[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).
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.
_CHAPTER XIV_