Sismondi now takes constant capital into account, not only in the production of luxuries, but also in agriculture, and further raises the following objection against Ricardo: 'We must abstract from time, if we make the assumption that the cultivator, whom a mechanical discovery or an invention of rural industry enables to treble the productive power of his workers, will also find sufficient capital to treble his exploitation, his agricultural implements, his equipment, his livestock, his granaries: to treble the circulating capital which must serve him while waiting for his harvest.'[207] In this way Sismondi breaks with the superstition of the classical school that with capital expanding all additional capital would be exclusively spent on wages, on the variable capital. He clearly dissents from Ricardo's doctrine--which did not, however, prevent his allowing all the errors arising out of this doctrine three years later again to creep into the second edition of his _Nouveaux Principes_. In opposition to Ricardo's facile doctrine of harmony, Sismondi underlines two decisive points: on the one hand, the objective difficulties of the process of enlarged reproduction which works by no means so smoothly in capitalist reality as it does in Ricardo's absurd hypothesis; on the other hand, the fact that all technical progress in social labour productivity is always achieved under capitalism at the expense of the working class, bought with their suffering. Sismondi shows himself superior to Ricardo in yet a third point: he represents the broad horizon of the dialectical approach as against Ricardo's blunt narrow-mindedness with its incapacity to conceive of any forms of society other than those of bourgeois economics: 'Our eyes,' he exclaims, 'are so accustomed to this new organisation of society, this universal competition, degenerating into hostility between the rich and the working class, that we no longer conceive of any mode of existence other than that whose ruins surround us on all sides. They believe to prove me absurd by confronting me with the vices of preceding systems. Indeed, as regards the organisation of the lower classes, two or three systems have succeeded one another; yet, since they are not to be regretted, since, after first doing some good, they then imposed terrible disasters on mankind, may we conclude from this that we have now entered the true one? May we conclude that we shall not discover the besetting vice of the system of wage labour as we have discovered that of slavery, of vassalage, and of the guilds? A time will come, no doubt, when our descendants will condemn us as barbarians because we have left the working classes without security, just as we already condemn, as they also will, as barbarian the nations who have reduced those same classes to slavery.'[208]