Sismondi On Capitalism

I want to share a quote from the book "From Dawn to Decadence" -- a history book I've been reading on and off for the last few months. This is from page 457, and describes the beliefs of a person who was writing around the year 1818. Emphasis is mine.

Sismondi had visited England and had been struck by the misery resulting from industrial progress. Why did the seemingly beneficial production of goods by machinery bring on "poverty in the midst of plenty"? The answer was: free competition keeps wages low, free enterprise makes for overproduction, which leads to recurrent "crises" -- shutdowns or failures entailing unemployment and starvation.

His detailed criticism of the new society includes the observation that it splits labor from capital and makes them enemies, with the power all on one side. The idea of their "bargaining" over wages is absurd. Tyrant and victim describes the relation, yet without cruel intent of the one or knowledge by the other of who is oppressor is. Again, with overproduction the capitalist must seek foreign markets and precipitate national wars, while at home a class struggle goes on without end: "the poor could say that the employer's life is their death, and therefore his death would be their life." But Sismondi does not urge revolutionary massacre. What is needed is protective legislation.

Sismondi does not oppose machinery; he rejects the idea that the economic situation is the inevitable effect of a law of nature, as the orthodox then affirmed. He saw the evils as the result of social and legal arrangements that could be changed. And he instances the guild system, of which one advantage was prudence in procreation. For the modern worker population Sismondi coined the term proletariat, from the class of proletarii (from proles, Latin for offspring) the lowest class in ancient Rome. To give one more sample of Sismondi's perceptiveness: he pointed out that the combination of capital and labor under existing conditions increased the value of each and produced a mieux-valeur [sic]. This is close to the Mehrwert by which Marx demonstrated that labor was exploited. Sismondi's critique of political economy dates from 1818, the year of Marx's birth.