The Accumulation Of Capital Part 17

'Surely I have never denied that since the time of Louis XIV France has been able to double her population and to quadruple her consumption, as he contends. I have only claimed that the increase of products is a good if it is desired, paid for and consumed; that, on the other hand, it is an evil if, there being no demand, the only hope of the producer is to entice the consumers of a rival industry's products. I have tried to show that the natural course of the nations is progressive increase of their property, an increase consequent upon their demand for new products and their means to pay for them, but that in consequence of our inst.i.tutions, of our legislation having robbed the working cla.s.s of all property and every security, they have also been spurred to a disorderly labour quite out of touch with the demand and with purchasing power, which accordingly only aggravates poverty.'[216]

And he winds up the debate by inviting the preacher of harmony to reflect upon the circ.u.mstance that, though a nation may be rich, public misery no less than material wealth is constantly on the increase, the cla.s.s which produces everything being daily brought nearer to a position where it may consume nothing. On this shrill discordant note of capitalist contradictions closes the first clash about the problem of acc.u.mulation.

Summing up the general direction of this first battle of wits, we must note two points:

(1) In spite of all the confusion in Sismondi's a.n.a.lysis, his superiority to both Ricardo and his followers and to the self-styled heir to the mantle of Adam Smith is quite unmistakable. Sismondi, in taking things from the angle of reproduction, looks for concepts of value (capital and income) and for factual elements (producer and consumer goods) as best he can, in order to grasp how they are interrelated within the total social process. In this he is nearest to Adam Smith, with the difference only that the contradictions there appearing as merely subjective and speculative, are deliberately stressed as the keynote of Sismondi's a.n.a.lysis where the problem of capital acc.u.mulation is treated as the crucial point and princ.i.p.al difficulty.

Sismondi has therefore made obvious advances on Adam Smith, while Ricardo and his followers as well as Say throughout the debate think solely in terms of simple commodity production. They only see the formula C--M--C, even reducing everything to barter, and believe that such barren wisdom can cover all the problems specific to the process of reproduction and acc.u.mulation. This is a regress even on Smith, and over such myopic vision, Sismondi scores most decisively. He, the social critic, evinces much more understanding for the categories of bourgeois economics than their staunchest champions--just as, at a later date, the socialist Marx was to grasp infinitely more keenly than all bourgeois economists together the _differentia specifica_ of the mechanism of capitalist economy. If Sismondi exclaims in the face of Ricardo's doctrine: 'What, is wealth to be all, and man a mere nothing?'[217] it is indicative not only of the vulnerable moral strain in his petty-bourgeois approach compared to the stern, cla.s.sical impartiality of Ricardo, but also of a critical perception, sharpened by social sensibilities for the living social connections of economy; an eye, that is, for intrinsic contradictions and difficulties as against the rigid, hidebound and abstract views of Ricardo and his school. The controversy had only shown up the fact that Ricardo, just like the followers of Adam Smith, was not even able to grasp, let alone solve the puzzle of acc.u.mulation put by Sismondi.

(2) The clue to the problem, however, was already impossible of discovery, because the whole argument had been side-tracked and concentrated upon the problem of crises. It is only natural that the outbreak of the first crisis should dominate the discussion, but no less natural that this effectively prevented either side from recognising that crises are far from const.i.tuting _the_ problem of acc.u.mulation, being no more than its characteristic phenomenon: one element in the cyclical form of capitalist reproduction. Consequently, the debate could only result in a twofold _quid pro quo_: one party deducing from crises that acc.u.mulation is impossible, and the other from barter that crises are impossible. Subsequent developments of capitalism were to give the lie to both conclusions alike.

And yet, Sismondi's criticism sounds the first alarm of economic theory at the domination of capital, and for this reason its historical importance is both great and lasting. It paves the way for the disintegration of a cla.s.sical economics unable to cope with the problem of its own making. But for all Sismondi's terror of the consequences attendant upon capitalism triumphant, he was certainly no reactionary in the sense of yearning for pre-capitalistic conditions, even if on occasion he delights in extolling the patriarchal forms of production in agriculture and handicrafts in comparison with the domination of capital. He repeatedly and most vigorously protests against such an interpretation as e.g. in his polemic against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopedique_:

'I can already hear the outcry that I jib at improvements in agriculture and craftsmanship and at every progress man could make; that I doubtless prefer a state of barbarism to a state of civilisation, since the plough is a tool, the spade an even older one, and that, according to my system, man ought no doubt to work the soil with his bare hands.

'I never said anything of the kind, and I crave indulgence to protest once for all against all conclusions imputed to my system such as I myself have never drawn. Neither those who attack me nor those who defend me have really understood me, and more than once I have been put to shame by my allies as much as by my opponents.'--'I beg you to realise that it is not the machine, new discoveries and inventions, not civilisation to which I object, but the modern organisation of society, an organisation which despoils the man who works of all property other than his arms, and denies him the least security in a reckless over-bidding that makes for his harm and to which he is bound to fall a prey.'[218]

There can be no question that the interests of the proletariat were at the core of Sismondi's criticism, and he is making no false claims when he formulates his main tendency as follows:

'I am only working for means to secure the fruits of labour to those who do the work, to make the machine benefit the man who puts it in motion.'[219]

When pressed for a closer definition of the social organisation towards which he aspires, it is true he hedges and confesses himself unable to do so:

'But what remains to be done is of infinite difficulty, and I certainly do not intend to deal with it to-day. I should like to convince the economists as completely as I am convinced myself that their science is going off on a wrong tack. But I cannot trust myself to be able to show them the true course; it is a supreme effort--the most my mind will run to--to form a conception even of the actual organisation of society. Yet who would have the power to conceive of an organisation that does not even exist so far, to see the future, since we are already hard put to it to see the present?'[220]

Surely it was no disgrace to admit oneself frankly powerless to envisage a future beyond capitalism in the year 1820--at a time when capitalism had only just begun to establish its domination over the big industries, and when the idea of socialism was only possible in a most Utopian form.

But, as Sismondi could neither advance beyond capitalism nor go back to a previous stage, the only course open to his criticism was a petty-bourgeois compromise. Sceptical of the possibility of developing fully both capitalism and the productive forces, he found himself under necessity to clamour for some moderation of acc.u.mulation, for some slowing down of the triumphant march of capitalism. That is the reactionary aspect of his criticism.[221]

FOOTNOTES:

[210] 'L'argent ne remplit qu'un office pa.s.sager dans ce double echange.

Les echanges termines, il se trouve qu'on a paye des produits avec des produits. En consequence, quand une nation a trop de produits dans un genre, le moyen de les ecouler est d'en creer d'un autre genre' (J. B.

Say, _Traite d'economie Politique_, Paris, 1803, vol. i, p. 154).

[211] In fact, here again, Say's only achievement lies in having given a pompous and dogmatic form to an idea that others had expressed before him. As Bergmann points out, in his _Theory of Crises_ (Stuttgart, 1895), the work of Josiah Tucker (1752), Turgot's annotations to the French pamphlets, the writings of Quesnay, Dupont de Nemours, and of others contain quite similar observations on a natural balance, or even ident.i.ty, between demand and supply. Yet the miserable Say, as Marx once called him, claims credit as the evangelist of harmony for the great discovery of the '_theorie des debouches_', modestly comparing his own work to the discovery of the principles of thermo-dynamics, of the lever, and of the inclined plane. In the preface and table of contents, e.g. to the 6th edition of his _Traite_ (1841, pp. 51, 616) he says: 'The theory of exchange and of vents, such as it is developed in this work, will transform world politics.' The same point of view is also expounded by James Mill in his 'Commerce Defended' of 1808, and it is he whom Marx calls the real father of the doctrine of a natural equilibrium between production and demand.

[212] Say in _Revue Encyclopedique_, vol. 23, July 1824, pp. 20 f.

[213] _Nouveaux Principes_ ..., vol. i, p. 117.

[214] Say, loc. cit., p. 21.

[215] Say, loc. cit., p. 29. Say indicts Sismondi as the arch-enemy of bourgeois society in the following ranting peroration: 'It is against the modern organisation of society, an organisation which, by despoiling the working man of all property save his hands, gives him no security in the face of a compet.i.tion directed towards his detriment. What! Society despoils the working man because it ensures to every kind of entrepreneur free disposition over his capital, that is to say his property! I repeat: there is nothing more dangerous than views conducive to a regulation of the employment of property' for 'hands and faculties ... are also property' (ibid., p. 30).

[216] Sismondi, op. cit., pp. 462-3.

[217] Ibid., p. 331.

[218] Sismondi, op. cit., p. 432-3.

[219] Ibid., p. 449.

[220] Ibid., p. 448.

[221] Marx, in his history of the opposition to Ricardo's school and its dissolution, makes only brief mention of Sismondi, explaining: 'I leave Sismondi out of this historical account, because the criticism of his views belongs to a part with which I can deal only after this treatise, the actual movement of capital (compet.i.tion and credit)' (_Theorien uber den Mehrwert_, vol. iii, p. 52). Later on, however, in connection with Malthus, he also deals with Sismondi in a pa.s.sage that, on the whole, is comprehensive: 'Sismondi is profoundly aware of the self-contradiction of capitalist production; he feels that its forms, its productive conditions, spur on an untrammelled development of the productive forces and of wealth on the one hand, yet that these conditions, on the other, are only relative; that their contradictions of value-in-use and value-in-exchange, of commodity and money, of sale and purchase, of production and consumption, of capital and wage-labour, and so on, take on ever larger dimensions, along with the forward strides of the productive forces. In particular, he feels the fundamental conflict: here the untrammelled development of productive power and of a wealth which, at the same time, consists in commodities, must be monetised; and there the basis--restriction of the ma.s.s of producers to the necessary means of subsistence. He therefore does not, like Ricardo, conceive of the crises as merely incidental, but as essential, as eruptions of the immanent conflicts on ever grander scale and at determinate periods.

Which faces him with the dilemma: is the state to put restrictions on the _productive forces_ to adapt them to the productive conditions, or upon the _productive conditions_ to adapt them to the _productive forces_? Frequently he has recourse to the past, becomes _laudator temporis acti_, and seeks to master the contradictions by a different regulation of income relative to capital, or of distribution relative to production, quite failing to grasp that the relations of distribution are nothing but the relations of production _sub alia specie_. He has a perfect picture of the contradictions immanent in bourgeois production, yet he does not understand them, and therefore fails also to understand the process of their disintegration. (And indeed, how could he, seeing this production was still in the making?--R.L.) And yet, his view is in fact grounded in the premonition that _new_ forms of appropriating wealth must answer to the productive forces, developed in the womb of capitalist production, to the material and social conditions of creating this wealth; that the bourgeois forms of appropriation are but transitory and contradictory, wealth existing always with contrary aspects and presenting itself at once as its opposite. Wealth is ever based on the premises of poverty, and can develop only by developing poverty' (ibid., p. 55).

In _The Poverty of Philosophy_, Marx opposes Sismondi to Proudhon in sundry pa.s.sages, yet about the man himself he only remarks tersely: 'Those, who, like Sismondi, wish to return to the true proportions of production, while preserving the present basis of society, are reactionary, since, to be consistent, they must also wish to bring back all the other conditions of industry of former times' (_The Poverty of Philosophy_, London, 1936, p. 57). Two short references to Sismondi are in _On the Critique of Political Economy_: once he is ranked, as the last cla.s.sic of bourgeois economics in France, with Ricard in England; in another pa.s.sage emphasis is laid on the fact that Sismondi, contrary to Ricardo, underlined the specifically social character of labour that creates value.--In the _Communist Manifesto_, finally, Sismondi is mentioned as the head of the petty-bourgeois school.

_CHAPTER XIV_

MALTHUS

At the same time as Sismondi, Malthus also waged war against some of the teachings of Ricardo. Sismondi, in the second edition of his work as well as in his polemics, repeatedly referred to Malthus as an authority on his side. Thus he formulated the common aims of his campaign against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopedique_:

'Mr. Malthus, on the other hand, has maintained in England, as I have tried to do on the Continent, that consumption is not the necessary consequence of production, that the needs and desires of man, though they are truly without limits, are only satisfied by consumption in so far as means of exchange go with them. We have affirmed that it is not enough to create these means of exchange, to make them circulate among those who have these desires and wants; that it can even happen frequently that the means of exchange increase in society together with a decrease in the demand for labour, or wages, so that the desires and wants of one part of the population cannot be satisfied and consumption also decreases. Finally, we have claimed that the unmistakable sign of prosperity in a society is not an increasing production of wealth, but an increasing demand for labour, or the offer of more and more wages in compensation for this labour. Messrs. Ricardo and Say, though not denying that an increasing demand for labour is a symptom of prosperity, maintained that it inevitably results from an increase of production. As for Mr. Malthus and myself, we regard these two increases as resulting from independent causes which may at times even be in opposition.

According to our view, if the demand for labour has not preceded and determined production, the market will be flooded, and then new production becomes a cause of ruin, not of enjoyment.'[222]

These remarks suggest far-reaching agreement, a brotherhood in arms of Sismondi and Malthus, at least in their opposition against Ricardo and his school. Marx considers the _Principles of Political Economy_, which Malthus published in 1820, an outright plagiarism of the _Nouveaux Principes_ which had been published the year before. Yet Sismondi and Malthus are frequently at odds regarding the problem with which we are here concerned.

Sismondi is critical of capitalist production, he attacks it sharply, even denounces it, while Malthus stands for the defence. This does not mean that he denies its inherent contradictions, as Say or MacCulloch had done. On the contrary he raises them quite unmercifully to the status of a natural law and a.s.serts their absolute sanct.i.ty. Sismondi's guiding principle is the interests of the workers. He aspires, though rather generally and vaguely, towards a thoroughgoing reform of distribution in favour of the proletariat. Malthus provides the ideology for those strata who are the parasites of capitalist exploitation, who live on ground rent and draw upon the common wealth, and advocates the allocation of the greatest possible portion of the surplus value to these 'unproductive consumers'. Sismondi's general approach is predominantly ethical, it is the approach of the social reformer.

Improving upon the cla.s.sics, he stresses, in opposition to them, that 'consumption is the only end of acc.u.mulation', and pleads for restricted acc.u.mulation. Malthus, on the contrary, bluntly declares that production has no other purpose than acc.u.mulation and advocates unlimited acc.u.mulation by the capitalists, to be supplemented and a.s.sured by the unlimited consumption of their parasites. Finally, Sismondi starts off with a critical a.n.a.lysis of the reproductive process, of the relation between capital and income from the point of view of society; while Malthus, opposing Ricardo, begins with an absurd theory of value from which he derives an equally absurd theory of surplus value, attempting to explain capitalist profits as an addition to the price over and above the value of commodities.[223]

Malthus opposes the postulate that supply and demand are identical with a detailed critique in chapter vi of his _Definitions in Political Economy_.[224] In his _Elements of Political Economy_, James Mill had declared:

'What is it that is necessarily meant, when we say that the supply and the demand are accommodated to one another? It is this: that goods which have been produced by a certain quant.i.ty of labour, exchange for goods which have been produced by an equal quant.i.ty of labour. Let this proposition be duly attended to, and all the rest is clear.--Thus, if a pair of shoes is produced with an equal quant.i.ty of labour as a hat, so long as a hat exchanges for a pair of shoes, so long the supply and demand are accommodated to one another. If it should so happen, that shoes fell in value, as compared with hats, which is the same thing as hats rising in value compared with shoes, this would simply imply that more shoes had been brought to market, as compared with hats. Shoes would then be in more than the due abundance. Why? Because in them the produce of a certain quant.i.ty of labour would not exchange for the produce of an equal quant.i.ty. But for the very same reason hats would be in less than the due abundance, because the produce of a certain quant.i.ty of labour in them would exchange for the produce of more than an equal quant.i.ty in shoes.'[225]

Against such trite tautologies, Malthus marshals a twofold argument. He first draws Mill's attention to the fact that he is building without solid foundations. In fact, he argues, even without an alteration in the ratio of exchange between hats and shoes, there may yet be too great a quant.i.ty of _both_ in relation to the demand. This will result in both being sold at less than the cost of production plus an appropriate profit.

'But can it be said on this account', he asks, 'that the supply of hats is suited to the demand for hats, or the supply of shoes suited to the demand for shoes, when they are both so abundant that neither of them will exchange for what will fulfil the conditions of their continued supply?'[226]

In other words, Malthus confronts Mill with the possibility of general over-production: '... when they are compared with the costs of production ... it is evident that ... they may all fall or rise at the same time'.[227]

Secondly, he protests against the way in which Mill, Ricardo and company are wont to model their postulates on a system of barter: 'The hop planter who takes a hundred bags of hops to Weyhill fair, thinks little more about the supply of hats and shoes than he does about the spots in the sun. What does he think about, then? and what does he want to exchange his hops for? Mr. Mill seems to be of opinion that it would show great ignorance of political economy, to say that what he wants is money; yet, notwithstanding the probable imputation of this great ignorance, I have no hesitation in distinctly a.s.serting, that it really is money which he wants....'[228]

For the rest, Malthus is content to describe the machinery by which an excessive supply can depress prices below the cost of production and so automatically bring about a restriction of production, and _vice versa_.

'But this tendency, in the natural course of things, to cure a glut or a scarcity, is no ... proof that such evils have never existed.'[229]

It is clear that in spite of his contrary views on the question of crises, Malthus thinks along the same lines as Ricardo, Mill, Say, and MacCulloch. For him, too, everything can be reduced to barter. The social reproductive process with its large categories and interrelations which claimed the whole of Sismondi's attention, is here completely ignored.

In view of so many contradictions within the fundamental approach, the criticism of Sismondi and Malthus have only a few points in common: (1) Contrary to Say and the followers of Ricardo, they both deny the hypothesis of a pre-established balance of consumption and production.

(2) They both maintain that not only partial but also universal crises are possible.