I.10. Overseas Food Competition and the Industrialisation of Agriculture

The last chapters have shown us that the capitalist mode of production, which burst the fetters of feudalism and gave agriculture an enormous impetus that carried it further in a few decades than it had formerly come in a thousand years — that this same mode of production develops tendencies which cramp and oppress agriculture more and more, and which bring it about that the forms of appropriation and of property corresponding to the present mode of production come more and more into contradiction with the needs of a rational agricultural enterprise.

These oppressive tendencies made themselves felt early on, but they troubled the farmer and landowner very little so long as he was in a position to shift the burdens resulting from them off himself and on to others, on to the consumers. So long as this was the case, the golden age of agriculture lasted from the collapse of the feudal state onwards; it lasted into the seventies.

“The memorandum on the state measures for the promotion of agriculture in Prussia drawn up in the Ministry of Agriculture in November 1859”, Meitzen remarked at that time (Der Boden und die landwirthschaftlichen Verhältnisse des preußischen Staates, I, 440), “could rightly say:

“‘The expected effects of the agrarian laws have not failed to appear; the slackness of the rural population has given place to a gratifying activity … The coincidence of favourable conjunctures has spread a general prosperity among the owners of peasant holdings as well as of manors, and the purchase prices of all landed estates have risen almost to excess, on account of the unhindered possibility of improving them and the unlimited competition of buyers.’”

How differently a Prussian Minister of Agriculture speaks today!

Until well into the second half of the seventies the prices of foodstuffs rose without interruption, in sharp contrast to the prices of industrial products; often they also rose faster than wages, so that the workers saw their position worsened not only as producers, in that the rate of surplus-value rose, that is, their share in the value they had created fell, but often also as consumers. The prosperity of agriculture sprang from the immiseration of the proletariat.

According to J. Conrad, 1,000 kilograms of wheat cost

A kilogram of beef cost

This steady rise came to an end in the course of the seventies.

1,000 kilograms of wheat cost

According to the latest report of the English parliamentary agricultural commission, the price of wheat per quarter in England was officially given as

A kilogram of beef cost in Berlin, 1881–85, 119 pfennigs, 1886–90, 115 pfennigs; in London, 1881–85, 124 pfennigs, 1886–90, 101 pfennigs.

Since the seventies, then, the movement of the prices of foodstuffs has been proceeding in a direction opposite to the earlier one.

The cause of this reversal, like that of every other great change in modern agriculture, is to be sought in the development of industry, which makes the former more and more dependent on itself.

The capitalist mode of production entails an uninterrupted revolutionising of production through accumulation, the progressive piling up of new capital, and through technical upheavals that proceed from the uninterrupted progress of the sciences, which capital has taken into its service. The mass of capitalistically produced products therefore grows from year to year in the capitalist nations; it grows much faster than the population.

Strangely enough, this uninterruptedly increasing wealth becomes a source of increasing embarrassment for the capitalist producers, thanks to the circumstance that their mode of production is production of surplus-value, which falls not to the wage-labourers but to the capitalist class, but at the same time is also production on a large scale, production of mass articles, production for the consumption of the masses. This is an essential difference between the capitalist mode of production and the feudal or ancient one. The feudal lord or the slave-owner also extorted a surplus-product from his labourers, but a surplus-product that he or his parasites consumed themselves. The surplus-value appropriated by the capitalist, on the other hand, as a rule first takes the form of products that the mass of the population has to buy, before it can take the form of products suited to the consumption of the capitalist. The capitalist, just like the feudal lord and the slave-holder, must strive to press down the consumption of the masses in order to increase his own; but in doing so he has a care that they did not know, that of uninterruptedly increasing mass consumption. This contradiction is one of the most characteristic, but also one of the most uncomfortable, of the problems that the modern capitalist has to solve.

Naive social reformers, and zealous socialists too, have long been at pains to prove to him that mass consumption is the greater, the greater the consumption of the working masses, and that therefore, in order to keep production going and to be able to expand it steadily, he need do nothing but raise wages. But this consideration could at best lead the individual capitalist to be glad to see wages raised in other branches of industry, but never in his own. A brewer, say, may have an interest in the increase of mass consumption through the raising of the wages of other workers, but never through the raising of the wages of his own. It is true that the higher the wages, the more the capitalist can sell. But he does not produce in order to sell, but in order to pocket a profit. And the profit, ceteris paribus, is the higher the higher the surplus-value, and this is the higher the lower the wage, for the same performance of labour.

The capitalists have accordingly always known quite other methods of raising the mass consumption of capitalistically produced products than that of raising the consumption of the working masses. It is not in the working proletariat that they seek their principal market in the first place, but in the non-proletarian masses of the population, above all in the country people. We have seen how they ruin the latter’s domestic industries and thereby create a great market for the sale of their mass products.

But this market is the less sufficient, the greater the productive forces of the capitalist mode of production, and the more the wage-labourers predominate in the population, that is, the class that creates the mass product but in the nature of things can consume only a part of its product. The extension of the market beyond the bounds of one’s own nation, production for the world market and its constant expansion, becomes a condition of life for capitalist industry. Hence that pushing and hunting after the expansion of markets, after blessing Negroes with boots and hats and the Chinese with ironclads, cannon and railways, which is the hallmark of our time. The home market itself now depends almost entirely on the foreign one. It is the latter that in the main decides whether business goes briskly, whether proletarians and capitalists, and with them traders, handicraftsmen and farmers, can consume much.

If the foreign market, the world market, is no longer capable of rapid expansion, then the capitalist mode of production is at its wits’ end.

Hand in hand with the constant pressure to expand the market for industry, however, there also goes a revolutionising of the means of transport.

We have seen that the capitalist mode of production rests from the outset on mass production. As such, however, it also needs means of mass transport. It needs them not merely for the export of its products. A capitalist large-scale industry also consumes far more raw materials than its neighbourhood can offer it; it concentrates greater masses of people than the neighbourhood can feed. But raw materials and foodstuffs are mostly of only slight specific value; in great weight and bulk they contain little labour; only an especially cheap means of transport can carry great masses of them over long distances without the costs growing enormously.

In the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production only the waterway offered such a cheap means of mass transport. That mode of production could develop only by the sea or on especially favourably situated waterways. But the capitalist mode of production needs not only cheapness but also speed and security of mass transport. The more rapid the turnover of capital, the less capital one needs to advance in a given undertaking in order to carry it on at a given scale; the larger the scale one can reach with a given capital. If I send my goods from Manchester to Hong Kong, it makes an enormous difference whether I receive payment for them in three months or in a year. If my capital turns over four times a year, then, other circumstances being equal, my profit will be four times as great as if it turns over only once.

On the other hand, the more rapid the traffic, the greater the distance at which I can seek my customers, the more I can extend my market, without slowing down the turnover of the capital advanced in my undertaking, without enlarging it.

The greater the speed of traffic, the smaller, too, the stocks of raw materials that I must lay in to keep the enterprise constantly going. In this respect too every improvement in transport works towards enabling one to accomplish more with a given capital, to attain the same result with less capital, and finally also to widen the circle of one’s sources of supply.

The greater security of traffic works in the same direction. It reduces the mass of the reserves of money and raw material that the entrepreneur must keep ready in order to be armed against possible disturbances in sales or in supply.

In respect of speed and security of traffic, however, transport by water, by sail, oar or towing-horse, leaves much to be desired. The canals and rivers freeze over in winter, the sea is made unsafe by storms, and calms or contrary winds are, if anything, still worse for the waiting merchant.

Only the taming of steam-power made it possible to create those forms of mass transport which make the capitalist mode of production independent of the waterways, transplant it into the interior of the continents too, and transform the whole world into a market for the gigantically shooting-up large-scale industry.

The steam locomotive and the railway were invented already at the beginning of our century, but their application remained almost entirely confined to the regions in which large-scale industry ruled. Only the great wars in which old Europe and America were finished off cleared the way for the most rapid development of the railways outside the regions of large-scale industry. Only from then on did the railway change from a product into a forerunner of capitalist development. When Russia after the Crimean War, and Austria-Hungary since 1859 and still more since 1866, promoted the building of railways in every way, it was chiefly strategic considerations that were at work. The same held no less of the Romanian and Turkish railways, and of the Indian. But commercial points of view also came into play. The governments needed money in order to be able to take up competition with the capitalist states; but the only thing their peoples had to bring to market was raw materials and foodstuffs. For these, means of mass transport had to be created.

The railways created by the American capitalist class since the War of Secession, which had raised capital to sole dominion in the Union, served this purpose from the outset. The successes of these railways soon provoked imitation, and today one of the chief activities of European finance consists in the founding and financing of railways in economically quite backward, often quite empty regions outside Europe. The building of such railways not only offers welcome outlets to the overflowing capital under whose superabundance the European capitalist class threatens to suffocate; it opens up, indeed often creates, new markets for the rapidly growing industry of Europe, but it also opens up and creates new sources of supply of raw materials and foodstuffs.

Giffen has only recently published the following table of the length of the railways (in English miles of 1,609 metres) at the end of the years:

In 1870 the European railway network was still half the railway network of the world in extent; in 1895 it was only a third. In this period it has not quite quintupled its length, while the American has increased sevenfold, and that of the other three continents more than thirtyfold.

In a similar, if not so tremendous, fashion steam has revolutionised shipping. According to Jannasch, the tonnage of the ships entering and clearing in the most important seafaring countries of the world was:

The costs of railway and ship transport are constantly falling. According to Sering, the average freight rates for the transport of wheat from Chicago to New York per bushel were:

The transport of wheat from New York to Liverpool by steamer cost on average, per bushel, 14.36 cents in 1868, and only 6.87 in 1884.

Since then freight rates have fallen still further. According to the Yearbook of the United States, Departement of Agriculture, 1896, one paid for a bushel of wheat from New York to Liverpool

The transport of 100 pounds of wheat by rail from Chicago to New York cost 25 cents in 1893, 20 cents in 1897.

This development of transport has completely changed the position of European agriculture. The products of agriculture are distinguished, as already mentioned, by a low specific value, that is, in great volume and weight they contain only relatively little human labour: so potatoes, hay, milk, fruit, but also wheat and meat. Many of them, too, will not bear long transport, like meat, milk, and many kinds of fruit and vegetables. With primitive means of transport, transport made these products very much dearer, and their supply beyond a very limited distance became downright impossible. The supply of foodstuffs to the market, to the town, remained a predominantly local affair, remained confined to its surroundings. These possessed a monopoly of the exploitation of the urban consumers, and they made full use of it. The height of the costs of transport from the most distant estates that still had to be drawn upon to cover the needs of the town drove up the differential ground-rents of the estates lying nearer. The growing difficulties of extending the supply of foodstuffs beyond a certain area also made it possible to screw up absolute ground-rent quite enormously.

The building of railways did not change this much so long as it remained confined to the industrially highly developed countries. They did, indeed, open up new sources of food supply for the urban market, but only such as produced under conditions similar to those of the sources lying nearer the town. Above all, however, these railways worked towards an enormous expansion of the urban market; for it was they that first made possible that rapid growth and that immense extension of the great cities which characterises our time. Nor did they bring about a fall in ground-rent; on the contrary, from the time when railway-building began until well into the seventies, ground-rent was everywhere rising rapidly in western Europe. The railways worked towards a rapid growth in the number of landowners who shared in this rise. They have increased enormously the mass of ground-rent that fell to the landowners of the country.

Those railways, however, that are laid down in economically backward countries have a different effect. They too have scarcely led to an overproduction of foodstuffs; in the measure in which they increased the supply of foodstuffs, they enlarged the urban market, increased the size of the industrial population, which in Europe could not have grown so rapidly in the last decades without the overseas supply of food. It was not the quantity of the foodstuffs supplied that became threatening to European agriculture, but their conditions of production. They did not have to bear the burdens that the capitalist mode of production imposes on agriculture; by their appearance on the market they made it impossible henceforth for European agriculture to shift on to the mass of the consumers the burdens that private property in land and capitalist commodity production impose on it and rapidly increase; it must bear them itself, and in this consists the present agrarian crisis.

The countries that undersell European agriculture can be divided into two great groups: the regions of Oriental despotism and the free (present or former) colonies, provided that one can still count countries like Russia among the former. But precisely with regard to the rural population this is, by and large, still the case.

In the former regions the rural population is utterly at the mercy of the arbitrary will of the state and of the ruling classes. Capitalism has not yet created a national political life; the nation, at least in the countryside, is still only an aggregate of village communities, each of which leads its own life for itself and in its isolation stands powerless before the centralised power of the state. But so long as the latter does not go beyond the sphere of simple commodity production, the position of the peasant in such a state is as a rule not too bad. Personally he scarcely comes into contact with the power of the state; he is protected and represented before the state by his democratically organised community, and the power of the state has few means at hand for squeezing the community excessively, and little occasion to do so, since it has only limited use for the products in kind in which taxes are paid. The cruelties and extortions of Oriental despotism show themselves more in the towns, towards courtiers, high officials and rich merchants, than in the open country.

This changes completely, however, as soon as the power of the state comes into contact, in one way or another, with European capitalism. European civilisation makes its entry in the forms of militarism, bureaucracy and the system of public debt, and suddenly increases the money needs of the state as much as its power over the rural communities. Now the taxes are converted into money taxes, or such slight money taxes as already exist are screwed up to an unbearable height and ruthlessly collected. Agriculture is the chief branch of production in the state; almost the whole burden of taxation falls on it, the more so the more powerless the rural population is. The comfortable life of that population is gone. It must practise robbery on its own labour-power and on the powers of its soil, in order to wring from the soil whatever can be wrung from it. The time of leisure, the time of artistic activity, is past — the beautiful wood-carvings and the embroideries of the South Russian peasants are a thing of the past — and so is the time of plenty. Far more is harvested than formerly, the soil is given no time to recover, yet everything that is not absolutely indispensable to the barest maintenance of life goes to market. But where are buyers to be found in a country in which almost every person is a peasant who wants to sell foodstuffs and needs to buy none? The export of foodstuffs now becomes a question of life and death, and the building of railways leading from the interior to the ports or the frontiers a necessity for the government, if it is to be able to gather in the money taxes from the peasants.

There is scarcely any question of a regulation of the prices of these foodstuffs by the costs of production. They have not been produced capitalistically, and they are sold under the pressure of the state and of the usurer, whom the introduction of money taxes brings on to the scene. The higher the taxes and the usurious interest, the greater the need and the debt-bondage of the peasant, the greater the necessity for him to dispose of his products at any price, the greater the amount of labour he must perform for nothing for his creditor, a rich peasant or village innkeeper or landlord, in payment of his debts, the greater the quantity of products he brings to market, the lower the prices he gets for them, the cheaper the products produced on the estates of his creditors. The growing burdening of the peasant by taxes and usurious interest here makes the product not dearer but cheaper; it presses the ground-rents and wages of the small peasant, so far as there can be any talk of such things, down to the very lowest.

Against competition of this kind an agriculture cannot hold its own that produces capitalistically and has to reckon with a given standard of living of the rural population, given wages, and given ground-rents fixed in land prices and mortgage debts; that does not practise robbery of the soil but maintains the equilibrium of the soil’s fertility; and that has at its disposal only an insufficient supply of labour-power.

Quite different from this kind of competition from those countries of Oriental despotism that have come into contact with European capitalism, Russia, Turkey, India, is the competition of the colonies, of America and Australia.

There we find a vigorous democracy of free peasants, remote from the quarrels of the world, which knows no militarism and is little burdened by taxes. Immeasurable stretches of fertile land lie there without a master, for their original masters, the not very numerous aborigines, are exterminated or crowded together on small tracts of land. There is as yet no monopoly of the soil by individuals, as yet no ground-rent; the land has no price. The farmer does not need, as in Europe, to spend the greater part of his capital on the purchase of land; he can devote it entirely to equipping the enterprise. With the same outlay of capital and the same area of land, the farmer in the colony can therefore reach a much higher level of cultivation than in Europe. And he succeeds in this all the more because the colonist, when he comes from Europe, finds quite new conditions to which he must adapt himself, in the course of which the traditions and prejudices of former times that weigh upon the European peasant rapidly disappear.

Yet another circumstance promotes the development of cultivation. The soil is not yet exhausted; it is still quite virgin. It needs no manuring and no rotation of crops, and for years ahead it always gives a rich yield of the same crop. The farmer therefore needs neither to buy manure nor to produce it himself; he can confine himself entirely to the production of a single product, for example wheat, and does so the more readily, the more developed the means of transport are, the more he produces only commodities and no longer needs production for his own use. This one-sidedness of production allows him to save enormously on labour-power and means of labour, and at the same time to adapt his working stock entirely to the one purpose that alone it has to serve. The wheat-farmer needs no stalls for livestock, except draught animals, no barns for stores of fodder, no labour-power for keeping livestock; he need grow no root crops, and saves labour-power and implements there too. Just like the absence of ground-rent, this one-sidedness of production also works towards enabling the farmer in the colony to obtain a higher yield with the same outlay of capital and labour and the same area of land, or to cultivate a far greater area of land with the same outlay of capital and labour and the same yield per hectare as in Europe.

To explain the highly developed technique of American agriculture, it is usual to point to the shortage of labour-power and the high wages, which compelled the use of machinery. But without the two other factors just stressed, this factor could hardly have made itself felt to so high a degree as was actually the case.

A “labour question” in the sense in which it exists for European agriculture does not exist for the colonies. These are, it is true, much more thinly populated than the civilised countries of Europe; the number of workers in proportion to the area to be worked is much smaller.

But it is not the prosperity of agriculture that depends on the number of workers at any given time, only the kind of its enterprise. Where there are few workers, the enterprise is laid out more extensively, as much human labour as possible is replaced by machines, and so on. But it is by no means a matter of indifference for the prosperity of agriculture whether, with a given method of farming, the number of workers at its disposal decreases or not, and whether their efficiency diminishes or not. What is decisive for the prosperity of agriculture is not the number and skill of its workers at any given moment, but the direction of the changes in these factors.

And in this the colonies are superior to Europe. The same flight from the land that depopulates the open country of Europe constantly brings new crowds of vigorous country people not only to the towns but also to the colonies, the most intelligent and energetic of their kind, who under the new conditions soon become, and must become, still more energetic and intelligent. Those who cannot adapt themselves to the so totally changed conditions go under.

“After a few years a quite uneducated immigrant has become a much more capable person, all the more so because he nourishes himself, feeds himself, so extraordinarily well here. He is like a plant that has been transplanted from poor into better soil — today still, and so long as labour is better paid here than in Europe.” (R. Meyer, Ursachen der amerikanischen Konkurrenz, p. 16.)

In the colonies there is no military service to carry off labour-power from agriculture.

Sering (Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas, p. 179) accordingly declares expressly: “In the farming districts one often hears complaints about high wages, but very seldom about a shortage of workers.” But even the high wages do not stay at their level.

While in Europe the growing difficulty of getting agricultural labourers in sufficient numbers in general raises their wages, in the colonies, thanks to the constant influx of fresh labour-power, wages tend to fall. According to Sering (op. cit., p. 469), the monthly wages of agricultural labourers engaged by the year were, in dollars:

A general downward movement is unmistakable. In view of all these facts one easily sees how ridiculous is the good advice that liberal economists like to give European farmers: that they need only become as intelligent as the Americans, and American competition would be overcome.

But it is remarkable that in the course of development the Americans themselves, instead of becoming more intelligent, become less intelligent, that is, begin to farm by the European method.

The picture of colonial agriculture that we have just drawn now holds for the United States only in slight measure. This agriculture rests on robbery of the soil. (On this method of farming compare p. 147.) Sooner or later it exhausts the soil. This makes it necessary for the farmer from time to time to exchange the exhausted soil for fresh, either by giving his estate from the outset so great an extent that it includes an uncultivated part besides the cultivated one, or by moving on, when his land is exhausted, into uncultivated regions and there bringing a new piece of land under the plough for himself. In its nomadic character the agriculture of the colonists resembles that of the ancient Germans, with the difference, to be sure, that it is carried on with all the aids of modern technique and serves not consumption by the producer himself but sale. But precisely for this reason this modern nomadic agriculture must exhaust the soil still more rapidly than the agriculture of the Germans did. The abandoned land lies waste until it has recovered, or it is taken over by a farmer who begins to farm it in the European manner, with rotation of crops and manuring. In any case this old soil sooner or later becomes useless for extensive robbery-farming. Soils on which wheat can be grown for 40 years on end without manuring (Sering, op. cit., p. 188) are abnormal rarities.

The unsettled character of American agriculture is shown by the following figures. The acreage under wheat was

In the northern Eastern States at the same time the whole area in agricultural use diminished in still greater degree, from 46,385,632 acres to 42,338,024, that is, by more than 4 million acres.

With so rapid an exhaustion of the soil the land-hunger of the American colonists must be still greater than that of the ancient Germans; and if Germany became the vagina gentium, the ever newly bearing mother of numerous peoples who, during the centuries of the migration of the peoples, pressed forward little by little as far as Africa, so the east of America became a vagina gentium, a starting-point of settlers who in the course of a few decades filled the continent as far as the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

This advance was furthered by the heavy immigration from Europe; for the prospect of being able to farm fertile soil without the burdens of the old capitalist civilisation, without ground-rent, militarism and taxes, was too tempting not to induce numerous crowds of farmers to leave the paternal soil, with which, according to the assurances of our poets and politicians, they are so inseparably bound up, and to seek a new existence beyond the ocean.

Today all the fertile land in the United States is private property. The increase in the number of farms becomes slower and slower. From 1870 to 1880 they increased by 1,348,922, that is, by 51 per cent; from 1880 to 1890 only by 555,734, by 14 per cent. The land is no longer free; it yields ground-rent and has a price. But with this there also begins the loading of agriculture with the burden of private property under the regime of capitalism. The American farmer today must buy an estate; he must reduce his working capital by the amount of the purchase money, farm a smaller estate than would formerly have been the case, or run into debt. Or he must rent an estate. When he dies he can no longer direct his children to the free land in the far West; they must divide his estate, or one of them must buy it from the others, which likewise does not come off without indebtedness or a curtailment of the working capital. Reduction in the size of estates, their indebtedness and a deterioration in their equipment set in.

At the same time, however, the demands on the farmer grow. The soil is exhausted, and new soil is no longer to be had for nothing. Manuring, rotation of crops and the keeping of livestock become necessary, but all this requires additional labour-power and money. Since 1880 the census in the United States has recorded the costs of the artificial manures consumed in the preceding year. They amounted to 28,600,000 dollars in 1880, and 38,500,000 in 1890. With this a new cause of indebtedness and of the reduction in size of estates appears.

Tenancy and indebtedness begin to take root and to spread. Of the farms of the United States, 25.56 per cent were rented in 1880, 28.37 per cent in 1890. (Compare p. 85.) The indebtedness of the farms was recorded for the whole Union for the first time in 1890. Of the farms that were not rented but worked by their owners, 28.22 per cent were indebted in 1890, most of them in the capitalistically developed states. Of the 886,957 indebted farms, 177,508 lay in the North Atlantic States (34.22 per cent of the farms there), 618,429 (42.52 per cent) in the North Central States, but in the Western States only 31,751 (23.09 per cent), in the South Atlantic 31,080 (7.43 per cent), in the South Central States 28,189 (4.59 per cent). The amount of the indebtedness was calculated at 1,086 million dollars, 35.55 per cent of the value of the farms. For 88 per cent of the indebted farms the causes of the indebtedness given were purchase, improvements, the acquisition of machines and livestock, and the like.

These conditions must also make the stream of immigration dry up, while with the transition from extensive to intensive farming the demand for labour-power grows. In 1882 immigration into the United States reached its peak, with 788,992 immigrants. Since then it has steadily fallen, and in 1895 amounted to only 279,948 persons. Emigration from Germany, which in 1881 was still 220,902 persons strong, fell to 24,631 by 1897.

At the same time industry and commerce are developing rapidly and absorbing an ever greater part of the population. From 1880 to 1890 the number of persons gainfully occupied in industry increased by 49.1 per cent, in commerce and transport by 78.2 per cent, in agriculture (with mining) by only 12.6 per cent.

For American agriculture too the time of its labour question is approaching. But the development of industry not only takes away agriculture’s labour-power directly; it also promotes militarism. It becomes an export industry that wants to conquer the world market for itself and comes into conflict with the rival nations. Military affairs make greater demands, the public debts grow, the taxes become heavier. The upswing of industry brings crises with it that shake the whole country; unemployment takes on threatening dimensions; the class struggles become ever more violent; the ruling classes need ever stronger means of repressing and preventing inconvenient movements. This too promotes militarism. And at the same time the state itself becomes more and more the prey of high finance, which plunders the population through its monopolies.

All this means an increased burden on the agriculture of the United States and a diminution of its competitive power on the world market.

The competition of European Russia and that of India, too, will lose its sharpness in time. There, still sooner than in the United States, robbery of the soil must lead to the bankruptcy of the prevailing method of agriculture, since there is less reserve of land, the old cultivated soil is already more exhausted, and the means of tilling the soil grow steadily worse the poorer the peasant becomes, the more he loses his livestock to the usurer and the tax-collector. The end is chronic famine, periodically growing especially acute.

Exports may still grow for a time, particularly as a result of the progressive building of railways, which keep opening up to traffic new districts not yet exhausted; but in the end this economy must finish either in the complete desolation of the land or in the transition to capitalist farming by large landowners and big peasants, of which there are already numerous beginnings in Russia.

The proletarianisation of the country people, which throws numerous cheap labourers and great saleable tracts of land on to the market, and its counterpart, the rise of a numerous class of rural usurers who accumulate capital, supply all the preconditions of capitalist production. But with this the conditions of production in Russia become more and more like those of Europe, and its competition depresses prices less and less.

But those who conclude from this that the agrarian crisis will now soon be overcome are very much mistaken.

The process that called it forth goes on without interruption, and keeps opening up new regions, both of the colonies and of Oriental despotism, to the capitalist mode of production. Unsettled land is still to be found in Canada, in Australia, in South America. Dr. Rudolf Meyer wrote in 1894:

“In the London Economist of 9 September 1893 an extract is given from the report of the English consular official in Argentina, who says among other things that in the current year only 12½ million acres (5 million hectares) are cultivated, but 240 million acres, or 96 million hectares, are cultivable. To this must be added very large areas in the other La Plata states and Venezuela, and parts of Brazil with similar conditions of cultivation, so that the cultivable area suitable for growing wheat in South America may well be estimated at 200 million hectares. Let it be considered what this will mean, when one notes that in recent years there have been sown with wheat, rye, oats and barley in the United States about 56 million hectares, in Austria-Hungary 13, in Great Britain and Ireland 4, in Germany 14, in France 15, together 102 million hectares.” (Der Kapitalismus fin de siècle, p. 469.)

The final report of the English parliamentary agricultural commission (1897) expresses itself in a similar way. Siberia, with its 100 million hectares of grain land, is being opened up to the world market by a railway; from north, south, east and west the railways are rapidly pushing forward into Central Africa; and the opening up of China by railways is a question of the near future. In the last-named country, it is true, an increase in the import rather than in the export of foodstuffs is expected; but the economic structure of China has too much kinship with that of India for us not to expect that railway-building will produce the same results here as there: the ruin of domestic industry, the rapid indebtedness of the peasantry, the slow rise of capitalist industries, but alongside this, at the same time as hunger and misery increase, the growth of the export of agricultural products. India, in which famine rages permanently, as a rule exports wheat and rice — about 20 million hundredweight of wheat and 20–30 million hundredweight of rice.

Things are no different in Russia. According to the latest calculations the peasantry there produces about 1,387 million poods of grain a year (after deducting the seed-corn). It would need 1,286 million poods of rye for its own food and 477 million poods for its livestock. That would give a deficit of 376 million poods, which the peasantry would have to buy in addition if it wanted to feed itself and its livestock properly. Instead of this it still sells grain, as is generally known. It simply has taxes and debts to pay and nothing else to sell. And the same causes will also compel the Chinese peasant to sell wheat and rice, however much he himself may need them.

Not all countries, of course, are suited to producing wheat. But neither is it absolutely necessary to live on wheaten flour. Attempts have already been made to replace wheat and rye by other cereals, maize, rice, millet, etc. These attempts are not likely to have much success so long as the supplies of wheat are increasing and the need for a substitute is not present. But should it ever come so far that all the land fit for wheat, or for rye, is occupied, and grain prices rise steadily, then the spirit of invention will at once throw itself into replacing the grains used hitherto by substitutes made from tropical products; and then those tropical countries too that are not suited to growing wheat, Central America, northern Brazil, great parts of Africa and of India, the Sunda Islands, would join the ranks of the competitors of the European grain-growers.

Naturally this competition too would one day have to lose its ruinous character. The surface of the earth is limited, and the capitalist mode of production is expanding at a positively dizzying speed. So the agrarian crisis must one day come to an end, so far as it springs from the competition of backward agricultural countries with advanced industrial countries. But when this competition is at an end, then the capitalist mode of production too has lost every possibility of further expansion. Constant expansion, however, is its vital principle, for the technical revolution and the accumulation of capital go on without interruption; production becomes more and more mass production, while the share of the mass in its product is constantly falling. The agrarian crisis can therefore end only in the one general crisis of capitalist society as a whole. One may suppose this date to be more distant or nearer; what is certain is that the agrarian crisis will not cease again in capitalist society, that it belongs to its iron stock. If the burdens of capitalism that have hitherto oppressed western European agriculture are now beginning to oppress its competitors in the United States, in Russia, etc., as well, this proves not that the agrarian crisis in western Europe is approaching its end, but that its domain is extending further and further.

For twenty years optimistic economists, liberal ones in particular, have been prophesying to us the speedy end of the agrarian crisis; for twenty years it has been deepening and spreading from year to year. We have to reckon with it not as a passing phenomenon but as a permanent one, a phenomenon that is revolutionising the whole of economic and political life.

We must forgo inquiring here what repercussions the agrarian crisis exerts on industry. Let it only be remarked that the development of industry has been substantially furthered by it. The times are past in which the proverb held good: When the peasant has money, the whole world has it.

Our task here is merely to consider the changes in agriculture that non-European food competition has partly called forth, partly promoted.

The nearest and simplest remedy for the landowners and farmers was the cry for state aid, the revolt against “dreary Manchesterism”. That is to say, now that European landed property had lost the economic power to shift on to the mass of the population the burden imposed by the capitalist conditions of production, political force was to see to it, by the imposition of duties on grain, debasement of the currency (bimetallism), money bounties and the like.

It would be superfluous to discuss once more the theoretical justification of these measures, which have been debated so often that the points of view coming into consideration may be regarded as universally known, and that there is hardly anything new left to say about them. This discussion is all the more superfluous since the agrarians themselves are beginning to see that they will not get far with these “petty remedies”. In their attempts to bring about an artificial dearness of foodstuffs they meet, in all civilised countries, with the most determined opposition of the working class, which would be affected by it first and foremost. The corn duties have so far been of no help to agriculture. But if circumstances should ever arise that enable them to have a considerable effect and to drive grain prices up, they create conditions so intolerable for the great majority of the population that they have to give way before its indignation. The bad harvest of 1891 brought about an immediate reduction of the corn duties in France (from July 1891 to July 1892); it also brought about in Germany, though not immediately, a reduction of the duties, and not merely a temporary one but a permanent one.

In England no serious politician may venture to come out in favour of an artificial raising of the price of foodstuffs. The working class there is too powerful for that. But competition with free-trading England also does not allow the other industrial states to screw their food duties up excessively. England’s persistence in the free import of foodstuffs compels the capitalists of the Continent, as well as the workers, to resist any raising of the food duties to a height at which they could paralyse the influence of foreign food competition.

If the agrarian protective tariffs in Europe are not screwed up to an enormous height, this is to be credited in the first place to the power of the workers of England.

But that, if an energetic agrarian protectionist policy were possible, its results would further not agriculture but only landed property — that is, that by keeping ground-rent high they would keep the price of land high, and so prolong the burden this lays on agriculture — needs no special proof after our discussion in the previous chapter.

The attempts to protect European agriculture against foreign competition by duties and other “petty remedies” are hopeless in every respect; they have only the one result of slowing down the adaptation of agriculture to the new conditions.

Nevertheless this adaptation is going on, clearly recognisable.

One of the chief advantages of overseas competition consists in its abundance of land, which allows it to take under cultivation only the best soil, the soil most suited to tillage.

It is otherwise in Europe. So long as every rural household was sufficient unto itself, it had to produce everything it needed, without regard to whether the soil was suited to it or not. Grain was grown even on infertile, stony, steeply sloping soil. The replacement of production for one’s own use by commodity production did not at first change this much; on the contrary, the increase in the demand for grain in consequence of the rapid growth of population compelled people to go over to ever more infertile soil, to devote ever more of it to tillage.

This changes as soon as overseas competition sets in. The necessity of continuing to grow grain even on soil not suited to it now ceases, and where circumstances are favourable it is abandoned on such soil and replaced by other kinds of agricultural production.

This tendency is strengthened still further by the following circumstances. Overseas competition makes itself felt first and most strikingly on the grain market. The cultivation of grain is much simpler, needs less preparation and fewer human hands, than for example intensive stock-raising, the growing of root crops and vegetables, or fruit-growing. Among foodstuffs, too, grain is one of the commodities having the greatest specific value in relation to weight and volume. A table by Settegast already mentioned earlier makes this clear. According to it, the following percentages of the value of the commodity fall on one hundredweight (of 50 kilograms) and one mile in transport

Wheat, then, stands far at the top. The transport costs of live animals have not been reduced by the railway. The speed of their transport, to be sure, has increased enormously. Their transport costs are equal to those of wheat. But wheat will bear the longest transport, storage, transhipment and sea voyages without harm, while live animals suffer greatly from long transport, and even more from crossing the sea. To store and stock them is of course impossible. Through its insensitivity to the duration and the hazards of transport, however, grain is also far superior to most of the other mass products of agriculture — meat, milk, fruit, vegetables, eggs.

It is natural, then, that foreign competition shows itself first in the field of grain production, so that those European farmers whose soil does not point them positively to this kind of production seek their salvation in going over to the production of the other products just named. But this transition does not lie at their discretion. They can carry it out only where they find a market for these products. Economic development, however, often meets them halfway here. We have seen that, as a result of a series of historical and physiological factors, the consumption of meat in the towns is much greater than in the open country. Since the urban population grows much faster than the population as a whole, the demand for meat too must grow in a much faster proportion. On the other hand, until well into this century the production of milk, vegetables, fruit, eggs and the like for the market was confined to a few areas neighbouring the towns. In the village and the country town almost every household, even the non-peasant one, carries on enough agriculture to produce these products for its own use. In the great city, on the other hand, this is impossible. As soon, therefore, as the great cities begin to take in a considerable part of the population, a strong demand for these products also arises; their production for the market now expands, to the advantage of the peasant’s purse, not always to the advantage of his health: formerly his family consumed the milk and the eggs that his farm produced; now they go to market and are replaced by coffee-water, spirits and potatoes. Even the increase of meat in the diet can have a harmful effect when it goes along with an increase of potatoes in the diet and a decrease in the consumption of milk and cereals. (Compare Weber in the third volume of the Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 777.) But the statistician proves to us from the rising consumption of these “luxuries” the growth of the prosperity of the population.

The same development of transport that makes the growing of grain unprofitable also works, for its part, to make possible in many regions the production of meat, milk, etc., for sale on a large scale, by making accessible to them a market from which they had until then been shut off.

Where these factors come into operation, the tendencies favourable to small-scale enterprise are mostly strengthened by them, and those favourable to large-scale enterprise weakened. It is in the field of grain production that the latter is most superior to small-scale enterprise, and it is precisely this field that is hit hardest by overseas competition. The fields in which the farmer who has been beaten on the grain market seeks refuge are, with the exception of meat production, precisely those in which small-scale enterprise can still best hold its own against large-scale enterprise.

But the influence of these factors must not be overestimated. They cannot make themselves felt everywhere. There is not everywhere a market for milk, vegetables, meat, etc. An increase in the stock of cattle, for example, also requires additional capital and additional labour-power, which are not at every farmer’s disposal.

The factors in question have made themselves felt most strongly and earliest in England, whose climate greatly favours pasture farming and whose urban population was considerable at an early date. Already in 1851 as many people lived in the towns as in the open country in Great Britain and England, while in Prussia in 1849 only a little over a quarter (28 per cent) of the population lived in towns; only today is the urban population in the German Empire as large as the rural.

In addition, the capitalist system of tenancy prevails in England, which compels the farmer to pay his rent punctually year in, year out, which makes it impossible for him to obtain, by mortgaging the land, the means to carry on a method of farming that has become unprofitable any longer, and which therefore compels the farmers more readily than elsewhere to adapt themselves to new conditions.

Now when overseas food competition developed, England, by virtue of its geographical position and its intensive commercial traffic, was the first and the most exposed to it. The excess of imports of wheat and wheaten flour into England (over exports) averaged

of the whole quantity of wheat available to England. So only a quarter of the wheat consumed in England now comes from the native soil.

But the English farmers had to be clear from the outset that the days of the corn duties were over. England is already much too democratic, its rural population too weak, its industrial population too strong, for anyone to dare to make bread artificially dearer for the latter.

Agriculture stood before the alternative: either early bankruptcy or a speedy transformation of its conditions of enterprise. In the majority of cases the latter came about. The landlords had to reduce their ground-rents — in Ireland under the pressure of legislation, in England under the pressure of a vigorous class of tenant farmers. In recent years rents have fallen by 20 to 30 per cent in the best districts, by 50 per cent and more in poor ones. At the same time, however, the expenditure that the landlord must agree to for buildings and improvements has risen. The report of the English agricultural commission, already mentioned several times, gives several examples of this; one of them, that of an estate in Norfolk, may be given here by way of illustration. There, in pounds sterling, the figures were:

The landowner’s net income therefore fell from 60,000 marks to 11,600 marks.

But this reduction of the burden laid on agriculture by ground-rent was not enough. Hand in hand with it went the transition from corn-growing to stock-raising. In the United Kingdom the harvest of wheat (after deduction of seed) averaged, in quarters, per year:

Since then production has fallen to an average of seven million quarters.

The area under wheat was:

Pasture, on the other hand, grew. In Great Britain it amounted to 13,312,000 acres in 1875, 15,342,000 in 1885, and 16,611,000 in 1895.

The development is different in Germany. Its continental position, its corn duties and the conservative character of the peasant delay it; on the other hand it is crossed by the advance from backward to more intensive farming, by the abandonment of fallow and the transition from the three-field system to crop rotation, advances that have by no means been carried through everywhere yet. These latter factors naturally favour the extension of corn-growing. The decline of corn-growing, its displacement by stock-raising and by vegetable and fruit production, has therefore so far been confined to particular districts of Germany, and does not appear in general.

In the German Empire the area harvested, in hectares, was:

The areas harvested of the chief kinds of grain have therefore changed only insignificantly. In 1883, 15,724,000 hectares were devoted to the cereals and pulses together, in 1893 15,992,000, an increase of 268,000 hectares. In the same period the area of arable pasture and fallow diminished from 3,336,830 hectares to 2,760,347 hectares, that is, by 576,483 hectares.

But while the area under grain remained by and large unchanged, the stock of cattle rose very considerably. The number of head counted was:

While, then, the number of cattle increased only insignificantly from 1873 to 1883, by 10,000 head, in the following decade it grew by almost two million, and in the last five years again by almost a million. The increase in pigs too has proceeded at a faster pace since 1883 than from 1873 to 1883.

Grain-growing is in a worse state in France than in Germany, in spite of the high corn duty. There the area under cultivation, in hectares, was:

The area under bread grains has therefore diminished considerably since 1862. The loss of territory in 1871 (1,451,000 hectares) did, to be sure, contribute to this; but it was more than outweighed by the shrinking of the fallow, and the decline of grain-growing continues from 1882 to 1892, while, in spite of the loss of territory, the meadows and pastures increase in extent.

The number of cattle is also growing, while that of horses is decreasing. The numbers counted were:

But if optimistic economists believed that the transition from grain production to the production of meat, milk, fruit and the like would secure European agriculture against overseas competition, they were mistaken. The technical revolution and the accumulation of capital go on without interruption, and in their train the improvement and cheapening of the means of transport, the speeding up of transport, the perfecting of the methods of preservation. But that means nothing else than that overseas competition is penetrating step by step into those fields too in which hard-pressed European agriculture seeks its refuge.

Only twenty years ago almost all the live cattle imported into England came from Europe. Today almost none at all come from Europe any more, most from North America; and it is already possible to bring live cattle across the sea from South America with advantage.

Of the cattle imported alive into England, there came from

The number of head of cattle imported was:

Of the sheep imported alive into England, there came from

In the supply of live sheep the displacement of Europe from the English market by the overseas regions came about only later, but then all the more rapidly.

Twenty years ago meat could be brought across the sea almost only in processed form, as preserves, tinned meat, salt meat, smoked meat. Since then the methods of keeping fresh meat edible for weeks by means of cold have been so perfected that the import of fresh overseas meat into England is steadily increasing. In 1876 only 34,640 English hundredweight of fresh beef were imported, but in 1895 2,191,037, in 1897 3,010,387. The largest quantities of it came from the United States.

Fresh mutton has been recorded separately in the British trade statistics only since 1882. At that time the import amounted to 190,000 hundredweight; in 1895 to 2,611,000, in 1897 to 3,193,276. Of this, 1,671,000 hundredweight came from Australia and 715,000 from Argentina.

As in wheat production, so in meat production the United States has probably already passed the peak of its exports. The extensive pasture farming that alone makes the production of livestock for export overseas profitable requires immense tracts of land, which, however, are more and more hemmed in by the growing population. In the United States there were counted:

Only the dairy cattle are increasing in number; the beef cattle, on the other hand, are decreasing. But it is not Europe that has the advantage of this, but Argentina and Australia, where immeasurable areas are still available for the extension of pasture farming. In supplying England with sheep and mutton both already stand in the front rank today, but their export of cattle and beef too is growing rapidly.

In 1890, 150,000 head of cattle were exported from Argentina, in 1894 220,500.

Besides meat production, dairying, fruit and vegetable growing and poultry-keeping are supposed to help distressed agriculture.

But it will not be long before overseas food competition makes itself felt in these fields too. In part it already does so, for example in fruit production, which is already so threatened from America that in Germany it was found necessary to raise the San José scale to be its patron saint, holding its protecting shield over the German apple.

But the time of overseas competition is likely to come for fresh vegetables too. The quantity of onions imported into England averaged 1,893,000 bushels a year in 1876/78, but 5,232,000 in 1893/95. Spain alone supplied 41,000 bushels in the former period, but 1,300,000 in the latter. Apart from this, the main import comes from Holland, France and Egypt.

Other fresh vegetables were imported into England in 1876/78 to the value of 227,000 pounds sterling, but in 1893/95 for more than 1,100,000 pounds sterling.

England draws its eggs from a circle that takes in Italy, Hungary and Russia. And in recent years successful attempts have been made to import fresh milk from Holland and Sweden.

The technical preconditions for opening up the production of eggs, vegetables, milk, etc., to overseas competition are therefore already given today, and that competition will take hold of it the sooner in the older agricultural exporting countries, the more grain production is pushed back in them, as in Europe, by the rise of the newer exporting countries. So far the improvement of transport for these products of the subsidiary branches of agriculture has damaged only the farmers of England; the farmers of the non-industrial regions of the rest of Europe, as suppliers of England, have gained by it. In the end, however, European agriculture will cease to export in this field too, and overseas competition will spread itself, except in branches of production too insignificant to be taken up by the overseas farmer. If this competition has so far mainly hit the fields of large-scale enterprise, it will then spread to the fields in which small-scale agricultural enterprise predominates.

How much the agrarian crisis must be sharpened by this needs no further discussion.

European agriculture, however, possesses still further expedients for defending itself against the overseas enemy.

So far we have referred mainly to England. To illustrate the weapon against overseas competition that we now come to speak of, we shall not fetch our evidence from across the Channel, for in England it has so far been only little developed, but from the Continent, where it has found better conditions of existence, above all, of course, from Germany itself, which lies nearest to us.

The system of tenancy allows the burdens of overseas competition to be shifted in the first place on to landed property. Where landowner and farmer are nominally one person, the fixing of the price of land by mortgage debts hinders this process. There the farmers are driven sooner than under the system of tenancy to look for another means of reducing the costs of production, and they find one that is favoured more by the system in which the landowner farms his own land than by the system of tenancy, because under the former the personnel of the farmers of a given district is more stable, and their co-operation is therefore less exposed to disturbing interruptions.

As we already know, the products of agriculture are mostly of low specific value, so that the possibility of turning them to advantage as commodities is often confined to a small circle. With the means of transport remaining the same, this circle is enormously widened if the product in question is exported not raw but processed.

Some figures from Settegast’s table, already cited several times, illustrate this very clearly. The following percentages of the value of the commodity fall on one hundredweight (of 50 kilograms) and one mile:

In many products of the food industry, the greater specific value is joined by yet another advantage: they keep better than the raw product, for example butter and cheese, preserved meat, vegetables and fruit, etc.

But many agricultural industries offer a further and most important advantage: the manufactured product contains few or no mineral constituents that would be necessary for maintaining the fertility of the soil. Its export takes nothing of consequence from the soil. The residues of manufacture, on the other hand, do contain substances that supply excellent manure, either directly or as fodder for livestock, and thereby enrich the soil. This is the case above all with distilling and with beet-sugar manufacture, which through their residues, used as fodder and manure, have powerfully raised grain-growing and stock-raising, and where they have taken root have become the indispensable foundation of an intensive, rational enterprise.

In addition it has to be considered that agricultural industry creates employment for men and draught animals in winter, when otherwise there is little for them to do, and that the steam-engine of the large industrial enterprise on the estate makes it easier to obtain motive power for the agricultural enterprise (for threshing-machines, grain-cleaning machines, grist-mills, pumps, saws, etc.), which must become especially important once the electrical transmission of power has gained a firm footing in agriculture, so that the steam-engine of the factory can also drive the plough, the threshing-machine, the manure-cart on the field railway and the mowing-machine.

All this early produced, in many regions where the preconditions were favourable, an endeavour on the part of the farmers to set up industrial enterprises on their estates to process their raw products. This endeavour received an especially powerful impetus from non-European food competition, which pressed down the prices of raw products and the ground-rents: now it was doubly necessary to gain as an industrialist what one lost as farmer or landowner, to make up for the fall of ground-rent by rising industrial profit, to make a dear manufactured product out of the cheap raw product.

Here too, as with every economic advance of our time, it was the large-scale enterprises that went first and drew the greatest advantages from the innovation.

A small-scale enterprise as a rule neither possesses enough capital nor produces enough raw products to be able to found an industrial enterprise of its own for processing its products. And the small farmers are more sluggish, more conservative, less familiar with the advances of technique and the needs of the world market than big farmers and capitalists. It was large landowners, in particular the owners of latifundia, who first introduced large-scale industry on their estates, and besides them capitalists who founded agricultural industrial enterprises and bought the land needed to supply the raw material. From both sides, then, the union of industry and agriculture was prepared. Besides distilleries and sugar factories there arose on the great estates starch factories and breweries — the latter, to be sure, not to any great extent, since beer production is mostly carried on more advantageously as an urban trade; the raw material of brewing is partly of the same specific value as the product (barley), partly of a higher one (hops), and more easily transportable than the product. Moreover, brewing barley and hops thrive only in particular regions. Apart from the agricultural industries named, there also arose dairies and factories for preserving vegetables, fruit, milk, etc.

One of the greatest advantages of the latifundia over the smaller enterprises lay in the possibility of a thorough and many-sided union between industry and agriculture; an advantage that is greatest where the latifundium supplies not only the raw material but also the motive power for industry — water-power, wood that is used from the nearby forests without long transport, coal. How much is saved there in the costs of transport and of middlemen!

The successes of these agricultural industries drove the smaller enterprises to seize these advantages too. The suitable form for this was found in the co-operative, which had already been prepared by individual capitalist enterprises that were too large for their own land to supply all their raw material, and that therefore found themselves compelled to conclude contracts for the supply of raw material with several farmers of the neighbourhood. If an enterprise of this kind was a joint-stock company, then the supplying farmers needed only to acquire the shares, and the co-operative was complete.

Within a few years these co-operatives have developed rapidly, especially in Germany. The number of agricultural co-operatives counted there (apart from credit, purchasing and marketing co-operatives) was:

The latter co-operatives are chiefly co-operatives for distilling, milling, baking, wine-cellars and the like.

We do not in the least doubt that this co-operative movement, which is only in its beginnings, will yet produce considerable results and call forth a great revolution in our agricultural conditions.

But if some see in it one of the transitional stages to socialism in agriculture — the other transitional stage is readily seen in the remains of the medieval commons and common pastures — and others the means of preserving an independent, vigorous peasantry, we can agree neither with the former nor with the latter.

The characteristic of modern socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the workers, and so, in a socialist commonwealth, by society as a whole. A producers’ co-operative that could serve as a transitional stage to this state of affairs must be an organisation of producers who are at the same time the owners of the co-operative’s means of production. One of the most important objections to the view that sees in the present producers’ co-operatives of workers a transitional stage to socialism consists in pointing to the fact that in capitalist society, with a prospering producers’ co-operative, the moment comes sooner or later when the co-operators begin to employ wage-labourers, proletarians who have no share in the ownership of the means of production and are exploited by the co-operators; that, therefore, every producers’ co-operative in modern society has an inherent tendency, if it prospers and so expands, to become a capitalist undertaking.

What in producers’ co-operatives founded by wage-labourers is at first a mere tendency is, in the producers’ co-operatives of farmers here in question, a foundation given from the outset. The workers in a co-operative sugar factory, distillery, dairy, preserving factory, mill, etc., are not the co-operators but wage-labourers employed and exploited by them. The advantage that flows to the farmers from the co-operatives consists, besides the saving of the costs of transport and trade, in the pocketing of the profit on capital. The agricultural producers’ co-operative of this kind — and there are as yet no others today — is a transitional stage to capitalism, not to socialism.

But how do matters stand with the rescue of the small peasants by it? Here it must be remarked first of all that from the outset it is not accessible to the dwarf peasant, the proletarian peasant, the one who needs help most. For an industrial enterprise requires money, and that is just what he lacks. As a rule, too, he will not be in a position to produce the raw material for the enterprise in the requisite quality. It is the “middle class” for whom the producers’ co-operative can be of value.

But here too large-scale enterprise will always be considerably ahead of small-scale enterprise. If he has the necessary money, the large landowner finds no obstacle to introducing an advantageous industrial enterprise; how difficult, on the other hand, is the formation of a co-operative! With the large landowner the adaptation of his agriculture to the needs of the industrial enterprise is a matter of course; how hard it is, on the other hand, to bring all the various small farmers to uniformity and regularity in their deliveries.

Large-scale enterprise in agriculture best meets the needs of agricultural large-scale industry. Often the latter creates such a large-scale enterprise for itself where none yet exists. Sugar manufacture, that classic example of an agricultural large-scale industry, has greatly furthered the development of large-scale enterprise in agriculture; on the other hand, Paasche points out that one of the reasons hindering its spread in South Germany and in many regions of France and northern Italy is to be sought in the fragmentation of landed property there.

In an article in the Zukunft, V, p. 382, by Dr. Ihne on German Sugar Factories in America, the author speaks of the

“rational and cheap sugar manufacture in some parts of eastern Prussia, where the owners of large estates have built sugar factories and feed them, independently of the changeable and often pig-headed disposition of the beet-growing peasants and cottars, with the beet grown by their own labourers on their own land, as the great plantation-owners of Louisiana also do with their cane-sugar factories.”

Many agricultural industries afford special advantages to large-scale enterprise besides.

If a distillery belongs to a large estate, the residues of manufacture flow back to it undiminished, and its farming is constantly improved. It is different, on the other hand, when the potatoes are brought to the distillery from various quarters.

“Since the slops, on account of their great water content, bear transport poorly, they can be fed to advantage only on the distillery farm itself. If other farms also supply potatoes to the factory, the fields of the distillery farm are enriched at the expense of the other farms, since the soil nutrients contained in the potatoes supplied often do not find their way back.” (Krafft, Betriebslehre, p. 101.)

According to Settegast’s table, with which we are already so well acquainted, the transport of distillery slops costs, other circumstances being equal, 30 per cent of their value per hundredweight and mile by road, that of potatoes only 10 per cent. With co-operative distilleries the farms lying nearest the distillery will increase the wealth of their soil; those lying further away will be exhausted.

The case is similar with the sugar factories.

Besides the big farmer, it is big capital that in many industries is best able to make use of the advantages of the closer union of agriculture and industry, and that will be furthered most by it.

At the last congress of the German agricultural co-operatives, at Dresden, the founding of co-operative bakeries and mills was warmly recommended to the farmers. In place of the existing small-scale enterprises, often very backward, there were to be co-operative large-scale enterprises, which would offer considerable advantages not only to their members but also to the public.

The idea of raising small-scale enterprise in agriculture by bringing it the profits of large-scale enterprise in baking and milling is certainly a very fine one, at least for the small farmers. Less so for the small millers and bakers. Small-scale enterprise is saved by the expropriation of small-scale enterprises. But that does not trouble the farmers, as they themselves declared. If, however, the union of milling, baking and agriculture in one hand really achieves such great advantages as is asserted — and we do not doubt it in the least — then it is not the sluggish co-operatives of the small peasants, poor in capital, but the great roller mills, strong in capital, that are best able to appropriate these advantages. Before the small farmers take possession of the great mills, the latter will take possession of the small farmers and the bakers.

The relationship that already prevails today between the peasant and the great roller mills is illuminated by the following letter from the grain district of Upper Bavaria, which went the rounds of the German press in the summer of 1897.

“Two roller mills”, it says, “dominate the whole district within a wide radius of seven hours’ journey. The peasants are completely at their mercy. On Saturdays there is the corn market in the little provincial town; but it is now attended only with oats; the peasants no longer dare to take wheat and rye to the corn market, since the two millers are the only buyers, and anyone who drives to the corn market instead of to them is punished with a lower bid of 10 pfennigs a hundredweight. Free sale of grain has completely ceased; the peasant must deliver his goods without a word and wait quietly for what he will get. If he refuses to hand them over, he receives the answer: ‘Just drive home, for I have just received a thousand hundredweight of Hungarian wheat.’”

But if in the field of the industrialisation of agriculture, as in other fields, large-scale enterprise is ahead of small-scale enterprise in a series of advantages, this naturally does not prove that the latter too cannot draw many considerable advantages from the only form of agricultural large-scale industry accessible to it, the agricultural producers’ co-operative. Where it succeeds in calling one into being, it makes the peasant a capitalist and allows him to enrich his agricultural enterprise with the fruits of his capitalist exploitation, to make it more rational and to raise it up.

The only question is how long this conjuring trick lasts that turns a peasant hastening towards the proletariat into a capitalist overnight.

The first consequence of the co-operative is the same as appears where the peasant becomes the supplier of an outside factory: he must adapt his enterprise to its needs. The sugar factory prescribes to the farmer what seed he is to use and how he is to manure; the dairy prescribes to him the fodder, the milking time, sometimes even the kind of dairy cattle.

“Formerly people were afraid of any too heavy nitrogen manuring, because it was said to impair the sugar content of the beet. The factories therefore mostly prescribed a ratio of nitrogen to phosphoric acid of 1 : 2, and forbade top-dressing with Chile saltpetre, as well as the growing of beet in fresh dung altogether. Of these prescriptions only the prohibition of top-dressing and of growing beet in dung that is brought on to the field after Christmas has survived. On the other hand the ratio of nitrogen to phosphoric acid has gradually been altered more and more in favour of the former, so that now some factories still demand a ratio of 2 : 3 or 3 : 4, but a great number already 1 : 1.” (Kärger, Die Sachsengängerei, p. 14.)

These prescriptions become dispensable where agriculture has already adapted itself completely to the sugar industry.

Stöckel, in his work on the Errichtung, Organisation und Betrieb der Molkereigenossenschaften, gives a model of the depot regulations of a milk-depot co-operative. In § 4 it says:

“In this paragraph all such prescriptions as may be necessary concerning the feeding of the cows are to be included. In the sale of fresh milk, especially in the supply of so-called nursery milk, definite binding prescriptions on feeding are indispensable.

“In manufacturing co-operatives too it may be necessary to lay down prescriptions on feeding, in particular to restrict the feeding of such feeding-stuffs as affect the taste and the keeping quality of the butter.

Ҥ 5. The milking times of the cows are to be fixed so that the milk is delivered directly from the cowshed to the co-operative, etc.

Ҥ 6. The greatest cleanliness is to be observed in milking, etc.

“§ 7. The members of the supervisory board (and those of the managing committee) have the right to inspect the cowsheds and milk-storage rooms of the members at any time without notice, to be present at the milking and to take samples of the milk. These trustees are entitled to demand from the members or their representatives the most exact information on the feeding of the dairy cattle, their treatment and the like.” (Pp. 102–104. Compare also p. 40.)

“In Denmark the dairy co-operatives make regulations on the feeding and keeping of the cows, in order to ensure uniformity of quality, the absence of unpleasant flavours and regular milk production in winter.” (Report of the Parliamentary Agricultural Commission in England, 1897, p. 126.)

The peasant therefore ceases to be master in his own agricultural enterprise; it becomes an appendage of the industrial enterprise, by whose needs it has to be guided. The peasant becomes a detail-labourer of the factory.

Often, too, he becomes technically dependent on the industrial enterprise in so far as the latter, as we have already remarked, supplies him with fodder and manure.

Hand in hand with this technical dependence of the peasant on the co-operative goes a purely economic one. The co-operative not only supplies the means of improving the agricultural enterprise and of covering its possible deficits; the more the latter adapts itself to its needs, the more it also becomes the sole buyer of the commodities produced by the peasant. The agricultural enterprise can no longer exist without the industrial one; the latter becomes its backbone, whose collapse brings ruin to it as well.

And it comes to such a collapse only too easily.

The greater the profits an agricultural industry makes, the greater the mass of capital that turns to it. Today, as a rule, great profits can be made only by enterprises whose size of capital far exceeds the average, so that technically and commercially they can drive every competitor from the field. They can also be made in fields that permit monopolisation, by nature or through specially created circumstances, or finally in fields that are newly created by technical or economic revolutions, or at least newly opened up to capitalist exploitation, as for example today in the field of electrical engineering. But the great profits of the last kind do not last long; soon the newly opened field too is overcrowded and overproduction becomes permanent. Those who came first skim off the cream; to those who come later there remains only the skimmed milk — often not even that.

Here too, as regards agricultural industry, lies an advantage that the large landowner, especially if he is a capitalist, has over small property and its co-operatives. He is more mobile, more enterprising, more far-sighted and less sluggish than the latter, and can much more quickly set up an agricultural industry where the necessary conditions are given, while it is still advantageous.

For every agricultural industry, as for every other, there comes sooner or later the moment when it is overcrowded, when prices are depressed, when competition rages and weeds out the weakest and clumsiest, when finally periodic crises shake the branch of industry concerned — partly general ones, coinciding with the general cycle of economic upswing and crash, partly particular ones, called forth by particular technical, economic or legislative upheavals.

The more the power of the state takes up the cause of these industries, the more advantages it bestows on them in the interest of agriculture at the expense of the population as a whole, the sooner this moment is reached. The European manufacture of spirits and of sugar shows this clearly. Both were stimulated in the liveliest way, in Germany as in Austria, Russia and France, by advantages of every kind, in particular by export bounties, which appeared in the form of a refund of the tax paid.

From 1872 to 1881 the number of distilleries in the Reich tax area working up farinaceous materials or molasses grew only from 7,011 to 7,280, but the number of distilleries paying over 15,000 marks in spirits tax grew from 789 to 1,492; it almost doubled.

From 1880/81 to 1885/86 the quantity of potatoes worked up for the production of spirits rose from 1,982,000 to 3,087,000 tonnes.

The consequence of this brilliant upswing was a crisis, which set in in 1884. This, to be sure, at once induced the Bismarck regime to come to the aid of the distressed industry. It finally succeeded in forcing through the tax law of 1887, which secures to the distilleries the well-known “love-gift” of 40 million marks a year and counteracts overproduction most vigorously; in 1895 it was supplemented by a new law that curbs the overproduction of spirits still more strongly and makes spirits at home somewhat dearer still, so that an export bounty of 6 marks per hectolitre on the spirits exported may come out of the tax revenue. And in spite of it all the spectre of a crash in spirits will not go away!

Sugar enjoys the solicitude of the governments no less than spirits — it is great lords, after all, who produce it too. The consequence is an enormous growth of sugar production. In the German Empire the figures were

On the other hand, in the German Empire, in tonnes:

However enormously the consumption of sugar, and especially its export, have risen, they have lately lagged far behind production. In 1896/97 consumption and export of sugar together amounted to roughly 1,640,000 tonnes, production on the other hand to 1,740,000 tonnes: an overproduction, therefore, of 100,000 tonnes. And this although the position of the sugar industry had lately been especially favoured by the Cuban war, which entirely prevented Cuba’s export of sugar. In 1894/95 the overproduction of the German sugar industry beyond home consumption and export amounted to 300,000 tonnes.

An improvement of the present state of the sugar industry is not to be expected; a worsening rather. The pressure of overseas competition, which drives towards the development of agricultural industries, and the artificial promotion of this development by an ever-growing system of bounties, are present in other countries too. In round figures, beet production, expressed in raw sugar, amounted in tonnes to (according to M. Schippel, Zuckerkrisis, Ausfuhrprämien und Zuckerring, Neue Zeit, XV, 1, p. 622)

Within one year an increase in supply of almost a million tonnes, while the annual increase in the demand for sugar on the world market amounts to a quarter, at best a third, of this sum!

Next to England our best customer for sugar is the North American Union. The exports of the German Empire of raw sugar, sugar loaves and the like amounted, in tonnes, to

The Americans, however, are now making no small efforts to create a beet-sugar industry of their own. F. W. Ihne, already mentioned, president of the polytechnic society in Chicago, in his article in the Berlin Zukunft, V, p. 380, invites German engineering works to use the opportunity to found beet-sugar factories in America. How patriotic! The efforts of the Americans will show themselves the more intensively, the less rewarding wheat-growing becomes. But the sugar industry is capable of the most rapid upswing, as the figures above prove, and the Americans are the right people to bring it up in the shortest time.

In the sugar-producing countries of Europe, however, the export bounties are being raised instead of lowered; in Germany the bounty was doubled in 1896 (from 1¼ to 2½ marks). It is with bounties just as with protective tariffs and militarism: once one has begun with them, one can no longer stop when one wants to. It is known that the bounty system drives towards overproduction, towards a terrible crisis — but each also fears that the crisis will be still more terrible for his country if it alone stops paying bounties, and each hopes that he will hold out longer than the others. So the population is fleeced to an ever-increasing degree, at the same time the cultivation of beet is extended more and more, and ever wider circles of agriculture are chained to the fate of the sugar industry.

The area sown with beet, in hectares, was

But the bankruptcy of the sugar industry becomes ever more unavoidable, and the devastation that this collapse must finally bring in its train becomes ever more tremendous.

Dairying was promoted less energetically in Germany than beet-sugar manufacture. Nevertheless it has developed rapidly, chiefly under the pressure of foreign competition, which made grain-growing less and less rewarding, as the figures for co-operative dairies given above already prove. Unfortunately a detailed statistics of the development of dairy farming in Germany is still lacking. But so much is certain, that the rapid upswing of dairying is connected only in part with an increase in milk production. The number of cows increases much more slowly than the production of butter and cheese. The rapid extension of dairying is made possible rather by another circumstance. The milk produced far from the towns could formerly not reach the market and become a commodity, because of the difficulties of transport. It was consumed in the producer’s own household, by his family and his wage-labourers, if he employed any. The transition to dairying enables him to make cheese and butter, which will bear longer transport and can appear as commodities on the market, not merely the home market but also the world market. But this leads to the farmer’s henceforth withdrawing from himself and his family the milk that he had until then consumed with them. In the same measure in which dairying increases in the countryside, the consumption of milk there declines.

If the rural population, in spite of overwork and wretched housing conditions and in spite of the lack of meat in its diet, was hitherto still superior to the urban population in strength and endurance, it owed this, besides work in the fresh air, chiefly to its large consumption of milk. Work in the fresh air ceases where domestic industry establishes itself, and milk consumption where a dairy withdraws the milk from the country people. These two chosen means of rescuing the small peasant economically are the most effective means of ruining him physically.

This holds most where the dairies make cheese. But it seems to us somewhat optimistic when, at the 42nd itinerant assembly of Württemberg farmers at Hohenheim (1897), J. Landauer-Gerabronn thought that if the dairies, as is mostly the case in Württemberg, confined themselves to making butter and returned the skimmed milk to the farmers, the disadvantages of dairying for the nourishment of the rural population would be removed:

“This way of utilising the milk should make the doctors more friendly towards the dairies than was formerly the case, when the whole of the milk was delivered to the cheese-dairies without the farmers getting sweet skimmed milk back home, for which reason the doctors rightly had grave misgivings in the matter of hygiene, and in his time a staff surgeon also made public his bad experiences in the mustering of recruits in particular districts.”

Skimmed milk can never replace whole milk, for it has lost the latter’s richness in fat. Whole milk contains 2.8 to 4.5 per cent of fat, skimmed milk 0.2 to 0.5 per cent. The present writer can indeed remember having read reports of doctors who likewise could not make friends with the regime of skimmed milk and found it very pernicious that in the dairy districts it is used to feed infants. The return of the skimmed milk will of course do least to improve the hygienic condition of the country people where the farmers do not even consume it themselves but likewise “utilise” it, for example by feeding it, as is often the case, to the pigs, which thrive splendidly on it and fetch a good price. The more the products of the small peasant become commodities, the more of them he turns into money, the worse his nourishment.

But if the bodily injury done to the dairy farmers by dairying is beyond doubt, their economic elevation by this means is rather doubtful, if one has in mind not merely momentary advantages.

While German butter manufacture is growing rapidly, the export of butter is steadily decreasing while imports grow.

In kilograms of butter, the figures were

With regard to cheese we find the following figures:

Here too we find decreasing exports, while imports are decidedly increasing.

Competition in dairy products on the world market is growing rapidly. In almost all the states of Europe the distress of corn-growing acts as a stimulus to dairy production, in France and the Netherlands as in Austria and Russia, in Sweden and Norway. But it is above all Denmark that is developing its butter production enormously. The excess of exports over imports rose there from 18 million kilograms in 1881 to 119 million kilograms in 1896. The number of cows in proportion to the population did not increase. It was

But outside Europe too dairying is developing rapidly. Here Canada for cheese and Australia for butter come especially into consideration. The export of cheese from Canada amounted to

In Australia dairy production was promoted, besides by the fall in wheat prices, by export bounties (mostly 2 pence a pound on butter and 1 penny a pound on cheese) in Victoria (until 1893), South Australia (until 1895) and Queensland (until 1898). The agricultural commission of the English Parliament reports on Australian butter production:

“In Victoria the progress of dairying was marked by the extension of the factory system. According to the latest official reports there were 155 butter and cheese factories there in 1895, against 74 in 1892, and of the total production of 35,580,000 pounds of butter in the former year, 27,000,000 came from the factories (dairy factories). The growth of butter exports from Victoria was as follows:

Similar reports of a rapid growth of dairy production come from Queensland and New South Wales; in the latter colony butter production rose from 15,500,000 pounds in 1889 to 27,359,000 pounds in 1895.

The following passage in the report on New South Wales is noteworthy:

“It appears that dairy production is no longer confined, as formerly, to the peasants (farmers), since many large stock-breeders (graziers in a large way of business), especially near the coast, have lately turned their attention to this industry.

“When the factory system was first introduced, most of the factories were co-operative, and the processes of skimming the milk and making the butter were carried on together. This arrangement is gradually ceasing, and in place of the former ones there are appearing central butter factories, which draw their raw material from numerous skimming stations. The advantages of this change are said to be considerable. In each centre butter of uniform quality is made, and the costs of production are considerably reduced by the larger scale of production and the use of better machines and appliances, such as refrigerating plant, which the large undertakings can employ with advantage.” (P. 81.)

Like the exported German sugar, the exported German butter too is mostly consumed by England. Of the 7,101,000 kilograms of the German export of butter (1896), 5,570,000 went to England; of the 3,716,000 kilograms in 1897, 2,766,000. But these figures already show that German butter is rapidly declining on the English market. The shares in the English import of butter were, in percentages:

The rapid rise of Australia stands out here especially clearly. The Danish dairies too are already hard pressed by Australian competition, which depresses prices and makes sales more difficult.

But the German co-operators are zealously striving to increase the number of dairies as rapidly as possible; they point with pride to their rapid growth in recent years; they behave as if a business were the more profitable, the greater the number of competitors. But of course, as saviours of the peasant they are forced into this attitude. However great the number of dairy co-operatives may be, in relation to the number of peasants who are to be saved by this sovereign remedy it is still much too small. But long before even a considerable part of the peasantry has prospered through the dairy co-operatives, the field of butter and cheese manufacture too must have fallen a prey to overproduction and crisis.

In Denmark, the promised land of the dairy co-operatives, many of them are already in a difficult position today. In Germany, at the time of the debates on the margarine law, the position of the butter producers was painted for us in the gloomiest colours; but that did not prevent the founding of 175 new dairies in 1895 and 177 in 1896, as was triumphantly announced at the latest congress of agricultural co-operatives at Dresden. And in 1897 the fever of founding seemed to rage still worse. Clear-sighted co-operators themselves are already raising their voices in warning. Thus, for example, Landauer-Gerabronn, already mentioned, declared in his report on dairying to the 42nd itinerant assembly of Württemberg farmers:

“Remarkably, an extraordinarily strong movement for the founding of new dairies has at present made itself felt in the countryside, especially in the past year. If it continues, it is not out of the question that the present number of dairies would double in 2 to 3 years, perhaps even treble. In the district of Gerabronn, for example, since the founding of the first dairy, that is, within 16 years, no new dairies had been founded, but in the last 6 months no fewer than ten new dairies have come into being, and still more are to be expected in the near future. The said movement is so great that even enthusiastic admirers of co-operative activity confront it shaking their heads, and harbour the fear that dangers of the most serious kind might arise indirectly for agriculture from the founding of so many dairies.”

Like a crisis in spirits and a crisis in sugar, a crisis in dairying is unavoidable. That is a matter of course today in a large-scale industrial enterprise.

Sering accordingly complained, in his report on the co-operative movement delivered before the Royal Prussian Agricultural Council in February 1897, of the bitter competition that the co-operative dairies wage against one another.

“Meanwhile”, he said consolingly, “it is hoped to overcome these difficulties by a further development of the co-operative idea, or rather by the same means that is at present so peculiarly transforming our large-scale industry, by cartels. Agitation is going on for the individual dairies to join the great butter-selling co-operatives in greater numbers than hitherto, and to bind themselves to sell a certain part of their production only through them. The enlarged and consolidated butter-selling associations then mean to divide the markets among themselves, and in this way to do away with the unsettled competition that has hitherto spoiled prices; the surpluses are to be taken abroad, even if with sacrifices” — to England.

But Professor Sering recommended this famous remedy in the same speech in which, shortly before, he had indignantly declared:

“The purchasing co-operatives are least of all to be dispensed with in a time of progressive cartellisation of industry, for against the abuse of economic power that the combination of manufacturers affords there is no other protection whatever than the combination of the consumers.” (Thiels landw. Jahrbuch 1897, Suppl., pp. 223, 225.)

The agrarian cartel, then, is a “development of the co-operative idea”; the industrial cartel is an “abuse of economic power”, which only the development of the co-operative idea can counter. At one moment the co-operative is to be praised because it is the means of coping with the cartel; at another the cartel is to be praised as the means of averting the otherwise unavoidable bankruptcy of the co-operative. The Herr Professor’s logic is on a level with his moral indignation.

But that is not the most interesting thing about his remarks. They become noteworthy because they establish the distress of the dairies and preach as the only way out the cartel, which, however, becomes impracticable with a constant increase in the number of dairies. And a luminary of agrarian science has to admit this in a hymn of praise to the miraculous effects of the co-operative movement!

It is the same with the other agricultural large-scale industries as with those mentioned here; so far, however, they have been of little importance for the co-operative movement.

The coming crisis need not, of course, ruin the industry it strikes. It does so only in the rarest cases. As a rule it merely leads to a revolution in the existing property relations in the direction of capitalism, that is, it brings about precisely what the co-operative is supposed to be a firm bulwark against.

The small, insufficiently equipped enterprises, weak in capital, go under in a crisis. But the ruin of an enterprise of agricultural industry is not confined to it alone; it brings in its train the downfall, or at least the undermining, of numerous agricultural livelihoods that rest upon it. The greater the help the industrial enterprises offered the farmers, the more these based their farming on them, the more devastating the consequences of the bankruptcy must be.

The larger, better equipped enterprises will be able to survive in such a crisis, but they too will have to go through hard times, in which profits cease and only continued contributions can keep production going. The co-operators who cannot make such contributions forfeit their rights as co-operators. If the insolvency of the co-operators is general, nothing remains but to sell the undertaking to a capitalist; if it is not general, the crisis leads to its becoming the private property of a few rich co-operators, who manage it on purely capitalist lines.

This process need not necessarily proletarianise the former co-operators; if they are lucky, they can keep their peasant property. But where this favourable case occurs, their economic dependence on the formerly co-operative enterprise remains; it is transformed, however, from dependence on a society of which the farmer was a member with equal rights and equal interests into dependence on one (or several) overpowering capitalists with opposed interests. The detail-labourer of the co-operative factory now becomes the wage-labourer of the capitalist factory. Matters are not improved by the fact that the wage-labour here, as in domestic industry, is a concealed one. That is the inevitable end of the agricultural producers’ co-operatives.

As everywhere in capitalist society, here too industry finally triumphs over agriculture and capital over the isolated producers’ co-operative.

In consequence of the momentary advantages they hold out to the farmers, the agricultural producers’ co-operatives are a powerful means of promoting the industrialisation of agriculture; but with this they are also a powerful means of opening up for capital a road to the domination of agriculture, on which it would otherwise meet much greater difficulties.

We by no means underestimate the importance of these co-operatives. They are important for the revolutionising of agriculture; but the means of saving the peasant they are not.

But the co-operative movement also has its limits.

The same laws hold for the agricultural industries as for every other industry. The concentration and centralisation of enterprises, which in agriculture meets such strong counter-tendencies, makes rapid progress here; in the agricultural industries, as in all others, the tendency to large-scale enterprise prevails.

This is shown most clearly by sugar manufacture, artificially stimulated, to be sure, by state measures. In the German Empire there were counted:

So almost a fivefold increase in the quantity of beet worked up on average by one factory in 25 years!

In potato distilling too the same tendency could be traced, though in a less grandiose way, up to the time of the new tax laws, which aimed at restricting the expansion of production. In the Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich we find it recorded that the number of distilleries working up potatoes, grain or molasses in the area of the tax union rose from 7,011 to 7,280 from 1872 to 1881/82. But the number of distilleries paying less than 15,000 marks in spirits tax fell from 6,222 to 5,788, while those paying more than 15,000 marks increased from 789 to 1,492.

On the other hand there were counted:

From 1887/88 onwards the output of potato distilling per enterprise in the Reich tax area has on average remained at the same level, but it is nevertheless noteworthy that it is precisely the smallest of these distilleries that show a decided decline.

The number of distilleries producing

The dairies too are of course subject to the law of development of modern large-scale industry; for them too technical progress does not stand still; for them too hand-working is displaced by steam, the machines grow, the quantity of products one machine works up grows, the production and storage rooms grow, the markets grow, and with them the necessity of employing staff of one’s own with commercial training, whom only a large enterprise can keep sufficiently occupied.

We have seen above how in New South Wales the dairies are becoming larger and larger. The same is reported from Belgium. Colard Bovy stated in a report to the International Agricultural Congress in 1895: the inadequate and badly managed small co-operatives give way more and more before the large ones,

“which can work up great quantities of milk at the lowest price and under better conditions, and supply products of constant uniformity. When a capable official directs the enterprise, these advantages reach their peak.” (Quoted by E. Vandervelde in his article on Agrarian Socialism in Belgium, Neue Zeit, XV, 1, p. 755.)

The development of the food industry in the German Empire is illustrated by the following calculation, based on the figures of the occupational statistics of 1882 and 1895. According to it, for every hundred heads of enterprises (owners and managers) there were the following numbers of wage-labourers and salaried staff:

Everywhere we see a progressive enlargement of enterprises; in all agricultural industries the number of wage-labourers rises far faster than that of the entrepreneurs and managers; in beet-sugar manufacture, in dairying, etc., and in brewing the relative increase amounts to more than a hundred per cent, in the manufacture of vegetable preserves to almost a hundred per cent.

The extent that some agricultural industrial enterprises have attained is shown, for example, by the undertakings of the firm of Nestlé. It owns two large factories in Switzerland for the manufacture of condensed milk and one factory for the manufacture of infant food. The latter, in Vevey, works up 100,000 litres of milk daily, the product of 12,000 cows, which comes together from 180 villages. 180 villages have lost their economic independence and have become subjects of the house of Nestlé. Their inhabitants are outwardly still owners of their land, but free peasants they are no longer.

In the measure in which this development advances and the sum of capital required to found an enterprise capable of competing rises, the circle of those farmers who are in a position to proceed to the founding of producers’ co-operatives narrows, and the sooner new foundations in these fields become capitalist undertakings from the outset, as already appears clearly today in beet-sugar manufacture and potato distilling. Where co-operative factories in these branches of industry can still be spoken of, it is a matter almost exclusively of co-operatives of big peasants and owners of manors.

If from the outset every rural producers’ co-operative is threatened in every crisis with passing into capitalist hands, there comes sooner or later for every kind of agricultural industry the point from which it closes its doors to the small farmers and becomes a monopoly of the capitalists and great landowners. As a rule this development also leads to the displacement of small-scale farming by large-scale farming. Here too the sugar industry supplies us with the best proofs. The advantages of machinery in agriculture appear most strongly where the motive power for the machines does not have to be procured specially, but is supplied by an industrial enterprise situated on the estate.

Where this does not lead to the decline of small-scale enterprise, the industrialisation of agriculture seals the dependence of the small farmer on the factory, the sole buyer of his products, and makes him completely the bondsman of industrial capital, according to whose needs he has to farm.

That is the salvation that agricultural industry brings the peasant.

If the development of agricultural industry offers the farmer a new support, at least for a time, the advance of technique on the other hand also brings forth results that oppress the farmer and ruin particular branches of agriculture. This happens, for one thing, through people’s succeeding in making better use of the raw material, so that more product is obtained from the same quantity of raw material; which naturally has the effect that, with consumption of the product remaining the same, the demand for the raw material falls, and that, with consumption increasing, the demand for the raw material does not rise as fast as consumption. But industrial progress further works towards replacing raw material of high value by raw material of lower value, especially through the utilisation of waste materials and through the production of substitutes. And finally industry even goes so far as itself to produce products that agriculture formerly supplied, or to replace them in such a way that those of agriculture become superfluous.

A few examples may illustrate this. The great loss of nutritive substances that arises from the imperfect grinding of corn is well known. The advances of milling reduce these losses more and more.

“In the seventeenth century Vauban estimated the annual consumption of a man at nearly 712 pounds of wheat, a quantity that now almost suffices for two men; and nowadays, through the improvement of our mills, immense masses of nutritive substance, worth many hundreds of millions a year, are won for human beings, which formerly served only for animals, for which it is infinitely more easily replaceable by other nutritive substances that are quite unsuited for human consumption … Wheat contains not more than 2 per cent of indigestible woody substance, and a perfect mill in the widest sense should give no more than this quantity of bran; but our best mills still give 12 to 20 per cent, ordinary mills up to 25 per cent of bran, which contains 60 to 70 per cent of the most nutritious constituents of the flour.” (J. v. Liebig, Chemische Briefe, p. 334.)

In 1877 the roller-miller V. Till claimed to have invented a milling process that yielded 92.6 per cent of flour and only 7.4 per cent of bran and waste (V. Till, Die Lösung der Brotfrage); we have not yet found any further reduction of the bran recorded. On the other hand, attempts are now being made to make the nutritive substances of the bran, especially the albumen, digestible by chemical means.

It is clear that, with the consumption of flour remaining the same, every advance of milling in the utilisation of the corn must bring about a diminution in the demand for grain. But the effect of falling demand must also appear with rising consumption of flour, if at the same time the mass of grain coming on to the market increases as fast as, or even faster than, the consumption of flour. The displacement of the primitive mills by the roller mills must therefore sharpen the effects of the crisis on the grain market.

The attempts just mentioned to convert the nutritive substances of the bran into a form in which they can be digested by the human stomach already belong to the field of the utilisation of waste materials and of the production of substitutes.

The progressive utilisation of waste materials is one of the most essential peculiarities of the modern mode of production. It is the natural result of large-scale production, which accumulates waste materials in enormous quantities at particular points, thereby makes their removal necessary, and stimulates attempts to use them for industrial purposes, and so to transform them from a source of embarrassment and unproductive expense into a source of profit.

These wastes have become of the highest importance for agriculture. On the one hand the wastes of large-scale industry supply agriculture with fodder and manure — so the wastes of distilleries, sugar factories, breweries and oil-mills, and further basic slag, wood ash, etc. — and so become a powerful means of chaining agriculture to industry. On the other hand, however, industry seizes on the wastes of agricultural products in order, by working them up, to compete with agriculture itself.

An example of such a utilisation of a waste material is the production of oil from cotton-seed, which formerly was thrown away, or at most used as manure on the cotton plantations. Today people know how to make an oil from it that offers very serious and rapidly growing competition to the oils made from European oil-plants. In the German Empire the imports were:

Cotton-seed oil is used in particular for adulterating olive oil and in the production of artificial butter, margarine, which is made from beef tallow, milk and cheap oils, especially cotton-seed oil, and can scarcely be distinguished from natural butter in taste and physiological effect. The first artificial butter factory in Germany was founded in 1872; today there are about sixty.

It is clear that this competition does not improve the position of the butter market, already critical in any case. The moving complaints of the agrarians about it, with which in 1896 they justified and obtained a new fettering of the margarine industry, are certainly exaggerated; but just as exaggerated is the opposite assertion that the farmers are not harmed at all by artificial butter. Very little comfort is to be had by the latter from the reminder that the manufacture of artificial butter too finds itself in a difficult position. This shows itself less in the deficits of individual factories — such things occur even in flourishing branches of industry, in badly managed, unfortunately situated or insufficiently equipped enterprises — than in the statistics of the country in which margarine and butter can fight out their competitive struggle most freely. In Great Britain the imports were:

The cheap Australian butter hard-presses not only the producers of natural butter but also those of artificial butter. But this will not, of course, lead to the downfall of the manufacture of artificial butter, but to the improvement of its methods of production. The producers of natural butter have nothing to gain by that.

But if we do not dispute that the dairies are harmed by the manufacture of margarine, we by no means wish thereby to approve the endeavours to stifle the production of the latter for the benefit of the former. We readily admit that it is sad when the bankruptcy of a co-operative dairy plunges numerous industrious peasants into the proletariat; but it is no sadder than, say, the depriving of industrious proletarians of their bread by a new machine. That, after all, is the way technical progress takes place in present-day society. Whoever wants to do away with this method of progress must do away with the whole present-day social order. On the other hand it is nonsensical to want to uphold this order by every means and to abolish its consequences. This nonsense becomes outrageous when it is to be made practicable by endowing, according to momentary and caste interests, only particular strata of producers with the privilege of being protected, at the expense of the community, against every technical advance that diminishes their profit.

In a modern state the mass of the population will not put up with a privilege of this kind for long, and therefore it is a utopia to try to preserve agriculture in this way from the pressure of rising industry. The convulsive endeavours of our agrarians in this direction merely prove how much they are threatened by capitalist large-scale industry in foodstuffs and articles of enjoyment, and what importance this has attained in relation to agriculture.

Artificial butter, and besides it artificial cheese, are probably the substitutes produced by large-scale industry that have so far made themselves most perceptibly felt by agriculture. But they are not the only ones working in this direction.

Brewing has made an enormous upswing in the last decades in almost all the states of Europe.

Beer production amounted to:

In Denmark beer production grew from 1,200,000 hectolitres (1876) to 2,185,000 (1891); in Sweden from 419,815 (1880) to 1,240,811 (1890); in Switzerland from 280,000 (1867) to 650,000 (1876), 1,004,000 (1886) and 1,249,000 (1891).

One would think that hop production had grown in the same measure. Nothing of the kind. It has risen only insignificantly. As early as 1867 the yield of a full hop harvest in Europe was estimated at 50,000 tonnes. The harvest of 1890 was just as large (of which 24,705 in Germany, 15,000 in England); in 1892, 57,550 tonnes were harvested (of which 24,150 in Germany, 19,000 in England).

In England the quantity of beer produced annually has risen from 35 million hectolitres (1873) to 52 million (1891), by 17 million, that is, by roughly 50 per cent. On the other hand, 24,000 hectares were under hops in 1871, and 23,000 in 1892. But the import of hops, says the report of the parliamentary agricultural commission of 1897 (p. 83), “has in fact remained stationary during the last 20 years. During the period 1876/78 the average annual import of hops from all sources was 195,000 hundredweight, and in 1893/95 203,000 hundredweight.”

The development in the German Empire is shown by the following table:

The rising consumption of beer, then, does not help the hop-growers at all. It only promotes the production of hop substitutes.

The development of chemistry plays still worse tricks on the vine-growers than on the hop-growers. It teaches how to make grape-sugar from potato starch, rags or wood fibres, that famous means of improving inferior wines. But it also teaches how to manufacture wines from grape-skins and raisins with the help of sugar and other products of agricultural industry.

More and more even the so-called “natural wines” have to go through a series of processes that require scientific knowledge and the use of costly apparatus; more and more the natural wine too thus becomes the product of a capitalist large-scale industry to which the vine-grower merely supplies the raw material. The wine-cellar becomes a wine factory.

In his report on The State of Legislation concerning Wine-making, and the Technique of Wine-making before the Royal Prussian Agricultural Council, February 1897, Professor Märcker set out, among other things, the following:

“Wine is not wholly a natural product; wine does not grow on the vines ready for bottling; there is a long road that it has to travel in its treatment in the cellar before the noble wine has ripened from the sweet must of the grapes …

“This wine-making has now in recent years called forth a whole series of scientific researches, through which we have come extraordinarily far in the field of the treatment of wine, in that we are gradually learning to produce a natural wine of better quality even from grapes of low value. Above all, the pure culture of yeast has taken possession of this field.”

Various yeast fungi cling to the skins of the grapes and bring about the fermentation in the must.

“It is known that there are different races of yeast, that the yeast which grows on the Johannisberg, at Geisenheim, produces a wine of a quite definite character; and attempts have now been made to obtain a wine of a definite character by breeding a definite kind of yeast pure. When good experiences with pure-culture yeast were in fact to hand, sanguine people thought that viticulture could be dispensed with altogether; one need only add a yeast artificially to a solution of sugar in order to produce the noblest Johannisberger or Steinberger with it.”

One would think that this prospect could only be inspiring: not only sugar-peas but Johannisberger too for everybody — would that not be the beginning of heaven on earth?

So a socialist thinks, but not an agrarian. What is a blessing for the welfare of the community — an abundance of means of subsistence and enjoyment — is a misfortune for ground-rent. If everyone can produce Johannisberger for himself from sugared water, then it is all over with the ground-rent of the Johannisberg vineyards. And so Herr Professor Märcker continues with relief:

“That, thank God, has not succeeded; but it has succeeded in producing a much better wine with pure-culture yeast than without it, and it has succeeded in obtaining considerably better prices for our products. And only a few years have passed since this pure-culture yeast was brought into use.”

So far, then, the yeast fungi have halted respectfully before ground-rent. But is there not reason to fear that these microscopic rascals will one fine day abandon their loyal attitude after all and turn subversive? One begins with producing Johannisberger out of rough wine; why should one not end with producing wine out of sugared water?

But it is not possible to forbid the improvement of wine; Professor Märcker himself declares this in the course of his report. Statistics say that in ten years there occur only one excellent wine year, three good ones, three middling and three sour. These sour wines are undrinkable for a civilised palate without improvement. To forbid the improvement of wine would mean doing the gravest harm to the vine-growers themselves.

Besides improved wines and wines made from grape-skins, raisin wine is coming up.

“From raisins, by stirring them with water, crushing them and letting them ferment, especially with the use of pure-culture yeast, one can make a quite excellent wine … It is a very good and serviceable wine; it has entirely the character of a wine, and it offers our German wine severe competition. Technically there is nothing to be said against it, but all the more economically, since it offers our German wine severe competition. It stands up to analysis and is enormously cheap; 100 litres can be made for 12 marks. This, then, is a severe competition, which must be resolutely combated by way of legislation.”

Indeed, just think what calamity would befall the German people if raisin wine were to succeed in displacing potato fusel!

With pure-culture yeast wine-like drinks can also be made from malt. In Hamburg a large factory manufactures such malt wines.

From the discussion of this report let us mention a remark of Privy Councillor Thiel, who said among other things that the small vine-growers were not in a position to carry out the necessary improvement of wine themselves. Only the big vineyard-owners and wine-merchants could do that.

Meitzen wrote similarly as early as the sixties (Der Boden etc., II, p. 275 ff.):

“Only the larger owners and the more prosperous vine-growers usually press their own grapes, treat the wine in store and wait for the favourable moment to sell. The number of the poorer vine-growers, who have no means for this, amounts to about 12,000–13,000 (in old Prussia before 1866). In order to get ready cash quickly they part with the grapes immediately after the vintage, and have often sold the yield of grapes beforehand in return for advances. The tax authorities give the quantity of grapes disposed of by this class of vine-growers to wine-merchants and wine-manufacturers in the autumn of 1864 as 69,405 hundredweight.”

The dependence of the small vine-growers on the wine-merchants is increased still further by the uncertainty of the yields of viticulture. We mentioned above Märcker’s remark that among ten wine years there are three sour ones and only one excellent; but the quantities fluctuate just as the quality does. In the work mentioned above (p. 277) Meitzen gives the wine yields of the Rhineland from 1821 to 1864 (in Eimer). We pick out a few figures:

In such circumstances viticulture becomes a pure game of chance, in which in the end the one must win who has the biggest purse, who can go on losing money for years. A bad year makes the small vine-grower without capital bankrupt, or brings him into hopeless debt-bondage.

The co-operative movement is to be the means of rescue here too. Co-operative wine-cellars are to put the small vine-grower in a position to pocket for himself the profits from the improvement of his wines and from the intermediate trade. What has been said of agricultural producers’ co-operatives in general holds of them: on the one hand they are not accessible to the quite small vine-growers without capital — on the other hand, like other producers’ co-operatives, they must sooner or later degenerate in a capitalist direction or become capitalist property. In this sense they merely accelerate the development that tends to bring the vine-grower into ever greater economic dependence on the factory, on the wine-cellar, and to transform him into a detail-labourer of the wine industry.

But the same technical development that makes the vine-grower more and more dependent on the wine-manufacturer makes the latter more and more independent of the native vine-grower. It brings him cheap foreign wines in rapidly rising quantities, which he turns into better ones; it also brings him more and more cheap raw material of other kinds from which to make wine.

The revolutionising of wine production can be followed most clearly in France. As a result of the ravages of phylloxera and other diseases, the country’s yield of wine fell rapidly. The annual figures were:

Although since the beginning of the eighties the consumption of wine has been far greater than the production of wine, exports are scarcely decreasing. This is to be explained partly by the accumulated surpluses of earlier years, partly by the import of inferior wines, which are improved and then consumed in France itself or exported as fine French wines.

Imports of wine, in thousands of hectolitres, were from:

At the same time, however, the manufacture of artificial wine also rose. According to the official statistics themselves, wine was made from:

The real manufacture of artificial wine is probably considerably greater still. Only part of this branch of industry is carried on openly.

In the German Empire the import of raisins rose from 12,994,000 kilograms in 1886 to 32,846,000 in 1895. The lion’s share of this increase is to be put down to the account of wine manufacture. Besides this, the import of fresh grapes rose from 3,181,000 kilograms (1886) to 19,371,000 (1895).

Moreover, an overseas competition is preparing in this field too, both in Africa (Algeria, Tunis, the Cape) and in the United States, especially in California, and in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Australia. In Algeria 17,600 hectares were planted with vines in 1878, 96,624 hectares in 1889, and 116,000 hectares in 1893, with a yield of 3,800,000 hectolitres. In the United States the yield of wine in 1889 was 1,500,000 hectolitres, in Argentina as much, in Chile 1,000,000 hectolitres.

With the substitutes and waste products dealt with so far, it was still a matter of working up raw materials, even if inferior ones, that came from agriculture. But in many fields industrial development finally goes so far as to bring forth a product hitherto produced by agriculture directly, without any participation of the latter.

Best known in this respect are the successes that chemistry has achieved in working up tar. Not only is an extraordinarily large and daily increasing number of quite new substances obtained from it, which play an important part especially in medicine; substances that agriculture formerly supplied are also produced from it in the cheapest way.

Madder, for example, was until the seventies an important commercial crop for many regions of Europe, especially in Holland, the south of France and South Germany. The discovery of the production of alizarin from coal-tar, achieved by Graebe and Liebermann in 1868 and exploited to an increasing extent by the aniline factories from 1870 onwards, dealt madder cultivation its death-blow.

From another product of coal-tar, saccharin, which was discovered in 1879 and has been manufactured on a large scale since 1886, a similar effect on the cultivation of sugar-beet was at first expected. This effect has not come about. Saccharin is indeed 500 times as sweet as cane sugar, but it can replace sugar only as a sweetener, not as a food. Nevertheless it displaces sugar from a series of its former uses, and so works against the extension of its consumption.

Alcohol too can be obtained from tar, but so far not in a way that makes the industrial exploitation of the process seem advisable.

Of greater — and more unpleasant — importance for a part of agriculture, on the other hand, are the advances of electrical engineering. It seems to be succeeding in what steam-power did not succeed in, the almost complete displacement of the horse from economic life.

Steam-power can be applied with advantage only in moving great masses and in operations with few interruptions. It has displaced the horse in the carriage of loads over long distances. But in stimulating the growth of the great cities, and to a great extent first making it possible, the railway system has set local traffic a series of ever-growing tasks, which until recently could be performed only with the help of the horse. In agriculture too the steam-engine was unable to displace the horse, however valuable it proved for many operations.

Electricity, whose power can easily be divided and conducted over long distances, and its action interrupted and set going again at will, and whose motors take up little room and are easy to handle, is capable of taking over the functions of the horse as a motor in traffic as in agriculture, and it has already done so in many cases. Other advances of technique are working at the same time towards the displacement of the horse from traffic. Besides electric tramways, electric cabs and omnibuses, motor vehicles of other kinds are appearing, and the spread of the man-propelled bicycle is making advances whose rapidity is an inexhaustible source not only of material for the comic papers and of moral indignation for the philistine, but also of fat profits for bicycle manufacturers and dealers.

The effect of all this is clear: the demand for horses must decline, horse-breeding must become unprofitable. In the United States, where electric tramways have already displaced the horse-trams to a much greater degree than in Europe, this has already come about. An English farmer who knows American conditions from his own observation writes about it:

“Of late one hears many complaints about the horse trade. Horse-breeding in particular seemed to me especially unremunerative in America; the horse-breeders told me that they often could not sell the horses they had bred at all, for lack of buyers; the supply was greater than the demand. This fact does not surprise me, for every little town in America now has an electric or cable railway instead of the horse-tram. The practical American has long since found out that electricity is cheaper than the expensive keeping of horses; I was often astonished at the spread of electricity even in the smallest villages.” (König, Die Lage der englischen Landwirthschaft, p. 408.)

The number of horses in North America is accordingly decreasing — in spite of the extension of its agriculture, the increase of its population and the growth of its towns. Their price fell even faster than their number.

The horses counted in the Union were:

The present stock of horses of the United States is therefore worth less than half what it fetched in 1892.

Hand in hand with the decrease in the demand for horses in the United States goes the growth of their export. It amounted to:

So the official American statistics (Yearbook of the United States, Department of Agriculture, pp. 574, 580). The Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reichs states that 19 horses were imported from the United States into Germany in 1890, 4,285 in 1896 and 5,918 in 1897. In recent years the import from America has far outstripped that from England, which grew from 1,070 to 2,719 head in 1890–97.

At the same time, however, the technical advances in transport in Europe itself must work first to restrict the increase in the keeping of horses, and then to bring about its decline.

This hits in the first place only the horse-breeders, mostly larger farmers; but for middling ones too, big peasants, horse-breeding remains an important source of income in many regions. The small farmers, on the other hand, are not directly threatened by the overproduction of horses; here too the small are at an advantage as against the large — though here too not through their technical superiority.

But indirectly they too are hit by the restriction of the keeping of horses, for this necessarily brings with it a restriction in the production of horse fodder too. Bicycles, electric tramways, motor-cars and electric ploughs eat neither oats nor hay. But among the important grain crops oats were hitherto the one that suffered least from overseas competition. In Great Britain the area, in acres, under

In 1896 a small decline in the area under oats set in. It amounted to only 3,095,000 acres. Whether this decline is a passing one or already the beginning of a progressive reduction in the growing of oats cannot yet be decided. In any case we may expect such a reduction sooner or later.

What overseas competition spares is threatened by industrial development at home.

The transformation of agricultural production into industrial production is only in its beginnings. Bold seers, especially chemists endowed with imagination, are already dreaming of the time when bread will be made from stones, when the whole quantity of foodstuffs will be produced in chemical factories. We cannot, of course, reckon here with such music of the future.

But one thing is certain. In a whole series of fields agricultural production has been transformed into industrial production; another series faces this transformation in the foreseeable future; no field of agricultural activity is entirely safe from it. And every advance in this direction must lead to increasing the distress of the farmers, heightening their dependence on industry, and diminishing the security of their existence.

One need not for this reason by any means speak of the downfall of agriculture. But its conservative character is irrevocably gone wherever the modern mode of production has once gained a firm footing. To cling to the old threatens the farmer with certain ruin; he must follow the development of technique without interruption, without interruption adapt his enterprise to the new conditions. There is no resting on ground once won. If the farmer believes he has vanquished one enemy, a new one rises up against him. In the open country too the whole of economic life, which hitherto moved so uniformly and strictly in eternally unchanging ruts, falls into that state of constant revolution which is the hallmark of the capitalist mode of production.

This constant whirlpool drags to the bottom all who cannot show extraordinary luck, extraordinary ruthlessness, extraordinary business intelligence or extraordinary means.

And so the revolutionising of agriculture inaugurates for them all a breathless hunt, in which they are driven on mercilessly until they collapse exhausted — with the exception of a few brutal lucky fellows, who succeed in climbing up on the bodies of those who go under into the ranks of the hunters, the great capitalists.