The Agrarian Question

Contents

1. Preface 13 min 14

   Kautsky explains that the book grew out of the German Social-Democrats’ dispute over an agrarian programme, proposed at Frankfurt in 1894 and rejected at Breslau in 1895, which showed that the party had no agreed view of agricultural development. He lists his earlier writings on the peasantry, the new British, American, French and German statistics he has used, and his aim: to find the single process behind the many agrarian questions. He then defends Marx’s method against those who call it obsolete, arguing that dialectical development preserves as well as negates, and that only the facts can decide.

2. I.1 Introduction 11 min 11

   Capitalist society contains many classes besides capitalists and workers, and the peasantry has always puzzled the democratic parties. Social-Democracy expected small farms to be displaced as small workshops were, but they persist, and Sombart concludes that Marx’s theory fails in agriculture. Kautsky grants that agriculture follows its own laws, but argues that it must be studied as part of the whole of social production. The real question is not whether the small farm survives, but whether and how capital takes possession of agriculture and transforms it.

3. I.2 The Peasant and Industry 20 min 10

   The medieval peasant household produced nearly everything it needed and was secure against all but passing misfortune. Urban industry, trade and money taxes dissolved its domestic crafts, made it need money, and turned the peasant into a mere farmer dependent on prices, dealers and usurers, so that good harvests and market crises could ruin him. The same change shrank the peasant family, made seasonal wage-labour necessary, and carried the antagonism of employer and employed into the village and the household, even before capital entered farming itself.

4. I.3 Agriculture in the Feudal Era 45 min 15

   The three-field system of the Germanic mark balanced private arable with common pasture and forest. Production for the town upset it: the soil was exhausted, land became valuable, and lords seized forests, pastures and peasant holdings for commodity production under feudal forms. The peasant’s diet declined from meat to bread and roots, and in France he starved. By the eighteenth century the system fettered agriculture, but only the bourgeois revolutions, violent in France, bureaucratic in Prussia and Russia, established the full private property that opened the way to capitalist farming.

5. I.4 Modern Agriculture 1 h 11 min 11

   Freed from the three-field system, agriculture increased its livestock and grain together through fodder crops, stall-feeding and crop rotation, and specialised for the market, which made farmers dependent on traders. Machinery spread despite obstacles peculiar to farming: seasonal use, low wages, unskilled labour and distance from repair shops. Steam ploughs and threshers, drainage, artificial manures and bacteriology followed, while Liebig showed how the towns rob the soil. Agriculture became a science taught at universities and run by commercial and scientific book-keeping.

6. I.5 The Capitalist Character of Modern Agriculture 1 h 41 min 27

   Modern farming needs capital, so Kautsky sets out Marx’s theory of value, surplus-value and price of production against academic critics such as Brentano. He then explains differential rent from fertility, situation and additional investment, and absolute rent from the landowners’ monopoly, with numerical tables. The price of land is capitalised rent; land is not capital. Comparing English tenancy with the continental mortgage, he argues that the mortgage creditor becomes the real owner of the rent, so that falling rents ruin owner-farmers, and that rent is concentrating in a few great credit institutions.

7. I.6 Large-Scale and Small-Scale Enterprise 1 h 57 min 48

   Kautsky sets out the technical superiority of the large farm: savings on buildings, livestock and implements, fuller use of machines, division of labour, scientifically trained management, and cheaper commerce and credit. He then asks how the small farm survives, and answers that it does so through overwork and underconsumption: peasant families, children included, toil longer and eat worse than hired labourers, which also holds back technical progress. Finally he examines agricultural co-operatives, finding that credit, purchasing and marketing societies benefit larger farms most, and that only co-operative production, which peasants will not adopt under capitalism, could match the large estate.

8. I.7 The Limits of Capitalist Agriculture 1 h 35 min 32

   Why, if the large farm is superior, did census figures show small holdings holding their ground? Kautsky argues that statistics of area say little: smaller but more intensive farms may be larger enterprises. Land, unlike capital, cannot be multiplied, so a large farm can grow only by absorbing adjoining holdings; beyond a certain size distance raises costs; and the modern giant enterprise takes the form of the multi-estate latifundium. Above all, large estates need the labour of smallholders and their children. Large and small farms therefore condition each other, with the small farmer becoming more and more a proletarian.

9. I.8 The Proletarianisation of the Peasant 1 h 27 min 30

   Kautsky explains why dwarf holdings multiply instead of disappearing. A plot that feeds only its owner's household escapes competition, and where wage-work is available, high land prices and rapid population growth drive subdivision, as in Belgium and southern Germany. The middle peasantry is squeezed from both sides. He then surveys the peasant's by-employments: farm labour on nearby estates, rural domestic industry (which he condemns as the worst form of exploitation), rural factories and mines, and seasonal migration. All of them turn the smallholder into a proletarian who keeps his land, and his interests converge with those of the industrial worker.

10. I.9 The Growing Difficulties of Commodity-Producing Agriculture 1 h 50 min 29

    Kautsky lists the burdens capitalism lays on commodity-producing agriculture. The price of land absorbs most of the farmer's capital and becomes mortgage debt with every sale and inheritance. Equal division fragments estates, while entail and single-heir laws proletarianise younger children. Rent, interest and taxes flow to the towns, the soil is exhausted, and improved breeds fall to epidemics. Above all, the flight from the land strips agriculture of its youngest and ablest workers. The middle peasants' recent gains, he argues, are a symptom of this distress, not of peasant prosperity.

11. I.10 Overseas Food Competition and the Industrialisation of Agriculture 2 h 41 min 43

    Kautsky explains the agrarian crisis that began in the late 1870s. Capitalist industry needs an ever-wider world market, and the railways and steamships it built opened up grain lands in Russia, India, America and Australia, where producers bore no rent or were forced to sell by taxes and usury. European farming could no longer pass its rents, mortgages and taxes on to consumers. He traces the retreat from grain to livestock and dairying, the rise of sugar, distilling and dairy co-operatives, which he argues lead to capitalism rather than socialism, and the threat from substitutes such as margarine, synthetic dyes and electric traction.

12. I.11 Prospects for the Future 32 min 8

    The concluding chapter of Part I. Kautsky argues that peasant indebtedness is a conservative rather than a revolutionary force, and that industry is the real driving force of agrarian change. Industry separated craft from farming, made large farms technically superior, and now reunites industry and agriculture under its own command. Large and small farms condition each other, and the census shows little change in their shares. A socialist revolution in the towns would socialise agricultural industry, leased land, mortgages and the great estates, and Kautsky expects the small peasants to join co-operative estates voluntarily, delivered rather than expropriated.

13. II.1 Does Social Democracy Need an Agrarian Programme? 1 h 46 min 29

    Kautsky asks whether Social Democracy needs a special agrarian programme. Agriculture is losing economic weight but gaining political weight, so the party cannot ignore it. But “protection of the peasant” is ruled out: the peasant, however poor, owns means of production and sells food, so his interests clash with the worker’s, and the dwarf farmer’s hope of becoming a peasant must not be fed. Social development stands above sectional interests. Nationalising land, mortgages or the grain trade under the existing state would bail out landowners and creditors; only forests and waters should be nationalised now. Village communism is a dead end; communal land ownership is a demand for the towns.

14. II.2 The Protection of the Rural Proletariat 2 h 17 min 31

    Kautsky turns to positive policy, applying the party’s general programme to the rural worker rather than protecting the peasant. He demands abolition of the servants’ ordinances, the right of combination and defence of freedom of movement. Attacking the employer-only inquiry of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, he documents child labour in the beet fields and herding, and proposes a ban on wage-labour under fourteen, limits on hours, and compulsory continuation schools. Women’s field work declines as labourers’ conditions improve. He calls for an end to the gang system in migrant labour, a seasonal normal working day, Sunday rest, sanitary housing rules, public rented dwellings and fair-rent courts.

15. II.3 The Protection of Agriculture 1 h 4 min 20

    Kautsky turns from the rural labourer to agriculture itself. Its interest, he argues, is that of profit and rent, which have powerful defenders already, so the party acts as a watchman, not an advocate. Yet it can work positively: abolishing entails, manorial districts and the hunting privileges of great estates; compelling the consolidation of scattered strips, land improvement and the fight against epidemics by restricting private property; nationalising hail insurance; easing co-operatives and promoting agricultural education. It refuses subsidies that would only raise ground-rent. If such policies do not win the peasants, he concludes, the fault lies with small-peasant production.

16. II.4 The Protection of the Rural Population 1 h 39 min 26

    Social Democracy can offer the rural population more than the agrarians by turning the “police state” into a “state of civilisation”: local self-government, a militia instead of the standing army, the state bearing the costs of schools, poor relief, health and roads, and free legal aid. These reforms cost far more than disarmament could save, so Kautsky outlines a proletarian fiscal policy: taxes only on surplus-value through progressive income, property and inheritance taxes, no new state loans, and nationalised monopolies. Summing up his demands, he concludes that the peasant cannot be won but may be neutralised.

17. II.5 The Social Revolution and the Expropriation of the Landowners 34 min 13

    The concluding chapter answers the peasant’s fear of expropriation. Small enterprises that are merely parasitic will be abandoned voluntarily once wage-workers are secure; necessary ones can survive within socialist production, dependent on society through nationalised mortgages and processing industries. Peasants will be prized producers, led to large-scale farming by example, not force, as the 1848 Demands, the Basle International, Liebknecht and Engels all held. A final section defends the private home: socialism socialises the means of production, not of enjoyment, and the family, freed from household drudgery, rests on individuality and love.