Sismondi's essay against Ricardo in the _Revue Encyclopédique_ of May
1824, was the final challenge for J. B. Say, at that time the
acknowledged 'prince of economic science' (_prince de la science
économique_), the so-called representative, heir and populariser of the
school of Adam Smith on the Continent. Say, who had already advanced
some arguments against Sismondi in his letters to Malthus, countered the
following July with an essay on 'The Balance Between Consumption and
Production' in the _Revue Encyclopédique_, to which Sismondi in turn
published a short reply. The chronology of Sismondi's polemical
engagements was thus inverse to the sequence of the opposing theories,
for it had been Say who first communicated his doctrine of a divinely
established balance between production and consumption to Ricardo who
had in turn handed it down to MacCulloch. In fact, as early as 1803,
Say, in his _Traité d'Économie Politique_, book i, chapter xii, had
coined the following peremptory statement: 'Products are paid for with
other products. It follows that if a nation has too many goods of one
kind, the means of selling them would be to create goods of a different
kind.'[210]
Here we meet again the all too familiar conjuring recipe which was
accepted alike by Ricardo's school and by the 'vulgar economists' as the
corner-stone of the doctrine of harmony.[211]
Essentially, Sismondi's principal work constitutes a sustained polemic
against this thesis. At this stage Say charges to the attack in the
_Revue Encyclopédique_ with a complete _volte-face_, as follows:
'Objection may be made that, because of man's intelligence, because of
the advantage he can draw from the means provided by nature and
artifice, every human society can produce _all_ the things fit to
satisfy its needs and increase its enjoyment in far larger quantities
than it can itself consume. But there I would ask how it is possible
that we know of no nation that is supplied with everything. Even in what
rank as prospering nations seven-eighths of the population are lacking
in a multitude of things considered necessities in ... I will not say a
wealthy family, but in a modest establishment. The village I live in at
present lies in one of the richest parts of France; yet in 19 out of 20
houses I enter here, I see but the coarsest fare and nothing that makes
for the well-being of the people, none of the things the English call
comforts.'[212]
There is something to admire about the effrontery of the excellent Say.
It was he who had maintained that in a capitalist economy there could be
no difficulties, no surplus, no crises and no misery; since goods can be
bought one for the other, we need only go on producing more and more and
everything in the garden will be lovely. It was in Say's hands that this
postulate had become a tenet of the doctrine of harmony, that doctrine
so typical of vulgar economics, which had evoked a sharp protest from
Sismondi who proved this view untenable. The latter had shown that goods
cannot be sold in any quantity you like, but that a limit is set to the
realisation of goods by the income of society in each case, by _v + s_;
inasmuch as the wages of the workers are depressed to a mere subsistence
level, and inasmuch as there is also a natural limit to the consumptive
capacity of the capitalist class, an expansion of production, Sismondi
says, must inevitably lead to slumps, crises and ever greater misery for
the great masses. Say's come-back to this is masterly in its ingenuity:
If you will insist that over-production is possible, how can it happen
that there are so many people in our society who are naked, hungry and
in want? Pray, explain this contradiction if you can. Say, whose own
position excels by contriving blithely to shrug off the circulation of
money altogether by operating with a system of barter, now censures his
critic for speaking of an over-abundance of products in relation not
only to purchasing power but to the real needs of society, and that
although Sismondi had left no doubt at all about this very salient point
of his deductions. 'Even if there is a very great number of badly fed,
badly clothed and badly housed people in a society, the society can only
sell what it buys, and, as we have seen, it can only buy with its
income.'[213]
A little further on, Say concedes this point but alleges that his
opponent has made a new mistake: 'It is not consumers, then, in which
the nation is lacking,' he says, 'but purchasing power. Sismondi
believes that this will be more extensive, when the products are rare,
when consequently they are dearer and their production procures ampler
pay for the workers.'[214]
That is how Say attempts to degrade, in his own trite method of thought,
or better, method of canting, Sismondi's theory which attacked the very
foundations of capitalist organisation and its mode of distribution. He
burlesques the _Nouveaux Principes_, turning them into a plea for 'rare'
goods and high prices, and holds up to them the mirror of an artfully
flattered capitalist accumulation at its peak. If production becomes
more vigorous, he argues, labour grows in numbers and the volume of
production expands, the nations will be better and more universally
provided for, and he extols the conditions in countries where industrial
development is at its highest, as against the misery of the Middle Ages.
Sismondi's maxims he declares subversive to capitalist society: 'Why
does he call for an inquiry into the laws which might oblige the
entrepreneur to guarantee a living for the worker he employs? Such an
inquiry would paralyse the spirit of enterprise. Merely the fear that
the authorities might interfere with private contracts is a scourge and
harmful to the wealth of a nation.'[215]
Not to be diverted from his purpose by this indiscriminate apologia of
Say's, Sismondi once more turns the discussion on the fundamental issue:
'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
institutions, of our legislation having robbed the working class 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 circumstance that, though a nation may be rich, public
misery no less than material wealth is constantly on the increase, the
class 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
accumulation.
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 analysis, 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 analysis where the problem of
capital accumulation is treated as the crucial point and principal
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 accumulation. 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, classical 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
accumulation 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 constituting _the_ problem of accumulation,
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 accumulation 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 classical 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
Encyclopédique_:
'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 accumulation, for some
slowing down of the triumphant march of capitalism. That is the
reactionary aspect of his criticism.[221]