III - The Problem of the Growth of the Industrial Population At the Expense of the Agricultural Population
Returning to Sismondi, Lenin takes up this point that the peasantry and independent artisans became transformed into a petty-bourgeoisie by the fact of capitalist development, and that its manifestation is the rapid diminution of the agricultural population relative to the industrial population.
“Sismondi, an outstanding economist of his time, must, of course, have seen this fact. He openly records it, but fails completely to understand the necessary connection between it and the development of capitalism (to put it even more generally: between it and the division of social labour, the growth of commodity economy called forth by this phenomenon). He simply condemns it as a defect in the “system.”” (p 226)
He saw the progress made in English agriculture, but saw the huge reduction in numbers employed in it as wholly negative. Lenin notes,
“We can understand why the ideologists of the bourgeoisie regarded this thing as a gain (we shall soon see that such is also the view of the scientific critique of capitalism): in this way they formulated the growth of bourgeois wealth, commerce and industry. While hastening to condemn this phenomenon, Sismondi forgets to think about its causes.” (p 226)
Lenin then sets out the reactionary nature of Sismondi's ideas in this regard. The same can be said of those, today, on both Right and Left, who propound reactionary nationalist ideas about the national economy, self-sufficiency, import controls, national sovereignty and so on, all of which were manifest in respect of Brexit. Lenin quotes Sismondi,
““In France and in Italy,” he says, “where, it is calculated, four-fifths of the population belong to the agricultural class, four-fifths of the nation will have the national bread to eat, no matter what the price of foreign grain may be” (I, 264). Fuit Troja! is what can be said of this. There are now no countries (even the most highly agricultural) which are not entirely dependent upon the price of grain, i.e., upon world capitalist production of grain.”” (p 226-7)
Sismondi saw the condition in countries like France and Italy, where large numbers were still employed in agriculture as beneficial, without recognising that this simply reflected their later industrial development. As with the Narodniks, and their views on the market question, Sismondi says that, if a number of countries all engaged in such industrial development, they would all compete after markets, meaning that they would all overproduce, and so have to close down many of their workshops. He has no conception of the way such industrialisation not only raises productivity, and rescues millions from the idiocy of rural life, but that, in doing so, it actually expands existing markets and creates large new ones, as Marx describes in The Grundrisse, in relation to The Civilising Mission of Capital.
Sismondi makes the same mistake as many today who confuse the way the process leads to a relative decrease in the employment of labour, but a significant absolute increase in the employment of labour, and so a consequent significant increase in the production of value and surplus value.
“He therefore overlooks the fact that the increase in the industrial population is necessarily and inseverably connected with commodity economy and capitalism. Commodity economy develops to the degree that the social division of labour develops. And the division of labour means precisely that one industry after another, one form of processing the raw product after another, separates from agriculture, becomes independent, and consequently gives rise to an industrial population. Therefore, to discuss commodity economy and capitalism and ignore the law of the relative growth of the industrial population, means to have no notion whatever of the fundamental characteristics of the present system of social economy.” (p 228)
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