Functional socialism

CAPITAL 129

century to their account. Labour as the measure of value was first adumbrated by Smith and reinforced by Ricardo. As for surplus value, we find it better done by Sismondi. Again it is a difference in words. With Sismondi it is “increment value’’. We find it in full measure in his Nouveaux Principes, published in 1819. Sismondi was not even a Socialist. His attitude to the economic problems of his day recall my namesake John A. Hobson as he writes to-day—or rather, yesterday. Here is Sismondi:We have said elsewhere, but think it essential to repeat it, that it is not the perfection of machinery that is the real calamity, but the unjust distribution of the goods produced. The more we are able to increase the quantity of goods with a given quantity of labour, the more ought we to increase our comforts or our leisure. Were the worker his own master, after accomplishing in two hours with a machine a task which formerly took him twelve, he would then desist from toil, unless he had some new need or were able to make use of a larger amount of products.

Nor is Sismondi less outspoken than Marx:

We might almost say that society lives at the expense of the proletariat, seeing that it curtails the reward of his toil.

And again:

Spoliation indeed we have, for do we not find the rich robbing the poor? ‘They draw their revenues from the fertile, easily cultivated fields and wallow in their wealth, while the cultivator who created that revenue is dying of hunger, never allowed to enjoy any of it.