I.2. The Peasant and Industry

The capitalist mode of production as a rule (except in some colonies) develops first in the towns, first in industry. Agriculture mostly remains untouched by it for a long time. But industrial development by itself already works to give agricultural production a different character.

The medieval peasant family was a wholly or almost wholly self-sufficient economic co-operative, which not only produced its own food but also built its own house, made its own furniture and household utensils, even fashioned most of its own clumsy tools, tanned its own leather, worked up its own flax and wool, made its own clothes, and so on. The peasant did go to market, but he sold there only the surplus of what he produced, and bought only things he could do without, with the exception of iron, which, however, he used as sparingly as possible. His comfort and his luxuries might depend on how the market went, but not his existence.

This self-sufficient co-operative was indestructible. The worst that could happen to it was a bad harvest, a fire, the invasion of an enemy army. But even these blows of fate meant only passing hardship; they did not cut off the sources of life. Against a bad harvest the large stores that had been laid up mostly gave protection; the cattle gave milk and meat; forest and water also contributed to the table. In the forest, too, there was timber for building, to put up a new house in place of one burnt down. Before the enemy one fled into the forest with cattle and movable goods and came back after he had withdrawn. Whatever he might have laid waste, the arable, the pasture and the forest, these foundations of existence, he had not been able to destroy. If the necessary labour was there, if men and beasts had come to no harm, the damage was soon made good again.

Even in our own century the conservative economist Sismondi has given us a vivid description of the comfortable condition of this independent peasantry, whose condition was his ideal:

“The rural happiness whose picture history shows us in the glorious times of Italy and Greece is not unknown in our own century either. Wherever peasant landed property is to be found, there too is to be met with that prosperity, that security, that confidence in the future, that independence which assure happiness and virtue at the same time. The peasant who with his children does all the work on his little inheritance, who pays neither a rent to anyone above him nor a wage to anyone below him, who regulates his production by the needs of his consumption, who eats his own corn, drinks his own wine, and clothes himself in the flax he has grown and the wool he has raised, cares little about market prices; for he has little to buy or to sell, and he is never ruined by commercial crises. Far from fearing the future, he sees it grow more beautiful in his hopes; for he employs in the interest of his children, nay, of centuries to come, every moment that the year’s work does not demand of him. It costs him little time to put into the ground the seed that in a century will be a mighty tree; to dig the ditch that will drain his field for ever; to lay the conduit that brings him spring water; to improve, by efforts tirelessly repeated and stolen from idle moments, every kind of animal and plant around him. His little patrimony is a true savings bank, always ready to receive all his small gains and to put to use all his moments of leisure. The ever-active power of nature makes them fruitful and repays them a hundredfold. The peasant feels most keenly the happiness that is bound up with his property.” (J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Études sur l’économie politique, I, pp. 170, 171.)

Sixty years ago one of the most eminent economists of his time could still paint this happiness of the small peasant in such vivid colours. The picture may be somewhat too rosy; nor was it the picture of the general condition of the peasantry. Sismondi had chiefly Switzerland and some districts of Upper Italy in mind. But in any case it is not an invented picture, but one painted from nature by a keen observer.

Compare with it the condition of the present-day peasantry throughout Europe, Switzerland included, and one cannot hide from oneself that a tremendous economic revolution has taken place in this period.

The first step towards it was the dissolution of peasant handicraft by industry, mainly urban industry, and by trade in commodities.

Within the peasant family only a slight division of labour was possible, which went no further than that between man and woman. No wonder that urban industry soon outstripped peasant handicraft and created implements and tools for the peasant that he was far from able to make so perfectly himself, and often could not make at all. But the development of industry and trade also produced new needs in the towns, which, like the new, improved tools, penetrated into the countryside all the more rapidly and irresistibly the livelier the intercourse between town and country became; needs which peasant industry was unable to satisfy. Cloth garments took the place of linen smocks and animal skins, bast shoes were displaced by leather boots, and so on. Militarism, which draws the peasants’ sons into the town and makes them familiar with urban needs, furthered this development enormously. To it is chiefly due the spread of the consumption of tobacco and spirits. In the end the superiority of urban industry became so great in some fields that it stamped the products of peasant industry as articles of luxury, which the thrifty peasant could not allow himself to use, and which he therefore gave up producing. Thus the development of the cotton industry, which makes such cheap calicoes, has everywhere greatly restricted the growing of flax for the peasant’s own use, and in many places done away with it altogether.

The dissolution of the peasant industry that produced for its own use had already begun in the Middle Ages, with the rise of urban handicraft. But its advance into the countryside was only slow, was confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the towns, and scarcely perceptibly affected the conditions of life of the peasantry. At about the same time as Sismondi was praising the happiness of the peasant, Immermann in his Hofschulze (in Münchhausen) could draw a big Westphalian peasant who says, “He is a fool who gives the smith what he can earn himself”, and of whom we are told “that he also mends all the posts, doors and thresholds, the chests and boxes in the house with his own hand, or, if luck is with him, even cuts them out new. I think, if he wanted to, he could pass for a cabinet-maker too and would turn out a proper cupboard.” In Iceland there is to this day no separate handicraft worth mentioning. There the peasant is still his own craftsman.

Only capitalist industry is so overwhelmingly powerful that it rapidly drives back the peasant domestic industry that produced for its own use, and only the capitalist means of communication, with their railways, posts and newspapers, carry the ideas and the products of the town into the remotest corners of the country, and so subject the whole rural population, not merely the neighbourhood of the towns, to this process.

The further this process advances, the more the original peasant domestic industry is dissolved, the more the peasant’s need for money grows; he now needs money not only to buy things he can do without, or even superfluities, but also to buy what is necessary and indispensable. He can no longer carry on his farm, no longer keep himself alive, without money.

But at the same time as his need for money there also developed and grew the need for money of the powers that exploited the peasant, the feudal lords and the princes and other holders of the power of the state. This led, as is well known, to the conversion of the peasants’ dues in kind into money dues; but it also produced the urge to screw these dues ever higher and higher. In this way, of course, the peasant’s need for money was increased still further.

The only method by which he could come by money was to turn his products into commodities, to bring them to market and sell them there. But of course it was not the products of his backward industry for which he most readily found buyers, but those products which urban industry did not produce. So the peasant was in the end bound to become what is understood by a peasant today, but what he was by no means from the beginning: a mere farmer. But the more he became this, the further the separation of industry and agriculture went, the more there disappeared that independence, security and comfort of peasant existence which Sismondi still found here and there among the free peasants.

The peasant now became dependent on the market, which he found still more capricious and incalculable than the weather. Against the malice of the latter he could at least protect himself to a certain degree. He could mitigate the effect of too wet summers by drainage ditches and counteract too great a drought by irrigation works; he could protect his vineyards from the spring frosts by smoking fires, and so on. But he had no means of preventing the fall of prices and of making unsaleable corn saleable. And the very thing that had once been a blessing to him now became a curse: a good harvest. This came strikingly to light especially at the beginning of our century, when agricultural production in Western Europe had already generally taken on the character of commodity production, but the means of transport were still imperfect and little able to balance surplus here against shortage there. Just as bad harvests made prices rise, good harvests made them fall. In France the wheat harvest yielded the following returns:

In 1821–22, with a harvest larger by a third, the French farmers obtained only about 200 francs for the yield of a hectare, a third less than in 1816–17. No wonder that the King of France at that time expressed to the Chamber his regret that no law was able “to prevent the inconveniences that arise from the abundance of the harvests”.

The more agricultural production became commodity production, the less could it remain at the primitive stage of direct sale by the producer to the consumer. The more distant and extensive the markets for which the countryman produced, the more impossible it became for him to sell directly to the consumer, the more he needed an intermediary. The dealer steps in between consumer and producer; he surveys the market far better than the latter, he dominates it to a certain degree, and he uses this to exploit the peasant.

The corn and cattle dealer is soon joined by the usurer, if he is not the same man. In bad years the peasant’s money income is not enough to cover his need for money; there is nothing left for him but to draw on his credit, to mortgage his land. A new dependence, a new exploitation begins for him, the worst of all, that by usurer’s capital, which he finds it hard to throw off again. He does not always succeed; often the new burden proves too heavy for him, and the end of the story is the forced sale of the inherited farm, so that the usurer, and perhaps the tax-collector as well, may be paid out of the proceeds. What bad harvests, fire and sword could not do in former times, the crises on the corn and cattle markets now achieve. They bring the peasant not merely passing hardship; they are capable of estranging him from his sources of life — his land — and finally of separating him from them altogether, of making him a proletarian. That is what becomes of the prosperity, the independence and the security of the free peasant wherever his domestic industry for his own use dissolves and money taxes are loaded on to him.

But the development of urban industry also sows the seed of the dissolution of the original peasant family. To a peasant holding there originally belonged as many fields as were necessary to feed the peasant family and, where that applied, to raise the dues to the lord of the manor as well.

But the more dependent on the market the peasant became, the more money he needed, and so the greater the surplus of food he had to produce and sell, the more land he needed in proportion to the size of his family, with conditions of production unchanged, in order to cover his needs. He could not, however, change the established mode of production at will, nor enlarge his landed property at will. But he was free, where his family was too large, to reduce it, to send the surplus-labour-power away from the paternal farm into the service of others, as farm-hand, soldier or urban proletarian, or to America to found a new home. The peasant family was reduced as far as possible.

Another circumstance worked in the same direction. Agriculture is not an activity that always makes the same demands on human labour-power. At times, during the tilling of the fields and above all at harvest, it requires numerous hands, at other times almost none. In summer the need for labour in agriculture is two, three, often even four times as great as in winter.

So long as peasant domestic industry existed, this unevenness in the demands that agriculture made on labour mattered little. If there was nothing or only little to do in the fields, the peasant family worked all the more in the house and about the house. That ceases when peasant domestic industry disappears. Here lies a second reason for the peasant to reduce his family to a minimum, so that he need on no account feed idlers in winter.

We are speaking here only of the effects of the disappearance of peasant domestic industry. Changes in agricultural production can neutralise them — for example the transition from pasture farming to intensive stock-raising, which demands more labour; but other changes can, on the contrary, increase them still further. Thus one of the most important agricultural tasks that filled the winter was the threshing of the corn. The introduction of the threshing-machine puts an end to this, and so becomes a powerful motive for a further reduction of the rural family.

Those who remain must of course toil all the harder in summer. But for all the straining of their powers they do not succeed in replacing the labour of those who have gone. It becomes necessary to bring in auxiliary hands, wage-labourers, who are employed only during the time of the most strenuous work and can be dismissed as soon as they are no longer needed. However highly one may pay them, that still comes cheaper than feeding them as members of the family all the year round. Such hands, however, who hire themselves out for wages, are supplied by the proletarianised peasants, by the peasants who are looking for a subsidiary income, and by the surplus sons and daughters of peasants.

The same development that on the one side creates the need for wage-labourers creates them on the other. It proletarianises some peasants; it reduces the peasant family, as we have seen, and throws the surplus peasants’ sons and daughters on to the labour market. Finally, among the smaller peasants it creates the need for a subsidiary occupation outside their own farm. Their land is too limited to produce a surplus beyond the needs of their own household; they have no agricultural products that they could bring to market. The only commodity they have to sell is their labour-power, which their own farm claims fully only at times. One of the means of turning it to account is wage-labour on larger agricultural enterprises.

Until the seventeenth century we only rarely find day-labourers, farm-hands and maids in the service of peasants. Only from this time on does their employment become more general. But the replacement of members of the family by wage-labourers reacts in turn on the position of the hands who remain within the family. They too are more and more pressed down to the level of wage-labourers in the service of the head of the family, while at the same time the farm, the family inheritance, becomes more and more the exclusive property of the head of the family.

In place of the old peasant family co-operative, which worked its own holding exclusively with its own powers, there appears on the larger peasant farms a band of hired labourers, who under the command of the landowner till his fields for him, tend his cattle and bring in his harvest.

The class antagonism between exploiter and exploited, between the propertied and the proletarian, penetrates into the village, indeed into the peasant household itself, and destroys the old harmony and community of interests.

This whole process, as has been said, had already been set in train in the Middle Ages; but only the capitalist mode of production has accelerated it so much that it has everywhere become decisive for the conditions of the rural population. It has not, however, yet come to its end, and is still going on today, seizing ever new districts, transforming ever further fields of peasant production for its own use into fields of commodity production, increasing the peasant’s need for money in the most various ways, putting wage-labour in the place of family labour. Thus the development of the capitalist mode of production in the town is by itself enough to revolutionise completely the foundations of peasant existence in the old sense, even without capital making its entry into agricultural production and without the antagonism between large-scale and small-scale enterprise arising.

But capital does not confine its operations to industry. As soon as it has grown strong enough, it takes possession of agriculture as well.