[1]For a totally different interpretation see Sweezy; The Theory of Capitalist Development, chap. xi, Section 9.
[3]Cf. the quotation from Capital, vol. iii, p. 331.
[7]Exchanges between industries, however, must take place at ‘prices of production’ not at values. See below, p. 15, note.
[11]Later it is assumed that real wages can be depressed by taxation (p. 455).
[17]In the numerical example quoted in chap. vi. (p. 117.) the rate of profit is much higher in Department II than in I. Marx has made the rate of exploitation equal in the two departments, and the ratio of constant to variable capital higher in Department I. This is evidently an oversight. The two departments must trade with each other at market prices, not in terms of value. Therefore s1 must represent the profits accruing to Department I, not a proportion (half in the example) of the value generated in Department I. s1/v1 should exceed s2⁄v2 to an extent corresponding to the higher organic composition of capital in Department I. The point is interesting, as it shows that when off guard Marx forgot that he could make prices proportional to values only when the organic composition of capital is the same in all industries.
[20]Since, in this model, the organic composition of capital is the same in the two departments, prices correspond to values.
[21]Of total gross output, 2⁄3 is replacement of constant capital; surplus is 1⁄6 of gross output, and of surplus half is saved; thus savings are 1⁄12 of gross output; of saving 4⁄5 is added to constant capital; thus 1⁄15 of gross output is added to constant capital. The output of Department I is therefore 2⁄3 + 1⁄15 or 11⁄15 of total gross output. Similarly, the output of Department II is 4⁄15 of total gross output.
[22]This model bears a strong family resemblance to Mr. Harrod’s ‘Warranted rate of growth’. Towards a Dynamic Economics, lecture III.
[28]See p. 102. The phrase ‘zahlungsfähige nachfrage’, translated ‘effective demand’, is not the effective demand of Keynes (roughly, current expenditure) but appears often to mean demand for new capital, or, perhaps, prospective future demand for goods to be produced by new capital.
[29]This assumption is made explicit later (p. 342).
[31]See Sweezy, loc. cit.
[35]This point is, however, later admitted (p. 337).
[37]See p. 259. Marx himself failed to get this point clear. Cf. my Essay on Marxian Economics, chap. v.
[38]Cf. Kalecki, Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations, pp. 14 et seq.
[40]See p. 314. Marx did not find himself in this dilemma because he held that there is a fundamental ‘contradiction’ in capitalism which shows itself in a strong tendency for the rate of profit on capital to fall as technical progress takes place. But Rosa Luxemburg sees that the tendency to a falling rate of profit is automatically checked and may even be reversed if real-wage rates are constant (p. 338).
[42]One passage suggests that she sees the problem, but thinks it irrelevant to the real issue (p. 342).
[45]In this model the rate of exploitation is different in the two departments. This means that the numbers represent money value, not value.
[46]Rosa Luxemburg seems to regard this process as impossible, but for what reason is by no means clear (p. 341).
[56]Hicks, Value and Capital, p. 302, note. Mr. Hicks himself, however, regards the increase in population as the mainspring.
[57]Cf. A Survey of Contemporary Economics (ed. Ellis), p. 63.
[58]‘If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction’ (Capital, vol. i, p. 578).
[59]Surplus value in our exposition is identical with profit. This is true for production as a whole, which alone is of account in our further observations. For the time being, we shall not deal with the further division of surplus value into its component parts: profit of enterprise, interest, and rent, as this subdivision is immaterial to the problem of reproduction.
[60]‘Quesnay’s Tableau Économique shows ... how the result of national production in a certain year, amounting to some definite value, is distributed by means of the circulation in such a way, that ... reproduction can take place.... The innumerable individual acts of circulation are at once viewed in their characteristic social mass movement—the circulation between great social classes distinguished by their economic function’ (Capital, vol. ii, p. 414).
[61]Cf. Analyse du Tableau Économique, in Journal de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Finances, by Dupont (1766), pp. 305 ff. in Oncken’s edition of Œuvres de F. Quesnay. Quesnay remarks explicitly that circulation as he describes it is based upon two conditions: unhampered trade, and a system of taxation applying only to rent: ‘Yet these facts have indispensable conditions; that the freedom of commerce sustains the sale of products at a good price, ... and moreover, that the farmer need not pay any other direct or indirect charges but this income, part of which, say two sevenths, must form the revenue of the Sovereign’ (op. cit., p. 311).
[62]Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (ed. MacCulloch, Edinburgh London, 1828), vol. i, pp. 86-8.
[63]Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 17-18.
[64]Ibid., pp. 18-19.
[65]Ibid., p. 23.
[66]As to the concept of ‘national capital’ specific to Rodbertus, see below, Section II.
[67]J. B. Say, A Treatise on Political Economy (transl. by C. R. Prinsep, vol. ii, London, 1821); pp. 75-7.
[68]Attention must be drawn to the fact that Mirabeau in his Explications on the Tableau Économique explicitly mentions the fixed capital of the unproductive class: ‘The primary advances of this class, for the establishment of manufactures, for instruments, machines, mills, smithies (ironworks) and other factories ... (amount to) 2,000 million livres’ (Tableau Économique avec ses Explications, 1760, p. 82). In his confusing sketch of the Tableau itself, Mirabeau, too, fails to take this fixed capital of the sterile class into account.
[69]Smith accordingly arrives at this general formulation: ‘The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced’ (op. cit., vol. i, p. 83). Further, in Book II, chap. 8, on industrial labour in particular: ‘The labour of a manufacturer adds generally to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master’s profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed’ (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 93-4).
[70]‘The labourers ... therefore, employed in agriculture, not only occasion, like the workmen in manufactures, the reproduction of a value equal to their own consumption, or to the capital which employs them, together with its owner’s profit, but of a much greater value. Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord’ (ibid., p. 149).
[71]Ibid., pp. 97-8. Yet already in the following sentence Smith converts capital completely into wages, that is variable capital: ‘That part of the annual produce of the land and labour of any country which replaces a capital, never is immediately employed to maintain any but productive hands. It pays the wages of productive labour only. That which is immediately destined for constituting a revenue, either as profit or as rent, may maintain indifferently either productive or unproductive hands’ (ibid., p. 98).
[72]Ibid., p. 19.
[73]Smith, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 19-20.
[74]Ibid., vol. i, pp. 21-2.
[75]Ibid., p. 22.
[76]Ibid.
[77]An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. i, p. 19.
[78]Theorien über den Mehrwert (Stuttgart, 1905), vol. i, pp. 179-252.
[79]Capital, vol. ii, p. 435.
[80]Smith, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 148.
[81]Ibid., p. 149.
[82]Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 86-7.
[83]In this connection, we have disregarded the contrary conception which also runs through the work of Smith. According to that, the price of the commodity cannot be resolved into v + s, though the value of commodities consists in v + s. This distinction, however, is more important with regard to Smith’s theory of value than in the present context where we are mainly interested in his formula v + s.
[84]For the sake of simplicity, we shall follow general usage and speak here and in the following of annual production, though this term, strictly speaking, applies in general to agriculture only. The periods of industrial production, or of the turnover of capitals, need not coincide with calendar years.
[85]The distinction between intellectual and material labour need not involve special categories of the population in a planned society, based on common ownership of the means of production. It will always find expression in the existence of a certain number of spiritual leaders who must be materially maintained. The same individuals may exercise these various functions at different times.
[86]Capital, vol. ii, p. 459.
[87]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 544-7. Cf. also p. 202 on the necessity of enlarged reproduction under the aspect of a reserve fund.
[88]Marx’s italics.
[89]Theorien über den Mehrwert, vol. ii, part 2, p. 248.
[90]In his seventh note to the Tableau Économique, following up his arguments against the mercantilist theory of money as identical with wealth, Quesnay says: ‘The bulk of money in a nation cannot increase unless this reproduction itself increases; otherwise, an increase in the bulk of money would inevitably be prejudicial to the annual production of wealth.... Therefore we must not judge the opulence of states on the basis of a greater or smaller quantity of money: thus a stock of money, equal to the income of the landowners, is deemed much more than enough for an agricultural nation where the circulation proceeds in a regular manner, and where commerce takes place in confidence and full liberty’ (Analyse du Tableau Économique, ed. Oncken, pp. 324-5).
[91]Marx (Capital, vol. ii, p. 482) takes the money spent directly by the capitalists of Department II as the starting point of this act of exchange. As Engels rightly says in his footnote, this does not affect the final result of circulation, but the assumption is not the correct condition of circulation within society. Marx himself has given a better exposition in Capital, vol. ii, pp. 461-2.
[92]Capital, vol. ii, p. 548.
[93]Capital, vol. ii, p. 550.
[94]Ibid., p. 551.
[95]Ibid., p. 572.
[96]‘The premise of simple reproduction, that I(v + s) is equal to IIc, is irreconcilable with capitalist production, although this does not exclude the possibility that a certain year in an industrial cycle of ten or eleven years may not show a smaller total production than the preceding year, so that there would not have been even a simple reproduction, compared to the preceding year. Indeed, considering the natural growth of population per year, simple reproduction could take place only in so far as a correspondingly larger number of unproductive servants would partake of the 1,500 representing the aggregate surplus-product. But accumulation of capital, actual capitalist production, would be impossible under such circumstances’ (Capital, vol. ii, p. 608).
[97]Ricardo, Principles, chap. viii, ‘On Taxes’. MacCulloch’s edition of Ricardo’s Works, p. 87, note. (Reference not given in original.)
[98]‘The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation, or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied by the centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1 : 1, it now becomes successively 2 : 1, 3 : 1, 4 : 1, 5 : 1, 7 : 1, etc., so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1⁄2 of its total value, only 1⁄3, 1⁄4, 1⁄5, 1⁄6, 1⁄8, etc., is transformed into labour-power, and, on the other hand, 2⁄3, 3⁄4, 4⁄5, 5⁄6, 7⁄8 into means of production. Since the demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning. In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable, as compared with its constant constituent’ (Capital, vol. i, pp. 642-3).
[99]‘The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agents of its reproduction’ (ibid., pp. 646-7).
[100]Capital, vol. i. pp. 593-4.
[101]Ibid., p. 594.
[102]Op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 596-601.
[103]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 598-9.
[104]Ibid., p. 599.
[105]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 600-1.
[106]Surplus consumption.
[107]Capital, vol. ii, p. 429.
[108]Ibid., pp. 531-2.
[109]Op. cit., vol. i, p. 594, note 1.
[110]Ibid., p. 594.
[111]Here we can leave out of account instances of products capable in part of entering the process of production without any exchange, such as coal in the mines. Within capitalist production as a whole such cases are rare (cf. Marx, Theorien ..., vol. ii, part 2, pp. 255 ff.).
[112]Capital, vol. ii, p. 503.
[113]Capital, vol. ii, p. 571.
[114]Ibid., p. 572.
[115]Ibid., pp. 573-4.
[116]Capital, vol. ii, p. 375.
[117]Ibid., pp. 575-6.
[118]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 579-81.
[119]Ibid., p. 581.
[120]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 583-4.
[121]Ibid., p. 584.
[122]Capital, vol. ii, p. 585.
[123]Ibid., pp. 586-7.
[124]Ibid., pp. 588-9.
[125]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 590-1.
[126]Ibid., p. 593.
[127]Capital, vol. ii, p. 594.
[128]Ibid., p. 595.
[129]Ibid., p. 595.
[130]Ibid., p. 596.
[131]Ibid., p. 601.
[132]Capital, vol. ii, p. 610.
[133]Capital, vol. ii, p. 572.
[134]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 380-1.
[135]Ibid., p. 381.
[136]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 381-3.
[137]Ibid., p. 383.
[138]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 384-5.
[139]Ibid., p. 385.
[140]Capital, vol. ii, p. 387.
[141]Ibid., p. 397.
[142]Ibid., p. 397.
[143]Ibid., pp. 397-8.
[144]Capital, vol. ii, p. 401.
[145]Capital, vol. ii, pp. 8 ff.
[146]Cf. e.g. Capital, vol. ii, pp. 430, 522, and 529.
[147]In the review of an essay on Observations on the injurious Consequences of the Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce, by a Member of the late Parliament, London, 1820 (Edinburgh Review, vol. lxvi, pp. 331 ff.). This interesting document, from which the following extracts are taken, an essay with a Free Trade bias, paints the general position of the workers in England in the most dismal colours. It gives the facts as follows: ‘The manufacturing classes in Great Britain ... have been suddenly reduced from affluence and prosperity to the extreme of poverty and misery. In one of the debates in the late Session of Parliament, it was stated that the wages of weavers of Glasgow and its vicinity which, when highest, had averaged about 25s. or 27s. a week, had been reduced in 1816 to 10s.; and in 1819 to the wretched pittance of 5-6s. or 6s. They have not since been materially augmented.’ In Lancashire, according to the same evidence, the direct weekly wage of the weavers was from 6s. to 12s. a week for 15 hours’ labour a day, whilst half-starved children worked 12 to 16 hours a day for 2s. or 3s. a week. Distress in Yorkshire was, if possible, even greater. As to the address by the frame-work knitters of Nottingham, the author says that he himself investigated conditions and had come to the conclusion that the declarations of the workers ‘were not in the slightest degree exaggerated’.
[148]Ibid., p. 334.
[149]Paris, 1827.
[150]Preface to the second edition. Translation by M. Mignet, in Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government (London, 1847), pp. 114 ff.
[151]Nouveaux Principes ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 79.
[152]Nouveaux Principes ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. xv.
[153]Ibid., p. 92.
[154]Ibid., pp. 111-12.
[155]Ibid., p. 335.
[156]Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 435.
[157]Ibid., p. 463.
[158]Op. cit., vol. i, p. xiii (pp. 120-1 of Mignet’s translation).
[159]Nouveaux Principes ... (2nd ed.), vol. i, p. 84.
[160]Ibid., p. 85.
[161]Ibid., p. 86.
[162]Ibid., pp. 86-7.
[163]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. i, p. 87.
[164]Ibid., pp. 87-8.
[165]Ibid., pp. 88-9.
[166]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. i, pp. 108-9.
[167]Ibid., pp. 93-4.
[168]Ibid., p. 95.
[169]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. i, pp. 95-6.
[170]Ibid., pp. 104-5.
[171]Ibid., p. 105.
[172]Ibid., pp. 105-6.
[173]Ibid., pp. 113, 120.
[174]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. i, p. 121.
[175]Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], Economic Studies and Essays, St. Petersburg, 1899.
[176]The article in the Edinburgh Review was really directed against Owen, sharply attacking on 24 pages of print the latter’s four treatises: (1) ‘A New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of Human Character’, (2) ‘Observations on the Effects of the Manufacturing System’, (3) ‘Two Memorials on Behalf of the Working Classes, Presented to the Governments of America and Europe’, and finally (4) ‘Three Tracts’ and ‘An Account of Public Proceedings relative to the Employment of the Poor’. ‘Anonymous’ here attempts a detailed proof that Owen’s reformist ideas by no means get down to the real causes of the misery of the English proletariat, these causes being: the transition to the cultivation of barren land (Ricardo’s theory of ground rent!), the corn laws and high taxation pressing upon farmer and manufacturer alike. Free trade and laissez-faire thus is his alpha and omega. Given unrestricted accumulation, all increase in production will create for itself an increase in demand. Owen is accused of ‘profound ignorance’ as regards Say and James Mill.—‘In his reasonings, as well as in his plans, Mr. Owen shows himself profoundly ignorant of all the laws which regulate the production and distribution of wealth.’—From Owen, the author proceeds to Sismondi and formulates the point of contention as follows: ‘He [Owen] conceives that when competition is unchecked by any artificial regulations, and industry permitted to flow in its natural channels, the use of machinery may increase the supply of the several articles of wealth beyond the demand for them, and by creating an excess of all commodities, throw the working classes out of employment. This is the position which we hold to be fundamentally erroneous; and as it is strongly insisted on by the celebrated M. de Sismondi in his Nouveaux Principes d’Économie Politique, we must entreat the indulgence of our readers while we endeavour to point out its fallacy, and to demonstrate, that the power of consuming necessarily increases with every increase in the power of producing’ (Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1819, p. 470).
[177]The original title is: Examen de cette question: Le pouvoir de consommer s’accroît-il toujours dans la société avec le pouvoir de produire? We have not been able to obtain a copy of Rossi’s Annales, but the essay as a whole was incorporated by Sismondi in the second edition of his Nouveaux Principes.
[178]At the time of writing, Sismondi was still in the dark as to the identity of ‘Anonymous’ in the Edinburgh Review.
[179]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 376-8.
[180]MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 470.
[181]Incidentally, Sismondi’s Leipsic Book Fair, as a microcosm of the capitalist world, has staged a come-back after 55 years—in Eugen Duehring’s ‘system’. Engels, in his devastating criticism of that unfortunate ‘universal genius’ adduces this idea as proof that Duehring, by attempting to elucidate a real industrial crisis by means of an imaginary one on the Leipsic Book Fair, a storm at sea by a storm in a teacup, has shown himself a ‘real German literatus’. But, as in many other instances exposed by Engels, the great thinker has simply borrowed here from someone else on the sly.
[182]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 381-2.
[183]MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 470.
[184]Sismondi, op. cit, vol. ii, p. 384.
[185]MacCulloch, loc. cit., p. 471.
[186]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 394-5.
[187]Ibid., pp. 396-7.
[188]Ibid., pp. 397-8.
[189]MacCulloch, loc. cit., pp. 471-2.
[190]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 400-1.
[191]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 401.
[192]Ibid., pp. 405-6.
[193]It is typical that on his election to Parliament in 1819, when he already enjoyed the highest reputation on account of his economic writings, Ricardo wrote to a friend: ‘You will have seen that I have taken my seat in the House of Commons. I fear I shall be of little use there. I have twice attempted to speak but I proceeded in the most embarrassed manner, and I have no hope of conquering the alarm with which I am assailed the moment I hear the sound of my own voice’ (Letters of D. Ricardo to J. R. MacCulloch, N.Y., 1895, pp. 23-4). Such diffidence was quite unknown to the gasbag MacCulloch.
[194]Nouveaux Principes ..., book iv, chap. vii.
[195]Ibid., book vii, chap. vii.
[196]D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (3rd edition, London, 1821), p. 474.
[197]Ibid., p. 478.
[198]This essay, Sur la Balance des Consommations avec les Productions, is reprinted in the second edition of Nouveaux Principes, vol. ii, pp. 408 ff. Sismondi tells us about this discussion: ‘M. Ricardo, whose recent death has been a profound bereavement not only to his friends and family but to all those whom he enlightened by his brilliance, all those whom he inspired by his lofty sentiments, stayed for some days in Geneva in the last year of his life. We discussed in two or three sessions this fundamental question on which we disagreed. To this enquiry he brought the urbanity, the good faith, the love of truth which distinguished him, and a clarity which his disciples themselves had not heard, accustomed as they were to the efforts of abstract thought he demanded in the lecture room.’
[199]Ricardo. op. cit., p. 339.
[200]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 361.
[201]Nouveaux Principes ..., book iv, chap, iv: ‘Comment la Richesse commerciale suit l’Accroissement du Revenu’ (vol. i, p. 115).
[202]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 412.
[203]Ibid., p. 416.
[204]Ibid., p. 424.
[205]Ibid., p. 417.
[206]Sismondi, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 425-6.
[207]Ibid., p. 429.
[208]Ibid., pp. 434-5.
[209]Thus, if Tugan Baranovski, championing Say-Ricardo’s views, tells us about the controversy between Sismondi and Ricardo (Studies on the Theory and History of Commercial Crises in England, p. 176), that Sismondi was compelled ‘to acknowledge as correct the doctrine he had attacked and to concede his opponent all that is necessary’; that Sismondi himself ‘had abandoned his own theory which still finds so many adherents’, and that ‘the victory in this controversy lies with Ricardo’, this shows a lack of discrimination—to put it mildly—such as is practically unheard-of in a work of serious scientific pretensions.
[210]‘L’argent ne remplit qu’un office passager dans ce double échange. Les échanges terminés, il se trouve qu’on a payé des produits avec des produits. En conséquence, quand une nation a trop de produits dans un genre, le moyen de les écouler est d’en créer d’un autre genre’ (J. B. Say, Traité d’Économie 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 identity, 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 ‘théorie des débouchés’, 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 Traité (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 Encyclopédique, 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 competition 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 (competition and credit)’ (Theorien über den Mehrwert, vol. iii, p. 52). Later on, however, in connection with Malthus, he also deals with Sismondi in a passage 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 mass 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).