[BASTIAT AND CAREY]^[107]

Bastiat. Harmonies économiques. 2 édition Paris, 1851

Foreword

The history of modern political economy ends with Ricardo and Sismondi: antitheses, one speaking English, the other French – just as it begins at the end of the seventeenth century with Petty and Boisguillebert. Subsequent political-economic literature loses its way, moving either towards eclectic, syncretistic compendia, such as e.g. the work of J. St. Mill, or into deeper elaboration of individual branches, such as e.g. Tooke’s History of Prices and, in general, the newer English writings about circulation – the only branch in which real new discoveries have been made, since the works about colonization, landed property (in its various forms), population etc. actually differ from the older ones only in the greater completeness of their material – or the reproduction of old economic disputes for a wider public, and the practical solution of questions of the day, such as the writings on free trade and protection – or, finally, into tendentious exaggerations of the classical tendencies, a relation which e.g. Chalmers occupies toward Malthus and Gülich to Sismondi, as well as in certain respects the older writings of MacCulloch and Senior to Ricardo. It is altogether a literature of epigones; reproduction, greater elaboration of form, wider appropriation of material, exaggeration, popularization, synopsis, elaboration of details; lack of decisive leaps in the phases of development, incorporation of the inventory on one side, new growth at individual points on the other. The only exceptions seem to be the writings of Carey, the Yankee, and Bastiat, the Frenchman, the latter of whom confesses that he leans on the former. [108] Both grasp that the antithesis to political economy – namely socialism and communism – finds its theoretical presupposition in the works of classical political economy itself, especially in Ricardo, who must be regarded as its complete and final expression. Both of them therefore find it necessary to attack, as a misunderstanding, the theoretical expression which the bourgeois economy has achieved historically in modern economics, and to demonstrate the harmony of the relations of production at the points where the classical economists naïvely described this antagonism. Notwithstanding the altogether different, even contradictory national environment from within which each of them writes, they are driven to identical endeavours. Carey is the only original economist among the North Americans. Belongs to a country where bourgeois society did not develop on the foundation of the feudal system, but developed rather from itself; where this society appears not as the surviving result of a centuries-old movement, but rather as the starting-point of a new movement; where the state, in contrast to all earlier national formations, was from the beginning subordinate to bourgeois society, to its production, and never could make the pretence of being an end-in-itself; where, finally, bourgeois society itself, linking up the productive forces of an old world with the enormous natural terrain of a new one, has developed to hitherto unheard-of dimensions and with unheard-of freedom of movement, has far outstripped all previous work in the conquest of the forces of nature, and where, finally, even the antitheses of bourgeois society itself appear only as vanishing moments. That the relations of production within which this enormous new world has developed so quickly, so surprisingly and so happily should be regarded by Carey as the eternal, normal relations of social production and intercourse, that these should seem to him as hampered and damaged by the inherited barriers of the feudal period, in Europe, especially England, which actually represents Europe to him, and that the English economists should appear to him to give a distorted, falsified reflection, generalization of these relations, that they should seem to him to confuse accidental distortions of the latter with their intrinsic character – what could be more natural? American relations against English ones: to this his critique of the English theory of landed property, wages, population, class antitheses etc. may be reduced. In England, bourgeois society does not exist in pure form, not corresponding to its concept, not adequate to itself. How then could the English economists’ concepts of bourgeois society be the true, undimmed expression of a reality, since that reality was unknown to them? In the last analysis, the disturbing effect which traditional influences, influences not arising from the womb of bourgeois society itself, exercise upon its natural relations reduces itself for Carey to the influence, to the excesses and interferences of the state in bourgeois society. It is in the nature of wages, e.g., to rise with the productivity of labour. If we find that reality contradicts this law, then, whether in Hindustan or in England, we have only to abstract from the influence of the government, taxes, monopolies etc. If the bourgeois relations are regarded in themselves, i.e. after deduction of state influences, they will indeed always confirm the harmonic laws of the bourgeois economy. The question to what extent these state influences, public debt, taxes etc., grow out of the bourgeois relations themselves – and hence, e.g. in England, in no way appear as results of feudalism, but rather as results of its dissolution and defeat, and in North America itself the power of the central government grows with the centralization of capital – is one which Carey naturally does not raise. While Carey thus brings the higher power to which bourgeois society is developed in North America to bear against the English economists, Bastiat brings to bear the lower power of bourgeois society in France, against the French socialists. You believe yourselves to be rebelling against the laws of bourgeois society, in a land where these laws were never allowed to realize themselves! You only know them in the stunted French form, and regard as their inherent form what is merely its French national distortion. Look across, at England. Here, in our own country, the task is to free bourgeois society from the fetters which the state imposes on it. You want to multiply these fetters. First work out the bourgeois relations in their pure form, and then we may talk again. (Bastiat has a point, in so far as in France, owing to its peculiar social formation, many a thing is considered socialism that counts in England as political economy.)

Carey, however, whose point of departure is the American emancipation of bourgeois society from the state, ends with the call for state intervention, so that the pure development of bourgeois relations is not disturbed by external forces, as in fact happened in America. He is a protectionist, while Bastiat is a freetrader. All over the world, the harmony of economic laws appears as disharmony, and even Carey himself is struck by the beginnings of this disharmony in the United States. What is the source of this strange phenomenon? Carey explains it with the destructive influence of England, with its striving for industrial monopoly, upon the world market. Originally, the English relations were distorted by the false theories of her economists, internally. Now, externally, as the commanding power of the world market, England distorts the harmony of economic relations in all the countries of the world. This disharmony is a real one, not one merely based on the subjective conceptions of the economists. What Russia is, politically, for Urquhart, England is, economically, for Carey. The harmony of economic relations rests, according to Carey, on the harmonious cooperation of town and countryside, industry and agriculture. Having dissolved this fundamental harmony in its own interior, England, by its competition, proceeds to destroy it throughout the world market, and is thus the destructive element of the general harmony. The only defence lies in protective tariffs – the forcible, national barricade against the destructive power of large-scale English industry. Hence, the state, which was at first branded the sole disturber of these ‘harmonies économiques’, is now these harmonies’ last refuge. On the one side, Carey here again articulates the specific national development of the United States, their antithesis to and competition with England. This takes place in the naïve form of suggesting to the United States that they destroy the industrialism propagated by England, so as, by protective tariffs, to develop the same more rapidly themselves. This naïveté apart, with Carey the harmony of the bourgeois relations of production ends with the most complete disharmony of these relations on the grandest terrain where they appear, the world market, and in their grandest development, as the relations of producing nations. All the relations which appear harmonious to him within specific national boundaries or, in addition, in the abstract form of general relations of bourgeois society – e.g. concentration of capital, division of labour, wage labour etc. – appear as disharmonious to him where they appear in their most developed form – in their world market form – as the internal relations which produce English domination on the world market, and which, as destructive influences, are the consequence of this domination. If patriarchal gives way to industrial production within a country, this is harmonious, and the process of dissolution which accompanies this development is conceived in its positive aspect alone. But it becomes disharmonious when large-scale English industry dissolves the patriarchal or petty-bourgeois or other lower stages of production in a foreign country. The concentration of capital within a country and the dissolving effect of this concentration present nothing but positive sides to him. But the monopoly of concentrated English capital and its dissolving effect on the smaller national capitals of other countries is disharmonious. What Carey has not grasped is that these world-market disharmonies are merely the ultimate adequate expressions of the disharmonies which have become fixed as abstract relations within the economic categories or which have a local existence on the smallest scale. No wonder, then, that he in turn forgets the positive content of these processes of dissolution – the only side he recognizes in the economic categories in their abstract form, or in the real relations within the specific countries from which they are abstracted – when he comes to their full appearance, the world market. Hence, where the economic relations confront him in their truth, i.e. in their universal reality, his principled optimism turns into a denunciatory, irritated pessimism. This contradiction forms the originality of his writings and gives them their significance. He is equally an American in his assertion of the harmony within bourgeois society, as in his assertion of the disharmony of the same relations in their world-market form. In Bastiat, none of this. The harmony of these relations is a world beyond, which begins just at the point where the boundaries of France end; which exists in England and America. This is merely the imaginary, ideal form of the un-French, the Anglo-American relations, not the real form such as he confronts it on his own land and soil. Hence, as with him the harmony in no way arises out of the abundance of living observation, but is rather the flat, stilted product of a thin, drawn, antithetical reflection, hence the only moment of reality with him is the demand that the French state should give up its economic boundaries. Carey sees the contradictions in the economic relations as soon as they appear on the world market as English relations. Bastiat, who merely imagines the harmony, begins to see its realization only at the point where France ceases, and where all nationally separate component parts of bourgeois society compete among one another liberated from the supervision of the state. This ultimate among his harmonies – and the presupposition of all his earlier, imaginary ones – is however itself in turn merely a postulate, which is supposed to be realized through free-trade legislation. Thus, while Carey, quite apart from the scientific value of his researches, has at least the merit of articulating in abstract form the large-scale American relations, and, what is more, of doing so in antithesis to the old world, the only real background in Bastiat would be the small scale of the French relations, which everywhere poke their long ears through his harmonies. Still, this meritorious contribution is superfluous, because the relations of so old a country are sufficiently known and least of all require to become known by so negative a detour. Carey is rich, therefore, in, so to speak, bonafide research in economic science, such as about credit, rent, etc. Bastiat is preoccupied merely with pacifying paraphrases of researches ending in contrasts; hypocrisy of contentment. Carey’s generality is Yankee universality. France and China are equally close to him. Always the man who lives on the Pacific and the Atlantic. Bastiat’s generality is to ignore all countries. As a genuine Yankee, Carey absorbs from all directions the massive material furnished him by the old world, not so as to recognize the inherent soul of this material, and thus to concede to it the right to its peculiar life, but rather so as to work it up for his purposes, as indifferent raw material, as inanimate documentation for his theses, abstracted from his Yankee standpoint. Hence his strayings and wanderings through all countries, massive and uncritical use of statistics, a catalogue-like erudition. Bastiat, by contrast, presents fantasy history, his abstractions sometimes in the form of arguments, another time in the form of supposed events, which however have never and nowhere happened, just as a theologian treats sin sometimes as the law of human existence, then at other times as the story of the fall from grace. Hence both are equally unhistorical and anti-historical. But the unhistoric moment in Carey is the contemporary historic principle of North America, while the unhistoric element in Bastiat is a mere reminiscence of the French eighteenth-century manner of generalizing. Hence Carey is formless and diffuse, Bastiat affected and formally-logical. The most he achieves is commonplaces, expressed paradoxically, ground and polished into facets. With Carey, a couple of general theses, advanced in schoolmasterly form. Following them, a shapeless material, compendium, as documentation – the substance of his theses in no way digested. With Bastiat, the only material – abstracting from a few local examples, or whimsically refashioned English trivia – consists in the general theses of the economists. Carey’s chief antithesis, Ricardo, in short, the modern English economists; Bastiat’s, the French socialists.

XIV. On Wages

The following are Bastiat’s main theses: All men strive for constancy of income, fixed revenue. <Truly French example: (1) All men want to be civil servants or make their sons civil servants. (p. 371.)> Wages are a fixed form of remuneration (p. 376) and hence a very perfect form of association, in whose original form ‘the aleatory’ predominates, in so far as ‘all the associated’ are subject to ‘all the risks of the enterprise’. <If capital takes the risk on its own account, the remuneration of labour becomes established under the name wages. If labour wants to take the consequences, good and bad, then the remuneration of capital splits off and establishes itself under the name interest (382).> (On this juxtaposition, see further p. 382, 383.) However, while the aleatory originally predominates in the worker’s condition, the stability of wage labour is not yet sufficiently secured. There is an ‘intermediate degree which separates the aleatory from stability’. This last stage is reached by ‘saving, during days of work, the means to provide for the needs of days of old age and illness’. (p. 388.) The final stage develops by means of ‘mutual aid societies’ (loc. cit.) and in the final instance by means of the ‘workers’ retirement fund’. (p. 393.) (As man began with the need to become a civil servant, so he ends with the satisfaction of drawing a pension.)

As to 1. Suppose everything Bastiat says about the fixity of wages to be correct. Then we would still not know the proper character of wages, its characteristic specificity, simply because wages are subsumed under the fixed revenues. One of its relations – which it has in common with other sources of income – would be emphasized. Nothing more. This would already be something, admittedly, for the advocate who wishes to plead the advantages of wage labour. It would still be nothing for the economist who wishes to understand the peculiarity of this relation in its entire scope. A one-sided characterization of a relation, of an economic form, so as to make it the object of panegyrics in contrast to the opposite form; this cheap practice of lawyers and apologists is what distinguishes the logician, Bastiat. Thus, in place of wages, put: fixed income. Is a fixed income not a good thing? Does not everyone love to count on a sure thing? Especially every petty-bourgeois, narrow-minded Frenchman? the ‘ever-needy’ man? Human bondage has been defended in the same way, perhaps on better grounds. The opposite could also be asserted, and has been asserted. Equate wages to non-fixedness, i.e. progression past a certain point. Who does not love to get ahead, instead of standing still? Can a relation be bad which makes possible an infinite bourgeois progress? Naturally, Bastiat himself in another passage asserts wages as non-fixedness. How else, apart from non-fixedness, would it be possible for the worker to stop working, to become a capitalist, as Bastiat wishes? Thus wage labour is good because it is fixedness; it is good because it is non-fixedness; it is good because it is neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. What relation is not good, if it is reduced to a one-sided characterization and the latter is regarded as position, not as negation? All opportunist chattering, all apologetics, all philistine sophistry rests on this sort of abstraction.

After this general preface, we come to Bastiat’s actual construction. Only, be it noted in passing that his rural sharecropper, [109] this type who combines in himself the misfortune of the wage labourer with the bad luck of the small capitalist, might indeed consider himself fortunate if he were put on fixed wages. Proudhon’s ‘descriptive and philosophical history’ hardly holds a candle to that of his opponent Bastiat. The original form of association, wherein all the associates share all the risks of chance, is followed, as a higher stage of association entered into voluntarily by both sides, by a form in which the worker’s remuneration is fixed. We will not call attention here to the genius of a procedure which begins by presupposing a capitalist on one side and a worker on the other, so as then, afterwards, to let the relation of capital and wage labour arise between them by their mutual agreement.

The form of association in which the worker is exposed to all the chance risks of the business – in which all producers are equally exposed to these risks – and which immediately precedes the form of wages, where the remuneration of labour gains fixity, becomes stable, as thesis precedes antithesis – is, as Bastiat tells us, the state in which fishing, hunting and herding form the dominant forms of production and society. First the wandering fisherman, hunter, herdsman – and then the wage labourer. Where and when has this historic transition from the semi-savage state into the modern taken place? If at all, then only in the burlesque. In real history, wage labour arises out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom – or of the decay of communal property, as with oriental and Slavonic peoples – and, in its adequate, epoch-making form, the form which takes possession of the entire social being of labour, out of the decline and fall of the guild economy, of the system of Estates, of labour and income in kind, of industry carried on as rural subsidiary occupation, of small-scale feudal agriculture etc. In all these real historic transitions, wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope etc. Hence as negation of the stability of labour and of its remuneration. The direct transition from the African’s fetish to Voltaire’s supreme being, or from the hunting gear of a North American savage to the capital of the Bank of England, is not so absurdly contrary to history as is the transition from Bastiat’s fisherman to the wage labourer. (Furthermore, in all these developments there is no sign of voluntary changes arising from mutual agreement.) This construction – in which Bastiat dishonestly conjures up his flat abstraction in the form of a historic event – is quite of the same rank as the synthesis in which the English friendly societies and the savings banks appear as the last word of wage labour and as the suspension of all social antinomies.

Thus the historic character of wage labour is non-fixity: the opposite of Bastiat’s construction. But how did he come at all to construe fixity as the all-compensating aspect of wage labour? What led him to the wish to present wage labour in this form historically in other forms of society and of association, as a higher form of the remuneration of labour?

All economists, when they come to discuss the prevailing relation of capital and wage labour, of profit and wages, and when they demonstrate to the worker that he has no legitimate claim to share in the risks of gain, when they wish to pacify him generally about his subordinate role vis-à-vis the capitalist, lay stress on pointing out to him that, in contrast to the capitalist, he possesses a certain fixity of income more or less independent of the great adventures of capital. Just as Don Quixote consoles Sancho Panza with the thought that, although of course he takes all the beatings, at least he is not required to be brave. Thus an attribute which the economists attach to wage labour in antithesis to profit is transformed by Bastiat into an attribute of wage labour in antithesis to earlier forms of labour, and as progress relative to the remuneration of labour in these earlier relationships. A commonplace which takes up the standpoint of the prevailing relation, which consoles one of its sides towards the other, is taken out of this relation by Mr Bastiat and turned into the historic foundation of this relation’s origin. In the relation of wages to profit, wage labour to capital, say the economists, wages have the advantage of fixity. Mr Bastiat says this fixity, i.e. one of the aspects of the relation of wages to profit, is the historical foundation on which wage labour arose (or, is an attribute of wages in antithesis not to profit, but rather to the earlier forms of the remuneration of labour), hence on which profit, hence the whole relation arose likewise. Thus a truism about one facet of the relation of wages and profit is surreptitiously transformed for him into the historic basis of this whole relation. This happens because he is constantly preoccupied by reflections upon socialism, which latter is then dreamed to be everywhere the first form of association. This an example of the importance assumed in Bastiat’s hands by the apologetic commonplaces which accompany the course of development in the economists’ writings.

To return to the economists. Of what does this fixity of wages consist? Are wages immutably fixed? This would altogether contradict the law of demand and supply, the basis of the determination of wages. No economist denies the fluctuations, the rise and fall of wages. Or are wages independent of crises? Or of machines which make wage labour redundant? Or of divisions of labour, which displace it? To assert any of this would be heterodox, and it is not asserted. What is meant is that in a certain average, wages realize a fair average level, i.e. the minimum wage for the whole class, a concept so hateful to Bastiat, and that a certain average continuity of labour takes place, e.g. that wages may continue on even in cases where profit falls or momentarily disappears entirely. Now, what does this mean other than that, if wage labour is presupposed as the dominant form of labour, as the foundation of production, then the working class exists from wages, and that labour individually possesses, on the average, the fixity of working for wages? In other words, a tautology. Where capital and wage labour is the dominant relation of production, there exists an average continuity of wage labour, and, to that extent, a fixity of wages for the worker. Where wage labour exists, it exists. And this is regarded by Bastiat as its all-compensating attribute. Furthermore, that in the state of society where capital is developed, social production as a whole is more regular, continuous, all-sided – hence, also, the income of the elements employed in it ‘more fixed’ – than where capital, i.e. production, is not yet developed to this stage, is yet another tautology which is given with the concept of capital itself and of production resting on it. In other words: that the general presence of wage labour presupposes a higher development of the productive forces than in the stages preceding wage labour, who denies this? And what would lead the socialists to the idea of raising higher demands if they did not presuppose this higher development of the forces of social production, brought about by wage labour? The latter is rather the presupposition of their demands.

Note. The first form in which wages make their general appearance – military pay [Sold], which arises with the decline and fall of national armies and of citizens’ militias. First, the citizens themselves are paid as soldiers. Soon after that, their place is taken by mercenaries who have ceased to be citizens.

(2) (It is impossible to pursue this nonsense any further. We, therefore, drop Mr Bastiat.)