[221] Marx, in his history of the opposition to Ricardo's school and its dissolution, makes only brief mention of Sismondi, explaining: 'I leave Sismondi out of this historical account, because the criticism of his views belongs to a part with which I can deal only after this treatise, the actual movement of capital (competition and credit)' (_Theorien über den Mehrwert_, vol. iii, p. 52). Later on, however, in connection with Malthus, he also deals with Sismondi in a passage that, on the whole, is comprehensive: 'Sismondi is profoundly aware of the self-contradiction of capitalist production; he feels that its forms, its productive conditions, spur on an untrammelled development of the productive forces and of wealth on the one hand, yet that these conditions, on the other, are only relative; that their contradictions of value-in-use and value-in-exchange, of commodity and money, of sale and purchase, of production and consumption, of capital and wage-labour, and so on, take on ever larger dimensions, along with the forward strides of the productive forces. In particular, he feels the fundamental conflict: here the untrammelled development of productive power and of a wealth which, at the same time, consists in commodities, must be monetised; and there the basis--restriction of the mass of producers to the necessary means of subsistence. He therefore does not, like Ricardo, conceive of the crises as merely incidental, but as essential, as eruptions of the immanent conflicts on ever grander scale and at determinate periods. Which faces him with the dilemma: is the state to put restrictions on the _productive forces_ to adapt them to the productive conditions, or upon the _productive conditions_ to adapt them to the _productive forces_? Frequently he has recourse to the past, becomes _laudator temporis acti_, and seeks to master the contradictions by a different regulation of income relative to capital, or of distribution relative to production, quite failing to grasp that the relations of distribution are nothing but the relations of production _sub alia specie_. He has a perfect picture of the contradictions immanent in bourgeois production, yet he does not understand them, and therefore fails also to understand the process of their disintegration. (And indeed, how could he, seeing this production was still in the making?--R.L.) And yet, his view is in fact grounded in the premonition that _new_ forms of appropriating wealth must answer to the productive forces, developed in the womb of capitalist production, to the material and social conditions of creating this wealth; that the bourgeois forms of appropriation are but transitory and contradictory, wealth existing always with contrary aspects and presenting itself at once as its opposite. Wealth is ever based on the premises of poverty, and can develop only by developing poverty' (ibid., p. 55).