-scale multinational and socialised capital, both in terms of the professional middle-class managers that are its personification, as well as the owners of large-scale fictitious capital (shares and bonds) whose revenues and capital gains are dependent on the fortunes of it, whilst those fortunes depend on breaking down national barriers, not erecting them, in order to create ever larger single markets.
Sismondi, who could only approach the question from the stance of what was desirable from the perspective of “the nation”, considered in the abstract, was nonetheless led to examine its effects on different elements of the nation. He had previously written, when considering the question in relation to some nation in the abstract, that protectionism was a bad thing. Now he is forced to look at the effects of repealing the Corn Laws on English farmers. The laws had been required, he notes, to provide them with the prices required for them to stay in business, whereas their removal would mean they would be driven out of business by the competition from cheaper imported grain. On the other hand, he notes that the English industrialists required that removal so that exporters of grain from foreign markets should be able to buy English industrial products.
Lenin notes that this latter argument is one-sided, and fails to take into account the requirement also to reduce the cost of raw materials and food, but does deal with the argument of those that blithely stated that the problem of overproduction could be resolved simply by exporting the surplus. Faced with responding to an actual situation, Sismondi can provide no practical solution, arguing only on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and concluding only that the problem would not exist were it not for capitalism. This kind of abstentionist position was also seen in the Brexit debate from groups such as the CPGB, who, in the Weekly Worker, argued that workers should abstain, because the answer was neither a capitalist EU, nor a capitalist Britain, but Socialism. They seem to forget that Socialism is only possible on an EU wide basis as a minimum, and that to achieve that, its rather preferable not to allow those that want to turn the clock back from where you are, to succeed, as a prerequisite!
In fact, the reason why this position is also reactionary, as with the Brexit and Lexit positions, is then set out by Lenin, in his analysis of Sismondi's position. A failure of Sismondi's argument, Lenin says, is the fact that he failed to take into consideration the wider development of capitalism, and the laws that govern that development. So, in Britain, it was not just industrial capitalism that was developing. That industrial development had also dragged agriculture into the realm of capitalist production too. As capital engaged in agricultural production, the same laws seen in industry, of the advantages of large-scale production, also began to manifest themselves, and those laws also mean that the smaller, less efficient farms are destroyed, whilst the larger farms prosper; they introduce additional capital that replaces labour, and reduces costs, and agricultural prices and so on.
Sismondi had noticed this process as seen earlier, but, in his desire to oppose this capitalist development, had sought to deny the consequences of it, by asserting against it the cheaper prices of the Polish peasant producer. Had he studied the actual capitalist development, he would have seen what Engels had predicted, even before the Repeal, which is that competition would ruin the smaller, less efficient British farms, but the larger farms would survive, they would accumulate additional capital, become more efficient and take over the farms of their ruined neighbours. And that is, in fact, what happened after the Repeal, as Marx also elaborates in Capital III, and in Value, Price and Profit.
In the usual spirit of the catastrophist, Sismondi predicts that hundreds of thousands of agricultural day labourers would also be displaced, and also this far more proximate and significant market for British industry would be lost. In fact, as Marx describes, in Capital III, and Value, Price and Profit, agriculture actually faced a shortage of such day labourers, between 1849-1859, after the Repeal. As industry expanded rapidly, there was also an increased demand for labourers to build the new railway network, and all of the infrastructure of ports, train stations, depots, warehouses and so on. The labour shortage, in agriculture, pushed up wages, giving another impetus for agricultural capital to replace labour with machines. In other words, free trade acted not just to hasten the break-up of the old forms of society that the romanticists sought to defend, but also brought about this more rapid development of capitalism, and the productive forces, with the attendant advance in the size and social position of the industrial proletariat.
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