MacCulloch's reply to Sismondi's theoretical objections evidently did
not settle the matter to Ricardo's own satisfaction. Unlike that shrewd
'Scottish arch-humbug', as Marx calls him, Ricardo really wanted to
discover the truth and throughout retained the genuine modesty of a
great mind.[193] That Sismondi's polemics against him and his pupil had
made a deep impression is proved by Ricardo's revised approach to the
question of the effects of the machine, that being the point on which
Sismondi, to his eternal credit, had confronted the classical school of
harmony with the sinister aspects of capitalism. Ricardo's followers had
enlarged upon the doctrine that the machine can always create as many or
even more opportunities for the wage labourers as it takes away by
displacing living labour. This so-called theory of compensation was
subjected to a stern attack by Sismondi in the chapter 'On the Division
of Labour and Machinery'[194] and in another chapter significantly
entitled: 'Machinery Creates a Surplus Population',[195] both published
in the _Nouveaux Principes_ of 1819, two years later than Ricardo's main
work. In 1821, after the MacCulloch-Sismondi controversy, Ricardo
inserted a new chapter in the third edition of his _Principles_, where
he frankly confesses to his error and says in the strain of Sismondi:
'That the opinion entertained by the labouring classes, that the
employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests,
is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct
principles of political economy.'[196]
He, like Sismondi, had to defend himself against the suspicion that he
is opposing technical progress, but, less ruthless, he compromises with
the evasion that the evil emerges only gradually. 'To elucidate the
principle, I have been supposing, that improved machinery is _suddenly_
discovered, and extensively used; but the truth is, that these
discoveries are gradual, and rather operate in determining the
employment of the capital which is saved and accumulated, than in
diverting capital from its actual employment.'[197]
Yet the problem of crises and accumulation continued to worry Ricardo
also. In 1823, the last year of his life, he spent some days in Geneva
in order to talk the problem over face to face with Sismondi. The result
of these talks is Sismondi's essay 'On the Balance Between Consumption
and Production', published in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ of May
1824.[198]
In his _Principles_, Ricardo had at the crucial points completely
accepted Say's trite doctrine of harmony in the relations between
production and consumption. In chapter xxi he had declared: 'M. Say has,
however, most satisfactorily shown, that there is no amount of capital
which may not be employed in a country, because demand is only limited
by production. No man produces, but with a view to consume or sell, and
he never sells, but with an intention to purchase some other commodity,
which may be immediately useful to him, or which may contribute to
future production. By producing, then, he necessarily becomes either
the consumer of his own goods, or the purchaser and consumer of the
goods of some other person.'[199]
To this conception of Ricardo's, Sismondi's _Nouveaux Principes_ were a
powerful challenge, and the dispute as a whole turned also on this
point. Ricardo could not deny the fact of crises which had but recently
passed over England and other countries. What was at issue was the
explanation for them. Right at the outset of their debate, Sismondi and
Ricardo had agreed on a remarkably lucid and precise formulation of the
problem, excluding the question of foreign commerce altogether. Sismondi
grasped the significance and necessity of foreign trade for capitalist
production, its need for expansion, well enough; in this line he was
quite in step with Ricardo's Free Traders, whom he considerably excelled
in his dialectical conception of the expansionist needs of capital. He
fully admitted that industry 'is increasingly led to look for its vents
on foreign markets where it is threatened by greater revolutions'.[200]
He forecast, as we have seen, the rise of a dangerous competition for
European industry in the overseas countries. This was after all a
creditable achievement in the year 1820, and one which reveals
Sismondi's deep insight into the relations of capitalist world economy.
But even so, Sismondi was in fact far from conceiving the problem of
realising the surplus value, the problem of accumulation, to depend on
foreign commerce as its only means of salvation, a view attributed to
him by later critics. On the contrary, Sismondi was quite explicit in
the sixth chapter of volume i:[201] 'In order to make these calculations
with greater certainty and to simplify these questions, we have hitherto
made complete abstraction from foreign trade and supposed an isolated
nation; this isolated nation is human society itself, and what is true
for a nation without foreign commerce, is equally true for mankind.'
In other words: in considering the entire world market as one society
producing exclusively by capitalist methods, Sismondi grounds his
problem in the same premises as Marx was to do after him. That was also
the basis on which he came to terms with Ricardo. 'From the question
that troubled us, we had each of us dismissed the instance of a nation
that sold more abroad than it needed to buy there, that could command a
growing external market for its growing internal production. In any
case, it is not for us to decide whether fortunes of war or politics
could perhaps bring forth new consumers for a nation--what is needed is
proof that a nation can create these for itself simply by increasing its
production.'[202]
This is how Sismondi formulated the problem of realising the surplus
value in all precision, just as it confronts us throughout the ensuing
era in economics, in contrast with Ricardo who actually maintains along
with Say, as we are already aware and shall show in further detail, that
production creates its own demand.
Ricardo's thesis in the controversy with Sismondi takes the following
form: 'Supposing that 100 workers produce 1,000 sacks of corn, and 100
weavers 1,000 yards woollen fabric. Let us disregard all other products
useful to man and all intermediaries between them, and consider them
alone in the world. They exchange their 1,000 yards against the 1,000
sacks. Supposing that the productive power of labour has increased by a
tenth owing to a successive progress of industry, the same people will
exchange 1,100 yards against 1,100 sacks, and each will be better
clothed and fed; new progress will make them exchange 1,200 yards for
1,200 sacks, and so on. The increase in products always only increases
the enjoyment of those who produce.'[203]
The great Ricardo's standards of reasoning, it must regretfully be
stated, are if anything even lower than those of the Scottish
arch-humbug, MacCulloch. Once again we are invited to witness a
harmonious and graceful country-dance of sacks and yards--the very
proportion which is to be proved, is again taken for granted. What is
more, all relevant premises for the problem are simply left out. The
real problem--you will recollect--the object of the controversy had been
the question: who are the buyers and consumers of the surplus product
that comes into being if the capitalists produce more goods than are
needed for their own and their workers' consumption; if, that is to say,
they capitalise part of their surplus value and use it to expand
production, to increase their capital? Ricardo answers it by completely
ignoring the capital increase. The picture he paints of the various
stages of production is merely that of a gradually increasing
productivity of labour. According to his assumptions, the same amount of
labour first produces 1,000 sacks and 1,000 yards textiles, then 1,100
sacks and 1,100 yards, further 1,200 sacks and 1,200 yards, and so on,
in a gracefully ascending curve. Not only that the image of a marshalled
uniform progression on both sides, of conformity even in the number of
objects brought to exchange, is wearisome, the expansion of capital is
nowhere as much as mentioned in the model. Here we have no enlarged but
simple reproduction with a greater bulk of use-values indeed, but
without any increase in the value of the aggregate social product. Since
only the amount of value, not the number of use-values is relevant to
the exchange transaction, and this amount remains constant in the
example, Ricardo makes no real advances, even though he seems to analyse
the progressive expansion of production. Finally, he is quite oblivious
of the relevant categories of reproduction. MacCulloch had begun by
making the capitalists produce without any surplus value and live on
air, but at least he recognised the existence of the workers, making
provision for their consumption. Ricardo, however, does not even mention
the workers; for him the distinction between variable capital and
surplus value does not exist at all. Besides this major omission, it is
of small account that he, just like his disciple, takes no notice of
constant capital. He wants to solve the problem of realising the surplus
value and expanding capital without positing more than the existence of
a certain quantity of commodities which are mutually exchanged.
Sismondi was blind to the fact that the venue has been changed
altogether. Yet he tried faithfully to bring the fantasies of his famous
guest and opponent down to earth and to analyse their invisible
contradictions, plaintively saying that these assumptions, 'just like
German metaphysics, abstract from time and space'.[204] He grafts
Ricardo's hypothesis on to 'society in its real organisation, with
unpropertied workers whose wage is fixed by competition and who can be
dismissed the moment their master has no further need of their work ...
for'--remarks Sismondi, as acute as he is modest--'it is just this
social organisation to which our objection refers'.[205]
He lays bare the many difficulties and conflicts bound up with the
progress of labour productivity under capitalism, and shows that
Ricardo's postulated changes in the technique of labour, from the point
of view of society, lead to the following alternative: Either a number
of workers corresponding to the increase in labour productivity will
have to be dismissed outright--then there will be a surplus of products
on the one hand, and on the other unemployment and misery--a faithful
picture of present-day society. Or the surplus product will be used for
the maintenance of the workers in a new field of production, the
production of luxury goods. Here Sismondi undoubtedly proves himself
superior: he suddenly remembers the existence of the constant capital,
and now it is he who subjects the English classic to a frontal attack:
'For setting up a new industry for manufacturing luxuries, new capital
is also needed; machines will have to be built, raw materials procured,
and distant commerce brought into activity; for the wealthy are rarely
content with enjoying what is immediately in front of them. Where, then,
could we find this new capital which may perhaps be much more
considerable than that required by agriculture?... Our luxury workers
are still a long way from eating our labourers' grain, from wearing the
clothes from our common factories; they are not yet made into workers,
they may not even have been born yet, their trade does not exist, the
materials on which they are to work have not arrived from India. All
those among whom the former should distribute their bread, wait for it
in vain.'[206]
Sismondi now takes constant capital into account, not only in the
production of luxuries, but also in agriculture, and further raises the
following objection against Ricardo: 'We must abstract from time, if we
make the assumption that the cultivator, whom a mechanical discovery or
an invention of rural industry enables to treble the productive power of
his workers, will also find sufficient capital to treble his
exploitation, his agricultural implements, his equipment, his livestock,
his granaries: to treble the circulating capital which must serve him
while waiting for his harvest.'[207]
In this way Sismondi breaks with the superstition of the classical
school that with capital expanding all additional capital would be
exclusively spent on wages, on the variable capital. He clearly dissents
from Ricardo's doctrine--which did not, however, prevent his allowing
all the errors arising out of this doctrine three years later again to
creep into the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes_. In opposition
to Ricardo's facile doctrine of harmony, Sismondi underlines two
decisive points: on the one hand, the objective difficulties of the
process of enlarged reproduction which works by no means so smoothly in
capitalist reality as it does in Ricardo's absurd hypothesis; on the
other hand, the fact that all technical progress in social labour
productivity is always achieved under capitalism at the expense of the
working class, bought with their suffering. Sismondi shows himself
superior to Ricardo in yet a third point: he represents the broad
horizon of the dialectical approach as against Ricardo's blunt
narrow-mindedness with its incapacity to conceive of any forms of
society other than those of bourgeois economics:
'Our eyes,' he exclaims, 'are so accustomed to this new organisation of
society, this universal competition, degenerating into hostility between
the rich and the working class, that we no longer conceive of any mode
of existence other than that whose ruins surround us on all sides. They
believe to prove me absurd by confronting me with the vices of preceding
systems. Indeed, as regards the organisation of the lower classes, two
or three systems have succeeded one another; yet, since they are not to
be regretted, since, after first doing some good, they then imposed
terrible disasters on mankind, may we conclude from this that we have
now entered the true one? May we conclude that we shall not discover the
besetting vice of the system of wage labour as we have discovered that
of slavery, of vassalage, and of the guilds? A time will come, no doubt,
when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left
the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as
they also will, as barbarian the nations who have reduced those same
classes to slavery.'[208]
Sismondi's statement, putting in a nutshell the vital differences
between the parts played by the proletariat in a modern society and in
the society of ancient Rome, shows his profound insight into historical
connections. He shows no less discernment, in his polemics against
Ricardo, when analysing the specific economic character of the
slave-system and of feudal economy as well as their relative historical
significance, and finally when emphasising, as the dominant universal
tendency of bourgeois economy, 'that it severs completely all kind of
property from every kind of labour'.
The second round, no more than the first, between Sismondi and the
classical school, brought little glory for Sismondi's opponents.[209]