Marx on Free Speech and Commerce

In the news these days is another case involving a Christian business that refuses to provide services for a same-sex wedding. The core issue in the case—303 Creative vs. Elenis—is summarized by SCOTUSblog as follows: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

The arguments on both sides are familiar. The business owner is accused of discriminating against gay couples. She replies that she does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but refuses to participate in anything to do with gay marriage, which she opposes for moral and religious reasons. The state of Colorado insists that the owner is engaged in “status discrimination,” because she would refuse to sell the identical product to a couple just because the couple is gay. She replies that this is not the case, because the products in question would not be identical. She refuses to make a website for anyone that violates her core beliefs, and there is no way to produce a wedding website for the gay couple without implicitly endorsing gay marriage.

The conflict here is framed as one between free speech and anti-discrimination. The website designer claims that requiring her to implicitly endorse gay marriage is an unconstitutional form of compelled speech. Colorado claims that this is not a free-speech matter, but an issue of illegally discriminating against gay people.

I find this framing unhelpful—it seems obvious to me that we have a religious liberty issue here, not a free speech issue. We are, after all, talking about a wedding. It is bizarre to think that the best way to reason through such a case is by pretending that bakers and web designers are persecuted artists. But I understand that the Court’s prevailing religious liberty jurisprudence doesn’t protect the website designer in this matter, so she needs to appeal to free speech.

Consequently, the debate turns on the question of whether a customized website counts as speech at all. I suppose this is a slightly better question than the version posed a few years ago—whether a custom-made cake counts as speech. But it still is a rather silly question. “Expressive” commercial activities are vaguely like speech, but not speech of the kind that we usually consider to be protected by the first amendment.

Reading the coverage of the case, I was reminded of a set of articles Marx wrote in 1842, when he was just 24. Marx comments on an legislative debate over the freedom of the press. Full of youthful, rhetorical exuberance, the articles are quite entertaining, and they offer some insight into the young Marx’s political philosophy—in particular they show how interested Marx was in economic matters long before his putative turn to materialism.

What reminded me of the articles was the connection between economic activity and free speech at issue in the court case. Colorado seems to say that because the website is a commercial product, it is not subject to the standard free speech protections. The designer replies that she cannot separate business activity and speech.

Marx’s primary purpose in these articles is to lambast Prussian conservatives. But he is almost as scathing in his treatment of the liberals, who defend press freedom as an extension of the freedom to conduct private business. As he summarizes at one point: “we cannot overcome the dreary and uneasy impression produced by an assembly of representatives of the Rhine Province who wavered only between the deliberate obduracy of privilege and the natural impotence of a half-hearted liberalism.”

The conservative case against press freedom rests on an assumption of man’s permanent intellectual immaturity. Because people are stupid, they will not know what to believe, and they will be led astray by what today we might term “fake news.” Marx replies—in classic Enlightenment form—that censorship will only guarantee the perpetuation of that stupidity:

in order to combat freedom of the press, the thesis of the permanent immaturity of the human race has to be defended. It is sheer tautology to assert that if absence of freedom is men's essence, freedom is contrary to his essence. Malicious sceptics could be daring enough not to take the speaker at his word. If the immaturity of the human race is the mystical ground for opposing freedom of the press, then the censorship at any rate is a highly reasonable means against the maturity of the human race.

What undergoes development is imperfect. Development ends only with death. Hence it would be truly consistent to kill man in order to free him from this state of imperfection. That at least is what the speaker concludes in order to kill freedom of the press. In his view, true education consists in keeping a person wrapped up in a cradle throughout his life, for as soon as he learns to walk, he learns also to fall, and only by falling does he learn to walk. But if we all remain in swaddling-clothes, who is to wrap us in them? If we all remain in the cradle, who is to rock us? If we are all prisoners, who is to be prison warder?

The conservative argument against press freedom rests on the claim that the “bad press”—which appeals to irresponsible and irrational passions—will always be more powerful than the “good press”—which deals in sobriety and rationality.

Marx replies that this distinction (1) implies the eternal weakness of the good vis-à-vis the bad—the “impotence of the good” and the “omnipotence of the bad;” and (2) fails to recognize that the same moral vices afflict the free and the censored press:

Base frames of mind, personal intrigues, infamies, occur alike in the censored and the free press. Therefore the generic difference between them is not that they produce individual products of this or that kind; flowers grow also in swamps. We are concerned here with the essence, the inner character, which distinguishes the censored from the free press.

The free press is essentially good, even when its products are vicious. The censored press is essentially bad, even when its products are virtuous: “A eunuch remains a bad human being even when he has a good voice. Nature remains good even when she produces monstrosities.”

Throughout Marx articulates an extreme faith in the transformative power of freedom, and he makes a straightforward market-place of ideas argument:

Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power against power without principle. The true censorship, based on the very essence of freedom of the press, is criticism. This is the tribunal which freedom of the press gives rise to of itself. Censorship is criticism as a monopoly of the government. But does not criticism lose its rational character if it is not open but secret, if it is not theoretical but practical, if it is not above parties but itself a party, if it operates not with the sharp knife of reason but with the blunt scissors of arbitrariness, if it only exersises criticism but will not submit to it, if it disavows itself during its realisation, and, finally, if it is so uncritical as to mistake an individual person for universal wisdom, peremptory orders for rational statements, ink spots for patches of sunlight, the crooked deletions of the censor for mathematical constructions, and crude force for decisive arguments?

For what it’s worth, I’m not particularly impressed by such arguments. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the opening of the Protagoras provides a decisive counter argument. (Though I do think Mill offers some stronger arguments for free speech).

In a striking aside, Marx insists on the necessity of law in constituting human freedom. It is a mistake to think of press freedom as the absence of legislation. It is, on the contrary, a positive expression of freedom. The perfectionism on display here strikes me as very different from standard American defenses of free speech:

Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual. A statute-book is a people's bible of freedom.

More interesting than the treatment of the defenders of censorship is Marx’s criticism of the liberal arguments in favor of free speech:

The mover of the motion desires that freedom of the press should not be excluded from the general freedom to carry on a trade, a state of things that still prevails, and by which the inner contradiction appears as a classical example of inconsistency.

There is something obscene about this argument, though it makes sense coming from a representative of the bourgeoisie. Such liberals are only able to understand freedom by way of analogy to their drab, commercial lives. Defending free speech as a form of the freedom of trade is a bit like Rembrandt depicting the Madonna as a Dutch peasant woman.

Such an account of free speech can never succeed:

To make freedom of the press a variety of freedom of trade is a defence that kills it before defending it, for do I not abolish the freedom of a particular character if I demand that it should be free in the manner of a different character? … is the press true to its character, does it act in accordance with the nobility of its nature, is the press free which degrades itself to the level of a trade?

The freedom of speech has nothing at all to do with the freedom to conduct a trade. Indeed, the freedom of self-expression is close to the exact opposite of the degrading, instrumentalization characteristic of commercial activity:

The writer does not at all look on his work as a means. It is an end in itself; it is so little a means for him himself and for others that, if need be, he sacrifices his existence to its existence. …The primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade. The writer who degrades the press into being a material means deserves as punishment for this internal unfreedom the external unfreedom of censorship, or rather his very existence is his punishment.

What’s more, theorizing press freedom as a species of trade freedom allows for a noxious implication: The authorization of certain writers but not others. An official press (whose freedom is protected) and an unofficial press (whose freedom is denied). I gather this remains an issue in American jurisprudence—does something distinguish press freedom from free speech in general?

Marx offers here a purplish reply, rejecting any attempt to distinguish between the official and unofficial press:

The press is the most general way by which individuals can communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for persons, but only respect for intelligence. Do you want ability for intellectual communication to be determined officially by special external signs? What I cannot be for others, I am not and cannot be for myself. If I am not allowed to be a spiritual force for others, then I have no right to be a spiritual force for myself; and do you want to give certain individuals the privilege of being spiritual forces? Just as everyone learns to read and write, so everyone must have the right to read and write.

By framing the issue as one of trade, the liberals have allowed free speech to become a matter of “soulless bargaining and haggling,” not unlike debates over what kinds of business activities to regulate. The American legal debate over the imaginary line between purely commercial and properly expressive business activities strikes me as roughly comparable. 

Marx concludes by favorably quoting a speech from a member of the peasant estate:

If any nation is suitable for freedom of the press it is surely the calm, good-natured German nation, which stands more in need of being roused from its torpor than of the strait jacket of censorship. For it not to be allowed freely to communicate its thoughts and feelings to its fellow men very much resembles the North American system of solitary confinement for criminals, which when rigidly enforced often leads to madness. From one who is not permitted to find fault, praise also is valueless; in absence of expression it is like a Chinese picture in which shade is lacking. Let us not find ourselves put in the same company as this enervated nation!

Sismondi and Third-Way Economics

I recently read some Simonde de Sismondi, previously known to me only from Marx’s vitriolic attacks. The “Communist Manifesto,” for example, praises Sismondi for his dissection of “the contradictions in the conditions of modern production,” but denounces Sismondi for representing a “petty-bourgeois socialism” that is unable and unwilling to go beyond demands for a rejuvenated form of patriarchal agriculture and guild manufacturing.

What is particularly striking about Sismondi (whose main economic work was published in 1819) is the degree to which he articulates what has become the default “third-way” position of contemporary economics. In part vindicating, perhaps, Marx’s critique, Sismondi attempts to moralize capitalism, remaining tethered to its fundamental categories, while insisting on reforms to mitigate the more brutal effects of market competition. Third way economics—which has some crude affinity with neoliberalism, Clintonite liberalism, and Blairite New Labor—remains the standard economic position for most Western liberals and conservatives. In what follows I sketchily outline the similarities between Sismondi and the third way, while noting interesting points of difference. There’s nothing systematic here, it’s more a meandering through some interesting passages.

Similarities with Third Way Economics

I see four chief areas of agreement between Sismondi and the prevailing consensus: (1) His commitment to a broadly Smithian approach to private property, the division of labor, and market competition; (2) His moralist critique of what we now call classical economics, centered on a demand to consider questions of distribution, not merely aggregate growth; (3) His defense of widespread private ownership and economic stability; and (4) His wariness of a welfare state and what has been called a culture of “dependency.”

A fine summary of Sismondi’s economic philosophy is found in a biographical essay attached to an 1847 translation of some of his writings. The translator describes Sismondi’s objection to the doctrine of laissez faire as follows:

He affirms that the object of the political economist should be, to ascertain how the happiness and well-being of the whole community are affected by the creation and distribution of wealth, not abstractedly how wealth may be created and preserved; that the principles of political economy should be extended to embrace all subjects which relate to the social welfare of man, and that this ought to be considered as the end, to which the increase and security of wealth is but a means; that the purely economical mode of considering the means apart from the end, the calculating theories in which men are too often reckoned as figures, and considered as means of production, have led to a disregard of their value of men: also that the theories of political economy and the legislation founded on them tend to make the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. Thus the amount of a nation’s wealth being taken as the test of its prosperity without regard to its distribution … M. de Sismondi contends that one of the main objects of political economy should be to regulate this very unequal distribution of wealth, which is not only frequently a source of injustice and a cause of misery to the lower classes, but which causes national insecurity … by continually adding to that dangerous though despised class who, at any time of difficulty or trouble, are ready to revenge their own sufferings by attacking property and institutions which have afforded to them neither advantage nor protection (Political Economy and the Philosophy of Government 67-8).

In a more recent translation of Sismondi’s New Principles of Political Economy, an introductory essay by Richard Hyse confirms the similarity between this approach and the today’s prevailing economic common sense:

[His proposals] have become, 150 years later, the accepted institutions of democratic capitalism: wide distribution of share ownership in large corporations, unions and industry-wide bargaining, unemployment insurance, pensions and social security, and equalization of incomes by government-decreed minimum wages and the progressive income tax (New Principles of Political Economy xxxviii-xxxix).

Let’s consider some more specific affinities:

1.1 Smith and private property

The first chapter New Principles is an elaboration of an essay published in the (Smithian) Edinburgh Review on the history of economics. He concludes that essay and this chapter with a celebration of Smith’s genius and achievement. In particular, the labor theory of value remains the central discovery of modern political economy. Yet Sismondi continues:

After this profession of our deep admiration of this creative genius, of our keen gratitude for the enlightenment we owe to him alone, one will no doubt be astonished to learn that the practical results of the doctrine we take from him, appeared to us often diametrically opposed to those he drew from it, and that, by combining his very principles with the experience of a half century during which his theory was more or less put into practice, we believe we can show that it was necessary, in more than one instance, to draw from it quite different conclusions (New Principles 52-3).

Methodologically, Sismondi remains loyal to Smith’s historical (yet scientific) economics against the overly abstract theorizing of Ricardo et al. He writes, plausibly enough:

One would believe at first sight that in freeing the theory from all surrounding circumstances, one would make it clearer and easier to comprehend; the opposite has happened; the new English economists are extremely obscure and can only be understood with much effort, while our mind is loath to accept the abstractions they require of us (New Principles 55).

That indictment applies well, it seems to me, to fields beyond economics. But more importantly, he insists on defending the core Smithian insights concerning the role that private ownership of capital and the division of labor play in driving economic production. The early chapters of Book two on the “formation and progress of wealth” offer restrained praise for the role specialization and private capital ownership play in driving prosperity. Reversing Rousseau, he moreover celebrates the institution of private property rights for making possible unprecedented plenty:

“He who, after having enclosed a field, uttered the first This is mine, has summoned him who possesses no field, and who could not live if the fields of the first would not bring forth a surplus product. This is a fortunate usurpation, and society, for the benefit of all, does well to guarantee it” (New Principles 138).

Private property rights, however, should not be understood as any kind of natural right. They are regulated by a principle of “public utility” not justice.

Today we find an explosion of so-called “left Smithians” who want to reclaim the man from libertarian and doctrinaire free marketeers. Sismondi is helpful and harmful to that project. He, like them, finds something about the Smithian project that is capable of producing a more egalitarian capitalism. Yet unlike them, he sees Smith squarely as part of the laissez faire tradition.

1.2 Moralism and distribution

This leads to our second point—Sismondi’s familiar, moralist critique of the market. While preserving the fundamentals of a market economy, Sismondi points us to the condition of those we would now call “left behind.” The preface to the second edition of New Principles details the shocking contradiction of modern England, which has managed to combine unprecedented economic wealth with unprecedented mass, proletarian misery. We must consider distribution, not merely production. He writes that the “double goal of the science of government” consists in (1) seeking “the means of securing to [men] the highest degree of felicity compatible with their nature,” while (2) “allowing the greatest possible number of individuals to partake in that felicity” (New Principles 21). Radical egalitarians abandon the first demand, rejecting any form of inequality or distinction, caring only about the equal distribution of wealth and privilege. Classical liberals, on the other hand, call the market society “liberty, even though it is founded on the slavery of the lower classes” (New Principles 22).

Again, familiarly enough, Sismondi wants to temper competition-induced wealth with concerns for just distribution. He accepts neither the liberal nor the egalitarian extremes, both the size of the pie and the size of the slices, so to speak, are morally important. Here the gap with Marx—famously contemptuous of this kind of economic moralism—is obvious.

Yet there are few critics of the market today who would go beyond Sismondi in this regard. Third-way consensus economics accepts growth and equality to be a permanent balancing act. All economic debate in modern Western societies becomes a form of haggling within Sismondian bounds.

1.3. Property owning democracy and job stability

Another familiar refrain of third-way economics is that wealth inequality is not just morally objectionable, it is politically destabilizing. Sismondi repeats two consistent themes on this point. The first is that property ownership must be widely distributed so as to ensure the full moral development of the poor and to prevent political revolution. In an analysis that will be echoed by Tocqueville and others, he writes:

The strongest safeguard of an established order may lie in the existence of a numerous class of proprietors. However advantageous it may be for a society to safeguard property, it is an abstract idea difficult to grasp by those to whom it seems only to guarantee privation. When land ownership is taken from the cultivator, and the ownership of factories from workers, all those who create wealth, and who see it passing through their hands without end, are strangers to all its benefits. They form by far the most numerous part of the nation; they see themselves as the most useful part, and they feel disinherited. Constant envy stirs them up against the rich; one can hardly dare to discuss civil rights before them, because one must always be afraid they will go from this discussion to that of property rights, and that they will demand the distribution of possessions and land.

A revolution in such a country is frightful; the whole order of society is subverted; power passes into the hands of the multitude which commands physical power, and this crowd, having suffered much, kept in ignorance by need, is hostile to all types of law, all degrees of distinction, all kinds of property. France experienced such a revolution at a time when the vast majority of the population was a stranger to ownership, and as a consequence to the blessings of civilization (New Principles 146).

Large consolidated farms, for example, pay their workers next to nothing. Efficiency coincides with less employment and terrible compensation. Favoring Swiss and American homesteading models, he demands breaking up large farms and distributing the wealth to smaller producers:

in England the excessive consolidation of farms is often caused by the owner against the interest of the nation. England has increased its prosperity so much … that at first glance the drawbacks of its large estates are not obvious. After having admired the well-tended fields, one has to take account of the population which works them; it is less than half of what it would be in France on the same amount of land. In the eyes of some economists this is a gain, in mine it is a loss. But the smaller population is at the same time much poorer. The cottager is below the peasant of almost all the other countries of Europe in happiness, hope, and security; from which I conclude that the goal of wealth creation has been missed (New Principles 188).

The logic of efficiency favors economic consolidation, but consequently produces “an abyss between extreme opulence and extreme poverty.” It destroys “that happy independence, that happy mediocrity, which was long the object of the wishes of the wise” (Political Economy 146).

Similarly, Sismondi is wary of the precarious nature of employment under conditions of modern market competition. He writes with a twinge of feudal nostalgia, noting that modern industrial laborers are abandoned when they cease to be productive, where feudal dependents were cared for in sickness and old age:

In the entirely barbaric and inhumane society of feudal countries, of slaveholding countries, this basic principle of justice has not been ignored. Never has a lord dreamt to make his vassals, his serfs, his slaves a burden of the province in their misfortunes, their old age, and their sicknesses; he has strongly felt that it was up to him alone to provide for the needs of those who experienced them only for his own benefit (New Principles 579).

The same logic applies to manufacturing. He insists in the final chapter of the book that large firms provide more substantial guarantees to their employees. Pensions and health coverage come to mind. He goes further, suggesting that large firms are less capable or willing to provide that kind of longterm support. Favoring more radical measures (like worker co-determination) he looks for means of aligning the interests of labor and capital. In a sense, such a program restores part of the holistic reciprocity the medieval guilds provided—thus giving some credence to Marx’s charge of Sismondi’s de facto reactionary economics. He doesn’t offer a specific plan here, but he summarizes the basic vision as follows:

I wish that the industry of the towns, as those of the land, be divided among a large number of independent businesses, and not brought together under a great single head who commands hundreds or thousands of workers; I wish that the ownership in manufactures be divided among a large number of average capitalists, and not concentrated in a single man, master over many millions; I wish that the industrious worker have before him the opportunity, almost the certainty, to be a partner to his master, in order that he will marry only when he will have a share in the business, instead of growing old, as he does today, without hope of advancement (New Principles 585).

The point there about marriage and childrearing is important, and points to our next similarity

1.4. Welfare and dependency

While concerned with the moral costs of economic brutalization, Sismondi is rather wary of public charity as the solution. He fears what today is often called the “culture of dependency” that accompanies direct, state support. The poor laws have not resolved the problem of pauperization, they have exacerbated it. The key target here is irresponsible childrearing. Like with conservative emphases on the “welfare queen” trope in the 90s, Sismondi is centrally concerned that the recipients of public charity will not be driven into productive work, but will instead have too many children. Those children are fated themselves to grow up in conditions of pauperization: “public charity can be considered as an encouragement society gives to a population it cannot sustain” (New Principles 549).

Where welfare reform advocates demand work requirements, however, Sismondi again favors a more harmonious alignment of the interests of labor and capital. The solution is to abolish proletarian wage labor, and to turn the poor into part of a broader middle class of “property owners” (New Principles 550). Indeed, work requirements of the sort conservatives celebrate will only exacerbate the trend of pauperization: “the condition of men who must live by their labour, who can only work when capitalists employ them, and who, when they are idle, must become a burden on the community” (Political Economy 149). Public charity and proletarian labor are two sides of the same coin. He concludes:

there will be no happiness for the working classes, there will be no real and lasting progress towards prosperity until a means will have been found to create a community of interest instead of opposition between the entrepreneur and all those he puts to work; until the workers in the fields will have been called to share in the harvests, and the factory workers in their output (New Principles 551).

Some Notable Differences with Third-Wayism

So those are the quick similarities I find between Sismondi’s ethic and the consensus position of third-way economics. While there are quibbles within the consensus, most democratic capitalists today favor broad deference to the market, wish to constrain that market with an eye toward equitable distribution, want to promote broad property ownership, and are somewhat skeptical of welfare state measures that beget greater indigence.

But there are some points of difference, at least in emphasis, as well.

2.1 Sismondi’s Radicalism

The first is that Sismondi theorizes the contradictions of capitalism in far more radical terms than do most contemporary moralizing critics of the market. Indeed, as the helpful footnotes in New Principles are quick to point out, many of Marx’s most famous arguments come straight from Sismondi. Consider this passage, for example:

Let whatever is called progress in the arts, in manufactures, in agriculture, be examined, and it will be found that every discovery, every improvement, may be reduced to doing as much with less labour, or more with the same labour; all progress tends also to reduce the value and reward of labour, or the ease of those who live only to labour.

The fundamental change which has taken place in society, amidst the universal struggle created by competition, is the introduction of the proletary among human conditions, the name of whom, borrowed from the Romans, is ancient, but whose existence is quite new. (Political Economy 144).

We see here clearly the account of wages falling to subsistence levels and the emergence of a new proletariat class that will become the industrial reserve army.

We see a discussion of the kind of mystification arising from the new M-C-M dynamics of the monetized market:

the circulating medium simplified all commercial transactions and complicated all the philosophical observations which have these transactions as their object. As much as this invention showed everyone clearly the goal to be pursued in every transaction, by that much it made the totality of these transactions intricate and unclear, and the general direction of commerce difficult to grasp (New Politics 113).

We see also a sophisticated account of what today we call business cycles, a theory of the intrinsic proclivity of the market to produce crises of overconsumption and mass unemployment. (The topic of New Politics Book II chapter 6).

Most significantly, Sismondi clearly develops the idea of “surplus labor,” which Marx picks up and ties to exploitation. Surplus labor consists in the gap between the wealth produced by the laborer and the wage he is paid (which covers only his subsistence). Consider the following passages:

The advantage of an employer of labor is often nothing more than the plunder of the worker he hired; he does not profit because his enterprise produced much more than its cost, but because he does not pay all the costs, because he does not grant to the worker sufficient compensation for his work (New Principles 83)

the labor that the worker will perform during the year, will always be worth more than the labor during the preceding year, with which he will maintain himself. Industry provides a constant increase in wealth as a consequence of this surplus value (New Principles 92).

All of the annual product is consumed, partly by workers who, in exchanging it for their work, convert it into capital and reproduce it; and partly by capitalists who destroy it by giving their income in return. Moreover, one should never forget that labor power is incommensurable with wealth. Wages do not represent an absolute quantity of labor, but only a quantity of goods which ahs sufficed to maintain the workers of the previous year (New Principles 93).

(The translator notes that Marx cited Sismondi more than anyone else in Capital, but curiously did not cite him on these points).

So in all these respects, Sismondi goes beyond mere moralism about the plight of those left behind. He offers a far more sweeping and radical indictment of the contradictions built into capitalism than modern third-wayers are inclined to offer. Marx could learn something from Sismondi’s treatment of the market. I don’t think he could have learned much from Tony Blair’s.

2.2 Wariness of Innovation

Another break with the third-way consensus is Sismondi’s producerist wariness of technological innovation and entrepreneurial progress. Everyone in the world today favors innovation. Perhaps the fruit of that innovation should be more widely spread, perhaps (with pharmaceuticals, for example) there should be constraints on prices that might tamp down a degree of innovation, and perhaps we were somewhat too cavalier in embracing automization. But on the whole, the strong presumption is in favor of disruptive creative destruction.

Sismondi flips that presumption. Labor saving technology and more general forms of entrepreneurial innovation are expected to harm workers.

Each improvement introduced into industry, if it has not been the result of a new demand, and if it has not been followed by a greater consumption, has almost always produced the same effects—it has killed, far away, old producers no one saw, and which have disappeared unsung; it has enriched, besides the inventor, new producers who, because they did not know their victim, have regarded each new invention as a benefit to mankind (New Principles 265).

We speak today of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency to justify the costs of dislocation. Of course, that's a rather brutal standard. A cash transfer is not the same thing as gainful employment, nor is mandated retraining particularly attractive. Regardless, those transfers and retraining investments never happen. But the modern third-wayist still presumptively favors disruptive innovation. For Sismondi, that stems from a bias in favor of consumption and an incapacity to properly value producers’ welfare and moral interests. He offers the following charming story in a footnote:

It is said that the Emperor Alexander, astonished to see, in England, that the entire population that surrounded him was wearing stockings, shoes and dress tolerably similar to that of a proper burgher, exclaimed in surprise: ‘Where are the poor? Are there no poor people in this country?’ However, more than one-half of these individuals, whom custom forced to spend a good deal for their clothing, had no other property than the wages they would receive that Saturday for the entire week; and more than a tenth of them were helped by their parish. There would be more independence and more happiness for the poor, to walk barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and owning a cottage, some fields, a garden and two cows, like the majority of the peasants on the Continent (New Principles 560).

Sismondi is presumptively hostile to all advances in labor-saving technology:

if the manufacturer, without an increase in demand, and without an increase in capitals, merely converts a part of his circulating capital into machines and lays off a number of his workers proportional to the work he has done by his blind servants, and without extending his sales, only increases his profit becasue he produces what he sells at a lower price, the social loss will be certain whatever the advantage he finds there for his own account (New Principles 300).

He develops this point too with an interesting aside on what will happen to the household with the development of new domestic labor-saving technology:

Why, it says, should the housewife spin, weave, and prepare all the linen of the family? All this work would be done infinitely cheaper at the manufactory … Why should she knead the bread? … Why should she make the pot boil? (Political Economy 148)

The future promises that “omnibus kitchens” will emerge to supply all the household’s food needs. Uber Eats! Sismondi warns that the abolition of these domestic duties will harm women, destroying the grounds of their independence and authority within the home. We should therefore oppose these changes because:

reciprocal cares and duties form and strengthen domestic ties; because the wife endears herself to the family of the poor man by the solicitude with which she provides for its first necessities ; because love is often in a labouring man only a brutal and transient passion ; but his affection for her who every day prepares for him the only enjoyment which he can obtain in the day, thus increases also every day. It is the wife who foresees, and who remembers, in the midst of that life passed so rapidly in labour, and physical wants; it is she who knows how to combine economy, neatness, and order, with abundance. It is in the happiness she gives that she finds strength to resist, if it is necessary, the imperious demands of drunkenness and gluttony. When the wife has nothing to do in the house but to produce children, can it be supposed that the sacred bond of marriage is not more broken, than by the lessons and the example of the most reprehensible immorality? (Political Economy 148-9).

You definitely won’t hear that argument today.

As Sismondi puts it in a rebuke of Ricardo and today’s prevailing consumptivist ethic: “Wealth is everywhere, men are absolutely nothing? What? … In truth, then there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England” (New Principles 563).

Hopefully we are recovering a bit of this producerist instinct today, but it remains absent for the most part, it seems to me.

2.3 Population control

Our final example is a break in emphasis with today’s third-wayism. I mentioned above the affinity with contemporary critics of the welfare state who warn of dependency and reckless procreation. Sismondi offered a somewhat more extreme discussion on that theme. He like many is terrified by the growth of an indigent population, and initially proposed laws to bar the poor from marrying. He dropped that argument in the second edition, but continued to insist that steps be taken to discourage the poor from marrying young and having many children. He doesn’t share Malthus’ pessimism on the matter, and claims that the right set of economic incentives will encourage the working class to delay marriage. Indeed, he argues that one of the chief failures of a mystifying market economy is that workers no longer can reasonably predict their future economic condition. That uncertainty is partly responsible for the growth in what he sees as a parasitic excess population:

the more property is taken from the poor, the more he will be in danger of miscalculating his income, and contributing to a population increase which will not in any way match the demand for labor, and will not find any subsistence (New Principles 520).

Greater ownership within factory life, for example, will give the worker a clearer sense of his lifetime earnings schedule, inclining him to delay marriage until he has attained the necessary advancement in the firm (New Principles 573).

Again, we don’t talk in this way today. Though the third-wayist enthusiasm for long-acting reversible contraception is perhaps not so different.