I.1. Introduction

It is the capitalist mode of production that dominates present-day society. It is the antagonism between the capitalist class and the wage-proletariat that moves our age and gives it its stamp. But the capitalist mode of production is not the only form of producing to be found in existing society; alongside it are still to be met remnants of pre-capitalist modes of production that have survived to this day; and the germs of a new, higher mode of production are already to be discovered in certain forms of state and municipal enterprise and of co-operation. Nor is the antagonism between the capitalist class and the wage-proletariat the only social antagonism of our time. Alongside these two classes, and between them, numerous others exist — among them the summit as well as the dregs of society, here the monarchs with their courtiers, there the various kinds of lumpenproletariat — classes that are partly products of pre-capitalist forms of society, and partly produced, or at least fostered in their growth, by the needs of capitalism itself. It is these manifold classes, some rising, some declining, with their extremely diverse interests, which constantly change and cross and intertwine in the most varied ways with the interests of the capitalists on the one hand and of the proletarians on the other, without ever coinciding completely with either, that give the political struggles of our time their unsteady character, full of the strangest surprises.

The theorist who wishes to investigate the fundamental laws that govern the life of present-day society must not let himself be confused by this abundance of phenomena. He must investigate the capitalist mode of production in its peculiar character, in its classical forms, entirely detached from the remnants and germs of other forms of production that surround it. The practical politician, on the other hand, would commit an enormous error if he chose to regard capitalists and proletarians as the only active factors in present-day society and to disregard all the other classes.

Marx’s Capital deals only with capitalists and proletarians. In the Eighteenth Brumaire and in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany by the same author, on the other hand, monarchs and lumpenproletarians, peasants and petty bourgeois, bureaucrats and soldiers, professors and students also play a part alongside capitalists and proletarians.

Of these intermediate strata, the peasantry, until recently the greater part of the population of our states, has always aroused a special interest among the democratic and revolutionary parties of our century. To these parties, which sprang from the towns, the peasant was a mysterious, incomprehensible, at times even a decidedly sinister being. He who had once fought the Church, the princes and the nobility most vigorously now clung most tenaciously to these institutions; with the same energy with which other classes fought for their emancipation he often stood up for his exploiters; the weapons that democracy brought him he turned only too often against it.

At first the peasant caused Social Democracy little anxiety. It is not a democratic people’s party in the bourgeois sense of the word, not a universal benefactress that seeks to do justice to the interests of all classes of the people, however opposed these may be, but a party of class struggle. The organisation of the urban proletariat took up its whole attention in the first years of its existence. And it expected that economic development would prepare the ground for it in the countryside just as in the town, and that the struggle between small-scale and large-scale enterprise would lead to the displacement of the former, so that it would then be easy for it, even as a purely proletarian party, to win the mass of the rural population.

Today Social Democracy has grown so powerful that the towns are no longer enough for it as a field of action; but as soon as it goes out into the countryside it comes up against the same mysterious power that has already prepared so many a surprise for earlier democratic and revolutionary parties. It sees that small-scale enterprise in agriculture is by no means disappearing rapidly, that the large agricultural enterprises are gaining ground only slowly, and in places are even losing ground. The whole economic theory on which it rests seems false as soon as it tries to apply it to the cultivation of the land. But if this theory really did not hold for agriculture, that would have to transform completely not only the tactics followed hitherto but the whole principles of Social Democracy. W. Sombart has brought out these misgivings very sharply in his most recent work:

“If there are fields of economic life that are not subject to the process of socialisation, and not subject to it because small-scale enterprise is here, in certain circumstances, of higher importance, more efficient than large-scale enterprise — what then? That is the whole problem that is placed before the eyes of Social Democracy today as the agrarian question. Will the ideal of a collective economy, which rests on large-scale enterprise, and with it the programme formed from that ideal, have to undergo a change of principle before the peasantry? And if one should in fact then come to the conclusion that in agrarian development there is no tendency towards large-scale enterprise, and that in the sphere of agrarian production large-scale enterprise is not even always the highest form of enterprise, then one will see oneself confronted with the decisive question: Are we now to be democratic, in the sense that we take in those small-scale existences as well and then alter our programme so as to abandon the goal of a collective economy; or are we to remain proletarian, keep this ideal and goal of a collective economy in view, and then exclude those elements from our movement? …

“I have had to speak here of ‘if’ and ‘but’, and for this reason: that so far as I know it is not yet possible to establish with any certainty either what the tendency of development in agriculture is, or which form of enterprise, and whether any particular form at all, is the superior one in agrarian production. But as far as I can see, the Marxian system essentially fails here; as far as I can see, Marx’s deductions cannot simply be transferred to the agrarian field. He said important things about agrarian matters too; but his theory of development, which rests on an increase of large-scale enterprise and a proletarianisation of the masses, and which derives socialism from this development as a necessity — that theory is clear only for the development of industry. It is not so for agrarian development, and it seems to me that only scientific research will be able to fill the gap that certainly exists.” (Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert, p. 111.)

We fear only that in this respect we shall have to wait a very long time. The disputed question whether large or small landed estates are the more advantageous has occupied economists for more than a century, and no end of the dispute is in sight. This has not prevented agriculture, however, from passing through an enormous development while the theorists were quarrelling over the merits of small and large estates, a development that is indisputable and can be clearly traced. But in order to see it one must not fix one’s gaze exclusively on the struggle between large-scale and small-scale enterprise, and one must not consider agriculture by itself alone, detached from the whole mechanism of social production.

There is no doubt — and we wish to take this as proven from the outset — that agriculture does not develop according to the same pattern as industry; it follows laws of its own. But this by no means says that the development of agriculture forms an antithesis to that of industry and is incompatible with it. We believe, rather, that we can show that both are hastening towards the same goal, as soon as one does not isolate them from one another but considers them as common members of a single total process.

The Marxian theory of the capitalist mode of production surely does not consist simply in reducing the development of this mode of production to the formula “displacement of large-scale enterprise by small-scale enterprise”, so that whoever knows this formula by heart already has in his pocket the key to the whole of modern economics.

If one wants to study the agrarian question in the spirit of the Marxian method, one must not merely put the question whether small-scale enterprise has a future in agriculture; we must rather investigate all the changes that agriculture undergoes in the course of the capitalist mode of production. We must investigate whether and how capital takes possession of agriculture, revolutionises it, makes old forms of production and property untenable and creates the necessity of new ones.

Only when we have answered these questions can we see whether the Marxian theory is applicable to agriculture or not, and whether the abolition of private property in the means of production has to halt precisely before the foremost of all means of production, the land.

Our task is thus clearly marked out for us.