I.11. Prospects for the Future

Bourgeois economics, in investigating the course of development of agriculture, lays the chief weight on the relation between the large and the small enterprises according to area. And since this relation of areas changes only a little, it ascribes to agriculture, in contrast to industry, a conservative character.

The popular socialist view, on the other hand, sees the revolutionising element in agriculture in usury, in the indebtedness that alienates the peasant from his property and drives him from house and home.

How incorrect the former view is, we believe we have proved. But we should not like to agree unconditionally with the second either.

The indebtedness of the peasants is, as is well known, not a phenomenon peculiar to the capitalist mode of production. It is as old as commodity production, and already plays a great part in that age of Greece and Rome in which their history passes from the legendary into the documented stage. By itself alone usurer’s capital is capable only of making the peasant discontented and rebellious; it does not form the driving force of development towards a higher mode of production. Only when capitalist production grows up, when the competitive struggle between large-scale and small-scale enterprise develops, and the possession of more money makes possible more advantageous production on a larger scale — only then does usury become credit, which considerably heightens the effective power of capital and accelerates economic development. But even then this holds more of industry than of agriculture. In agriculture the credit system retains for the most part the character of the pre-capitalist period. Even today the indebtedness of landed property is determined only to the smallest extent by the need to extend and improve the enterprise; by far the greatest part of it is a product of distress and of changes of ownership — sale and inheritance. As such it not only does not promote the economic development of agriculture but hampers it, by withdrawing from it the means of progress. To that extent peasant indebtedness is not only not revolutionary but conservative; it is not a means of rising from the peasant mode of production to a higher one, but a means that holds the peasant mode of production fast at the stage of its existing imperfection.

If indebtedness in the countryside is more a conservative than a revolutionary element with regard to the mode of production, it often is so with regard to property relations too. To be sure, where a new mode of production appears to which peasant property stands in the way as an obstacle, indebtedness can become a means of hastening its expropriation. This was the case in ancient Rome, when the abundance of slaves taken in war favoured the development of plantation farming; it was the case in England at the time of the Reformation, when the upswing of the wool trade led to the extension of sheep pastures. But that indebtedness was there only one of the levers of expropriation, not its driving force, we see already from the fact that, for example, at the time of the Reformation the complaints of the indebtedness of the peasants rang out still louder in South Germany than in England; nevertheless it did not lead there to any noticeable expropriation of the peasantry. The persons of the owners of particular peasant holdings changed; the holdings themselves remained. Usury here brought about the sucking dry of the peasantry, but not its diminution.

The revolution in the relations of production in the countryside that followed the French Revolution and its offshoots also gave usurer’s capital many opportunities for overturning property relations. It supported both the tendency to large-scale enterprise and the tendency to the fragmentation of enterprises. The indebtedness of the peasants made it easier for the large landowners to round off their estates and to extend the woodland. On the other hand, the rising demand of the growing rural population for dwellings and allotments of land led to the butchering of estates, to the parcelling out of indebted peasant farms, a process that many usurers carried on systematically.

Both processes are still going on; but since overseas competition has made agriculture unprofitable, and the increase of the rural population has come to a standstill, indeed in many places turned into a decrease, they have been greatly slowed down. Ground-rents and the prices of estates are no longer rising, apart from favoured situations, for example near towns or factories; they have begun to fall and threaten to fall still further. The more this happens, the less is the interest of the usurer capitalists in expropriating the indebted peasants. The forced sale threatens them with the loss not only of their interest but even of part of the capital. Instead of hastening it, they try to put it off by deferring the interest, often by new advances of money — much as in England even the most grasping and hard-hearted landlords were compelled by the agrarian crisis to defer the rents owing to them, to reduce those to be paid in future, and to carry out improvements themselves.

Thus, for example, in the inquiry of the Verein für Sozialpolitik into peasant conditions, the estate-owner Winkelmann reports from Westphalia:

“With the tenacity with which the peasant here clings to his inheritance, many usurers find it more advantageous to let the countryman work for them and to take from him everything he earns beyond bare life, than to engage in a doubtful butchering of estates. In many of our poorer mountain districts, moreover, buyers are already lacking.” (Vol. 2, p. 11.)

The indebtedness of the peasants, which is predominantly an obstacle to the revolutionising of the relations of production in the countryside, does not always mean a revolutionising of the property relations there either. Precisely the agrarian crisis makes its revolutionary sides recede for the moment in the latter respect too. But every new considerable change in the relations of production will again find in the indebtedness of landed property a lever that makes it easier to adapt the property relations to the conditions of production.

But where are we to seek the moving factor that makes that change in the mode of production necessary?

After what has been set out, the answer cannot be difficult. Industry forms the driving force not only of its own development but also of that of agriculture. We have seen that it was urban industry that destroyed the unity of industry and agriculture in the countryside, that made the countryman a one-sided farmer, a producer of commodities dependent on the whims of the market, that created the possibility of his proletarianisation.

We have found further that the agriculture of the feudal era ran itself into a blind alley from which it could not work its way out by its own strength. It was urban industry that created the revolutionary forces that were compelled and able to tear down the feudal regime and thereby open new paths not only to industry but also to agriculture.

It was industry that then produced the technical and scientific conditions of the new, rational agriculture, revolutionised it by machines and artificial manures, by the microscope and the chemical laboratory, and thereby brought about the technical superiority of capitalist large-scale enterprise over small-scale peasant enterprise.

Besides the qualitative difference between large-scale and small-scale enterprise, however, the same economic development created yet another difference: that between enterprises that serve merely the household’s own consumption and those that produce predominantly, or at least to an essential extent, for the market. Both are subjected to industry, but by different paths. For the former there arises the necessity of earning money by selling labour-power, by wage-labour or domestic industry, through which the small farmers become more and more dependent on industry and approach more and more the position of industrial proletarians. But the commodity-producing enterprises too see themselves compelled to an increasing extent to take up an industrial side-occupation. Technical progress does indeed contain the tendency to reduce the costs of production; but in capitalist agriculture this tendency is more than paralysed by counter-tendencies that burden it more and more: the growth of ground-rent, and with it of rents here and of mortgage debt there; the furthering of the latter, or of the fragmentation of the land, by the law of inheritance; the growing drain on the country by the town, as a result of militarism, taxes, absenteeism, etc.; the robbery of the soil; the increasing delicacy of domesticated animals and cultivated plants; and finally the increasing absorption of the rural labour force by industry — these are factors that by their combined action, in spite of technical progress, make the costs of production in agriculture swell more and more. This leads first to a general and steady rise in the prices of foodstuffs, but with it also to a sharpening of the antagonism between town and country, between landed property and the mass of the consumers.

But the same industrial development that created these agricultural conditions revolutionises them still further by the extension of world traffic, and produces overseas food competition. Where landed property is not strong enough, the competition falls on it with full force, as in England, but precisely thereby softens the antagonism between it and the mass of the consumers. Where landed property can make the power of the state its servant, it tries by an artificial raising of the price of foodstuffs to screw prices back up to the old level of the costs of production; but with present-day world traffic and international competition it nowhere succeeds, or can succeed, in this to a sufficient degree, and it merely heightens still further the already acute antagonism between landed property and the mass of the consumers, especially the proletariat.

But besides landed property, agriculture suffers too, most of all, of course, where the farmer is also the nominal landowner; it grasps at the most varied methods of production in order to adapt production to the new conditions, here returning to extensive pasture farming, there going over to the most intensive horticulture; but in the end it everywhere finds the union of industry and agriculture to be the most rational means.

So the modern mode of production — in two forms, to be sure, the industrial wage-labour of the small peasant and the agricultural industry of the larger farmer — returns at the end of the dialectical process to its starting-point: to the abolition of the separation of industry and agriculture. But whereas in the primitive peasant enterprise agriculture was the economically decisive and leading element, the relation has now been reversed. Capitalist large-scale industry rules, and agriculture has to obey its commands and adapt itself to its needs. The direction of industrial development becomes decisive for agricultural development. If the former is turned towards socialism, the latter too must turn towards it.

But in those regions that remain purely agricultural, that remain closed to the penetration of industry, whether because of the inaccessibility of their territory or of their inhabitants, the population declines in numbers, in strength, in intelligence and in prosperity, and with it the soil grows poorer and the agricultural enterprise decays. In capitalist society pure agriculture ceases to form an element of prosperity. But with this there also ceases the possibility of the peasantry’s prospering again.

Like the agricultural population of the feudal era, these elements too get into a blind alley from which they cannot free themselves by their own impulse, in which they crowd together more and more anxiously and despairingly. As at the end of the eighteenth century, this time too it will have to be the revolutionary population of the towns that brings them deliverance and opens the way for them to further development.

While in the countryside the capitalist mode of production visibly makes the conditions for the formation of a revolutionary class more difficult, it furthers them in the towns. It concentrates the masses of workers there, and creates favourable preconditions there for their organisation, their intellectual development, their class struggle. It depopulates the open country, scatters the agricultural labourers over wide areas, isolates them, robs them of the means of intellectual development and of resistance to the exploiter. In the towns it concentrates capital in fewer and fewer hands and so positively presses for the expropriation of the expropriators. In agriculture it leads only partly to the concentration of enterprises, and on the other side to their fragmentation. As it advances, the capitalist mode of production in every country sooner or later makes industry an export industry, for which the home market is not enough, which produces for the whole world market. In the same measure it reduces pure agriculture to a trade that cannot hold even the home market, whose importance recedes more and more beside world production.

The more, then, the capitalist forms and interests of property and appropriation come into contradiction with the needs of agriculture, the more they burden it, indeed press it down, the more urgent for it becomes the shattering of the capitalist forms and the overthrow of capitalist interests — the less is it in a position to develop the necessary forces and germs of organisation out of itself, the more does it need the impulse of the revolutionary forces of industry.

And this impulse will not be lacking. The industrial proletariat cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the agricultural population as well.

Human society is an organism — not an animal or vegetable one, but one of its own kind; nevertheless an organism and not a mere aggregate of individuals, and as an organism it must be organised in a unified way. It is an absurdity to believe that in a society one part can develop in one direction and another, equally important, in the opposite direction. It can develop only in one direction. But it is not necessary that every part of the organism should produce out of itself the driving force necessary for its development; it is enough that one place in the organism should generate the requisite forces for the whole.

If the development of large-scale industry goes in the direction of socialism, and if it is the ruling power in present-day society, then it will also seize for socialism, and adapt to its needs, those fields that are not capable of producing out of themselves the preconditions of this revolution. It must do this in its own interest, in the interest of the unity, of the harmony, of society.

No one could make a worse prognosis for modern society than those bourgeois economists who triumphantly proclaim: the road of industry may lead to socialism, but the road of agriculture leads to “individualism”. If this were correct, and if agriculture proved strong enough to ward socialism off from itself without, however, being able to force “individualism” on industry, then that would mean not the salvation but the downfall of society, civil war in permanence.

Fortunately for human society this last sheet-anchor of capitalist exploitation finds no ground in which it could hold.

We start from the principle that the development of modern industry leads of necessity to socialism. To furnish the proof of this would require a whole book; it has already been furnished in the fundamental works of scientific socialism, above all in Capital. Here we shall only try to indicate in a somewhat concrete way how the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the socialisation of industry that follows from it, must act on agriculture.

We say deliberately socialisation, and not nationalisation, of industry. We leave entirely aside the question whether a socialist society can be a state; in its beginnings it will certainly be a state; the power of the state is, after all, to become precisely the most powerful lever of the social revolution. But strictly speaking this revolution by no means signifies the nationalisation but merely the socialisation of the whole of production and of the means of production; they are to cease to be private property and to become social property; but it depends on their social importance to which society they fall for their utilisation. Means of production that serve local needs, such as bakeries, lighting works and tramways, will be suited to communal rather than to state ownership, while on the other hand a number of means of production (to which, of course, means of transport also belong) acquire an international importance and can become international property, such as, say, the Suez or the Panama Canal. The decisive means of production, to be sure, will pass into the ownership of the state, just as only the modern state can provide the framework for socialist society and create the conditions through which communal or co-operative enterprises become members of socialist production.

Even if socialisation extends at first only to capitalist large-scale industry, it is nevertheless clear that it thereby also transforms into social workers those farmers who cannot live by their farming alone and are compelled to take up a side-occupation, even if it does not in the least touch their landed property. The socialisation of the mines and brickworks, for example, transforms the hundreds of thousands of dwarf farmers who depend on work in the mines or the brickworks to cover the deficit of their agricultural enterprise from capitalist wage-labourers into workers of society. On the other hand, without any expropriation, by the simple socialisation of the sugar factories, the beet-growers are changed from detail-labourers of a capitalist enterprise into detail-labourers of a social one. The same holds for the relation of the milk producers to the butter and cheese factories, which today must more and more take on a capitalist character, and so on. But the socialisation of the large industrial enterprises, by uniting them in one hand, must also transform into social detail-labourers farmers who today, under free competition, appear independently on the market. If all the breweries are united in one hand, the producers of hops and malt are thereby brought without more ado into the same relation to the breweries as the beet-growers to the sugar factories. The relation between grain producers and social flour-mills, between vine-growers and social wine-cellars, and so on, must take shape in the same way.

Even today the dependence of the rural producers on the large-scale enterprises of this kind is considerable; their transformation from capitalist into social property must therefore mean a deliverance for the farmer, especially the small one, just as the socialisation of the mines, etc., does for the dwarf farmer who performs wage-labour.

Hand in hand with the increasing industrialisation of agriculture goes the separation of ground-rent from the profit on capital, of landed property from agriculture, on the one hand in the form of tenancy, on the other in that of mortgage debts. A proletarian regime must unconditionally lead to the socialisation of landed property in both these forms, to the socialisation of the land let out on lease and of the mortgages. The more developed large landed property is (in the countries of the system of tenancy), and the more the mortgage debts are concentrated in few hands, the more this process too, like the socialisation of the agricultural industries, will be regarded by the farmers as a deliverance and joyfully welcomed.

Finally, however, a proletarian regime must also lead to the socialisation of the large agricultural enterprises that rest on the exploitation of wage-labourers. It is true that large-scale enterprise is not advancing in agriculture in the same way as in industry. But it is decidedly false to expect a displacement of large-scale enterprise by the peasant enterprise. Large-scale and small-scale enterprise condition each other in capitalist agriculture.

The independent peasant enterprise has become untenable; it can hold its own only by leaning on a large-scale enterprise. Where there are large industrial enterprises nearby that employ the peasant as a wage-labourer or a detail-labourer, it becomes their slave. Where there are none, it needs a large agricultural enterprise if it is not to sink into the most extreme misery. Large-scale enterprise in the countryside does indeed suffer more from the flight from the land than small-scale enterprise, but the peasant family too is beginning to be broken up by it, and the peasant has not the means at his command to remedy the shortage of labour at least to some extent by an increased use of machines. And if the agrarian crisis expropriates the large landowners poor in capital sooner than the peasants, the ever more rapidly advancing accumulation of capital supplies enough capitalists who know how to draw gain from the union of agricultural with industrial exploitation, which of course is possible for them only within the framework of the large-scale enterprise, not of the peasant one.

Little as we may therefore reckon on a rapid absorption of the small-scale enterprises by the large ones in agriculture, we have still less reason to expect the opposite process. Statistics in fact show us only minimal shifts in the relation of the individual size categories, shifts that are often to be explained by changes in the method of farming — greater intensity of enterprise — and not by economic decline. If in Germany the share of enterprises of more than 50 hectares in the area in agricultural use fell from 1882 to 1895 from 33.00 per cent to 32.56 per cent, that is, by not quite half a per cent, in France from 1882 to 1892 the share of enterprises of more than 40 hectares in the cultivated area increased from 44.96 per cent to 45.56 per cent, that is, by over half a per cent.

These are quite insignificant differences. But here as there large-scale enterprise takes up a very considerable share of the land, almost a third here, almost half there. Yet in France in 1882 only 142,000 owners (out of 5,672,000 farmers, that is, 2.51 per cent) had an interest in these enterprises, and in 1892 only 139,000 (out of 5,703,000, that is, 2.42 per cent); in Germany in 1882 66,614 (out of 5,276,344 farmers, that is, 1.20 per cent), in 1893 67,185 (out of 5,558,317, that is, 1.21 per cent). That these enterprises will pass into social ownership when the continuation of the wage system becomes impossible is surely beyond doubt. But with this alone society already obtains the disposal of a third to a half of the agricultural land.

The great area of the large agricultural enterprise, whose capitalist character is developing more and more, the increase of tenancy and of mortgages, the industrialisation of agriculture — these are the elements that prepare the ground for the socialisation of agricultural production, which must spring from the rule of the proletariat just as surely as the socialisation of industrial production, with which it fuses more and more into a higher unity.

Together with these social elements of socialist agriculture its technical elements also unfold. We have seen how modern science and modern technique take possession of agriculture and revolutionise it, and how the modern large agricultural enterprise reaches its peak in the capitalist latifundium, of which we have given a detailed description (in the seventh chapter). But just as the perfected technique of English agriculture in the last century could thrive only on a few estates that were not subject to the crushing pressure of feudal property, so modern technique can develop only on isolated estates. Once more a social revolution is needed to generalise it and to clear away those obstacles to development that make agriculture wither after a brief upswing. The victory of the proletariat means the abolition of militarism and of the centralisation of the great cities. The socialisation of the large estates frees them from the burdens of the law of inheritance and of absenteeism. But the replacement of wage-slavery by the labour of free co-operators also brings to the large rural enterprises that element of prosperity which is most important for them and whose absence today most hinders their development: sufficient, intelligent, willing and careful labour.

The flight from the land ceases as soon as the worker in the countryside finds sufficient work, and this procures him the same well-being and the same conditions of culture as work in the town. It ceases all the more, the more industry unites with agriculture, and the more commodity production and trade, which strive towards economic centralisation in the great cities, are replaced by production by society and for society, which makes possible an even distribution of the places of production over the whole country and so allows an end to be made of the murderous crowding together of the population in the great cities. The union of industry and agriculture, which finds the first and meanest form of its revival in the industrial wage-labour of the small peasants and cottagers, which appears already more perfected in the farmer’s industrial side-business that works up his raw products, and which today reaches its peak in the modern latifundium, will then become the general law of the whole of social production.

The independent small agricultural enterprise now loses its last support. We have come to know the three forms in which it holds its own: through an industrial side-occupation; through wage-labour for the large agricultural enterprise; and, where both the one and the other are lacking, where the small peasant remains a pure farmer, where he confronts large-scale enterprise not as a wage-labourer but as a competitor, through overwork and underconsumption, through barbarism, as Marx says. With the passing of the capitalist enterprises into social ownership, the small agricultural enterprises of the first as well as of the second kind fall into dependence on social production, and are absorbed by it or turned into its appendages.

But then the independent, purely agricultural small-scale enterprises lose all attraction for their owners. Even today the position of the urban proletariat is so far superior to the barbarism of the small peasant that the young peasant generation takes to flight from the land just as much as the rural wage-labourers. When all around them socialist latifundia arise, no longer cultivated by needy wage-slaves but by prosperous co-operatives of free, happy people, then in place of the flight from the small-holding to the town there will come the still much more rapid flight from the small-holding to the co-operative large-scale enterprise, and barbarism will be driven out of its last fortresses, in which today it spreads itself, unapproachable, in the midst of civilisation.

It is not his expropriation that socialist large-scale enterprise will bring the small peasant, but his deliverance from a hell to which his private property chains him today.

Social development in agriculture goes in the same direction as in industry. Social needs and social conditions alike press here as there towards the social large-scale enterprise, whose highest form unites agriculture and industry into a firm unity.