As Lenin notes, Ephrucy objected to the characterisation of Sismondi as reactionary, by pointing out, not only to the fact that Sismondi did not argue for a return to the old guild system, with all its faults, but only used it as a model, but also that many professors had pointed to the advantageous aspects of the guilds. In other words, the same kind of “dialectics” as used by Proudhon, in which the bad side of phenomenon are to be discarded, and only the good side promoted. In more recent times we have seen a similar thing with interest in the Guild Socialist ideas of William Morris, as well as ideas promoted about the positive role played by the Luddites.
“Quasi-scientific writers often possess an amazing ability not to see the wood for the trees! Sismondi’s point of view on the guilds is characteristic and important precisely because he links his practical proposals with them. That is why his theory is described as reactionary. But Ephrucy begins to talk without rhyme or reason about modern historical works on the guilds!” (p 242)
Sismondi was superior to those who refused to recognise any contradictions within capitalism, and the same applies, as Lenin says, to the Narodniks, and today to the “anti-capitalists”, etc., but,
“it is not because he wanted to return to the Middle Ages that he was regarded as a reactionary, but because, in his practical proposals, he “compared the present with the past” and not with the future; because he “demonstrated the eternal needs of society” by referring to “ruins” and not by referring to the trends of modern development;” (p 242)
As Marx says of the designation petty-bourgeois, it does not mean views held solely by the small shopkeeper, but a narrow view that does not get beyond the ideas that such people are led to by their conditions of life.
“... his limited understanding and narrow outlook, which prompt the choice of means (for the achievement of very good aims) that cannot be effective in practice, and that can satisfy only the small producer or be of service to the defenders of the past.” (p 243)
It is this difference in world view that distinguishes Sismondi from those such as Owen, Fourier et al. Where, for Ephrucy, and the Narodniks, this difference made Sismondi ahead of his time, the opposite was actually the case, because Sismondi looked for solutions rooted in the past, whereas they looked to the future.
“That is why Sismondi’s utopia is regarded—and quite rightly—as reactionary. The grounds for this characterisation, we repeat once again, are merely that Sismondi did not understand the progressive significance of that “break-up” of the old semi-medieval, patriarchal social relations in the West European countries which at the end of last century large-scale machine industry began to effect.” (p 245)
And the same applies today with the break up of the old world based upon the nation state, and the creation of multinational states and federations that recognises the global nature of the capitalist economy, founded upon the prominence of multinational and transnational capital. Those that argue for Brexit, and similar measures fill the same position that Sismondi occupied at the start of the 19th century, and the Narodniks held at the end of that century.
Lenin notes Marx's comment from Capital I,
““Robert Owen,” says Marx, “the father of Co-operative Factories and Stores, but who. . . in no way shared the illusions of his followers with regard to the bearing (Tragweite) of these isolated elements of transformation, not only practically made the factory system the sole foundation of his experiments, but also declared that system to be theoretically the starting-point of the ‘social revolution.’”” (Note *, p 245)
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