[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).
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx opposes Sismondi to Proudhon in sundry passages, 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 classic of bourgeois economics in France, with Ricard in England; in another passage 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.
[222]Nouveaux Principes ..., vol. ii, p. 409.
[223]Cf. Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert, vol. iii, pp. 1-29, which gives a detailed analysis of Malthus’ theory of value and profits.