V - The Reactionary Character of Romanticism
Sismondi could see the way capitalist development was proceeding, and so knew that the proposals he put forward ran counter to that actual development. Where agriculture was following industry in becoming capitalist, and conducted on an ever larger scale, he instead proposed measures to divide up the land into twenty to thirty acre plots, provided to farmers, who he saw as restoring the old yeomanry.
“The “plans” of romanticism are depicted as very easily realisable—precisely because they ignore real interests, and this is the essence of romanticism.” (p 239)
Romanticism shares this trait with the Utopian Socialism of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. But, as Lenin says, following Marx, where it differs is that the latter based their utopias on a prescient view of future development, whereas Sismondi based his on a return to the past. It is that which makes Sismondi's ideas not just petty-bourgeois, not just Utopian, but also reactionary. The Utopian nature of the ideas of Owen etc., did not lie in the nature of the future communist society they envisaged, but in the fact that they did not see how such societies could only come about from the historical agency of the working-class. Actually, as Marx points out, Owen, coming late than the other Utopians, did have some understanding of that, and the reason for this difference is precisely that he did come later, and was in Britain, when the working-class had become more obviously such a social force. Owen, for example not only promoted the development of cooperatives, but, in contrast to some of his followers, also supported strikes by workers, and created the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.
Sismondi, and the Utopians, however, believed that their Utopias could be brought about simply on the basis of the force of reason, of what was beneficial for “society”, or the “the nation”, as though such abstract concepts actually exist, as against the reality of the interests of antagonistic classes.
“One is not surprised to read such naïve things written at the beginning of the century: the “theory” of romanticism conforms to the primitive state of capitalism in general, which conditioned such a primitive point of view. At that time there was still conformity between the actual development of capitalism—the theoretical conception of it—and the attitude towards capitalism, and Sismondi, at all events, appears as a writer who is consistent and true to himself.” (p 239-40)
The same could not be said for those that came later. But, these later romanticists do share with Sismondi that the petty-bourgeois nature of their ideas is not presented in the form of the return to the individual peasant production of the 18th century, and before. The Narodniks sought to establish artels, for example, or small scale cooperatives. This idea of small-scale cooperatives is a common feature, and contrasts to the ideas, even of Owen, who recognised the need for such cooperatives to be at least the scale of their capitalist competitors. It contrasts with the ideas of the Chartists and the First International, in relation to the development of cooperatives, which proposed the creation of a national cooperative federation, with profits being centralised, so as to use them for accumulation, as well as for educating workers and undertaking political action.
Today's “anti-capitalists”, for example, do not propose, as an alternative to large-scale capital, the restoration of individual peasant producers, and a society based upon them. It is, however, the case that the measures they propose, in opposition to large-scale capital, do act to support small scale capital, as do measures such as UBI, and so on. In other words, the effect of these positions implies a return to such a society. Its not just petty-bourgeois elements on the Left that pursue such a course. A look at the policies pursued by conservative social democrats follow a similar course. For example, in a piece in The New Statesmen, by Tony Blair earlier in the year, he said,
“It will challenge all those who don’t adapt to change, including big business with a conventional, centralised mentality, or trade unions which can’t get to grips with mobilising workers in the new economy. A myriad of small firms and the self-employed will be central, not peripheral, to the future.”
They are both reactionary, for that reason, and Utopian, because, not only are they impractical, but there is no social force that has a material interest in bringing them about. The dominant section of the bourgeoisie has no such interest, and nor does the working-class, whose interests both lie in the further development of large-scale socialised capital. They diverge only in that, as part of that further development, the working-class seeks to obtain democratic control over it, whereas the big bourgeoisie seeks to retain its own control via its shareholdings. The small capitalists have an interest in holding back the further development of large scale capital, which daily crushes them, but only to promote their own short-term interests, whilst, as capitalists, they have one eye on the potential for becoming bigger capitalists themselves.
“The absurdity of Sismondi’s plan is not his wholesale defence of the guilds, nor his wanting to restore them in their entirety—he did not set out to do that. The absurdity lies in his making his model an association which arose out of the local artisans’ narrow, primitive need for organisation, and wanted to apply this yardstick, this model, to capitalist society, whose organising, socialising element is large-scale machine industry, which breaks down medieval barriers and obliterates differences of place, origin and trade. Appreciating the need for association, for organisation in general, in one form or another, the romanticist takes as a model the association which satisfied the narrow need for organisation in patriarchal, immobile society, and wants to apply it to a totally transformed society, a society with a mobile population, and with labour socialised within the bounds not of a village community, or a corporation, but of a whole country, and even beyond the bounds of a single country.” (p 240-1)
The example of the reactionary opposition to the creation of the European Super League, for football, and limitation of the idea that football fans are only those living in a team's home town, and so an association based upon this medieval parochialism, is a case in point of this same mindset.
“It is this mistake that quite justly earns for the romanticist the designation of reactionary, although this term is not used to indicate a desire simply to restore medieval institutions, but the attempt to measure the new society with the old patriarchal yardstick, the desire to find a model in the old order and traditions, which are totally unsuited to the changed economic conditions.” (p 241)
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