Saturday 20 November 2021

A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, Chapter 2 - Part 12 of 16

The views of today's liberals and Stalinists, in opposing monopoly capitalism, and their proposals for “anti-monopoly alliances” were already propounded 200 years ago, by Sismondi. Lenin notes the reactionary nature of this proposal.

“This specific viewpoint of Sismondi’s can be discerned even in his arguments about “association” in general. “I want,” he says, “the ownership of the manufactories (la propriêtê des manufactures) to be shared among a large number of medium capitalists, and not concentrated in the hands of one man who owns many millions. . .” (II, 365). The viewpoint of the petty bourgeois is still more strikingly reflected in the following utterance: “Not the poor class, but the day-labourer class should be abolished; it should be brought back to the propertied class” (II, 308) To be “brought back” to the propertied class—these words express the sum and substance of Sismondi’s doctrine!” (p 245)

These reactionary ideas, two centuries old, have been resurrected, today, in the form of the “anti-monopoly alliance”, on the one hand, and the UBI on the other.

Lenin quotes the whole of the passage from The Communist Manifesto where Marx and Engels describe the formation of the petty-bourgeoisie as an intermediary class, arising from the development of capitalism, and the specific nature of the ideas which then arise from this intermediary and transitional position. Ephrucy also quotes from this passage, in order to try to associate Sismondi with Marx, but he does so by omitting the conclusion to it.

“In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture.” (p 248)

Similar methods of bowdlerisation are used by petty-bourgeois trends, for example, the Stalinist epigones undertake similar feats of text-chopping on the works of Lenin, whilst the AWL epigones routinely do that with the works of both Lenin and Trotsky to justify their petty-bourgeois politics. Of course, those trends claim to be adherents of Marxism, Leninism, or Trotskysim, referring to them extensively, even as, in their politics, they demonstrate a rejection of them.

“Perhaps the most outstanding and striking distinction is the effort the Narodnik economists make to disguise their romanticism by stating that they “agree” with modern theory and by referring to it as often as possible, although this theory sharply disapproves of romanticism and has grown up in the course of a fierce struggle against petty-bourgeois doctrines of every variety.

The analysis of Sismondi’s theory is of special interest precisely because it provides an opportunity to examine the general methods used in wearing this disguise.” (p 251)

The Narodniks pointed to the fact that both Sismondi and Marx recognised the contradictions inherent in capitalism that leads to crises of overproduction, but the Narodniks do not ask where the difference between Sismondi and Marx resides. They do not investigate the source of these contradictions in the antagonistic interests of the classes that are created by capitalism. The Narodniks only see the contradictions as basis for their complaints against the system not as the basis for understanding the further development of it, and the potential for Socialism arising from it. The Narodniks never questioned the difference between Sismondi, whose model was based on small production, as against Marx who saw large scale capitalism not only as the inevitable path of development, but also the foundation upon which the socialist society would be constructed.

“The comparison of Sismondi’s theory and their “theory,” which they have presented as a new and independent solution of the problem of capitalism based on the last word of West European science and life, clearly demonstrates to what a primitive stage of the development of capitalism and public thought the origin of that theory belongs. But the point is not that this theory is old. There are quite a few very old European theories that would be very new for Russia. The point is that even when that theory appeared, it was a petty-bourgeois and reactionary theory.” (p 252)


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