The proletariat, particularly in the time of Adam Smith, was still, largely, one comprising handicraft workers. They still bargained individually, much as independent commodity produces, over the price to be paid for their production, with the capitalist. That is most apparent with the Putting Out System, but carries forward into manufacture, where these handicraft workers are brought under one roof, in the first factories.
“Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians of this epoch, have no other mission than that of showing how wealth is acquired in bourgeois production relations, of formulating these relations into categories, into laws, and of showing how superior these laws, these categories, are for the production of wealth to the laws and categories of feudal society. Poverty is in their eyes merely the pang which accompanies every childbirth, in nature as in industry.” (p 115)
This had clearly changed by the end of the time that Ricardo was writing, as the handicraft workers, organised on the basis of manufacture, had been replaced by factory workers, organised on the basis of machine production. The workers more obviously form one collective worker, negotiating with capital for wages, but this machine production, particularly combined with steam power, creates the potential for an overproduction of commodities that becomes inevitable. Ricardo, who never saw such a crisis, believed it was impossible, but, Sismondi set out why it was inevitable. However, Sismondi's view is romantic, because, whilst he recognised the poverty that flowed from these crises, he continued to present a view in which bourgeois production could continue, but without these aspects that led to crises.
At the same time, there were others who recognised these aspects of bourgeois production, and simply acted as apologists for them.
“The economists now pose as blasé fatalists, who, from their elevated position, cast a proudly disdainful glance at the human machines who manufacture wealth. They copy all the developments given by their predecessors, and the indifference which in the latter was merely naïveté becomes in them coquetry.” (p 116)
Net, Marx says, comes the humanitarian school that recognises the poverty and distress and sincerely seeks to address it. But, its outlook is determined by a view in which theory and practice have become separated, resulting in these social ills.
“It seeks, by way of easing its conscience, to palliate even if slightly the real contrasts; it sincerely deplores the distress of the proletariat, the unbridled competition of the bourgeois among themselves; it counsels the workers to be sober, to work hard and to have few children; it advises the bourgeois to put a reasoned ardour into production.” (p 116)
There are numerous accounts, in literature, for example, in Dickens, of the representatives of these ideas. And, finally, Marx says, they take more developed form in the Philanthropic School.
“The philanthropic school is the humanitarian school carried to perfection. It denies the necessity of antagonism; it wants to turn all men into bourgeois; it wants to realize theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and contains no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy to make an abstraction of the contradictions that are met with at every moment in actual reality. This theory would therefore become idealized reality. The philanthropists, then, want to retain the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them. They think they are seriously fighting bourgeois practice, and they are more bourgeois than the others.” (p 116)
This is the basis of social-democracy as the ideology of large-scale industrial capital. Engels' “The Condition of the Working Class”, is a diary of this transition, because the work itself details the condition of workers in that early 19th century phase of capitalist development but, in his later Prefaces to the work, describes the changes that had been wrought, as a consequence of the development, in just a few decades, of the dominance of large-scale industrial capital. The early 19th century saw the continued dominance of the landed aristocracy, in a symbiotic alliance with financial and merchant capital, upon which the old colonial empires, and the Mercantilist System had been built. It continued the monopolies associated with them, and The Corn Laws etc.
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