I.6. Large-Scale and Small-Scale Enterprise

The more capitalist agriculture becomes, the more it develops a qualitative difference of technique between large-scale and small-scale enterprise.

In pre-capitalist agriculture, as already indicated, no such difference existed, if we disregard the plantation system and similar forms of enterprise that do not come into consideration for us here. The lord cultivated his land with the human and animal labour-power and the implements of his peasants who owed him service. What he himself supplied for it was insignificant and not superior to the peasants’ means of production. The greater number of his servants served first and foremost the greater needs of his household, and did not influence the manner of tilling the fields. Nor was the lord’s estate distinguished from the peasant’s holding by a large connected area. The lord’s plots, like the peasants’, formed scattered strips in the village fields and, like the peasants’, were subject to the compulsory rotation of the fields. The only difference between the peasant economy and the lord’s economy was, as already mentioned above, that the latter was carried on with unwilling forced labourers, who exerted their cattle and themselves as little as possible. The lord’s economy meant an enormous waste of labour-time and means of labour.

That changed when the feudal services ceased and the landowner became the free owner of his land, which he consolidated as far as possible and cultivated with his own implements, his own livestock, his own wage-labourers, according to his own plan. Then the large-scale enterprise took on quite another shape from the small-scale, and now it was the latter that wasted labour and means of labour.

The difference between large-scale and small-scale enterprise was bound to show itself first in house and yard, in the household, which acquired an enormous importance for the large-scale enterprise once it produced with its own livestock, its own implements and its own wage-labourers.

One of the most important differences between industry and agriculture lies in the fact that in the latter the farming enterprise proper and the household still always form a firm unity, while in industry, apart from some rudiments, the two are entirely independent of each other. There is no agricultural enterprise without a household belonging to it. But one can also turn the proposition round and say that in the countryside there is no independent household that does not carry on farming.

That the larger household is superior to the smaller in saving labour and materials scarcely needs proof any longer. If we compare a large estate that comprises as much land as 50 small peasant holdings, we find here one kitchen with one stove, there 50 kitchens with 50 stoves. Here perhaps 5 cooks, there 50. Here perhaps 5 living-rooms are heated in winter and 5 lamps burned, there 50. Here paraffin, chicory coffee and margarine are bought wholesale, there retail, etc.

If we go out of the house into the yard, we find there, with the large-scale enterprise, one cowshed for 50–100 cows where the small peasants have 50 cowsheds for 1–2 cows each; we find one barn, one well, instead of 50. If we then go further, we also find correspondingly fewer roads from the yard to the fields — field railways the peasants cannot use at all — fewer hedges and fences, fewer balks.

The smaller a plot, the greater the length of its boundaries in proportion to its area. With a square plot, the length of the boundary per are amounts, for an area of

To fence in 50 plots of 20 ares each one needs more than seven times as much fencing material, as much labour, as for one plot of 10 hectares.

If we assume as the boundary of the plot a balk 20 centimetres wide, the area thereby rendered unproductive, with a square plot, amounts per are, for an area of

In this way only 2½ ares are lost in bounding a plot of 10 hectares, but 18 ares in bounding 50 plots of 20 ares each.

The longer the boundaries of a plot, the greater too the loss of seed, which (with sowing by hand) unavoidably falls beyond the boundaries, and the greater the expenditure of labour in working the plot.

“The working of the land”, says Krämer in Goltz’s Handbuch der Landwirthschaft (I, p. 198), “with plough, cultivator, harrow, roller, horse-hoe and ridging plough, and the sowing of it with the machine, requires the more cost for the same area, the smaller the parcel is. This increase of outlay on smaller parcels rests on an accumulation of the losses of time that the working of the plots entails. Such losses regularly arise in turning at the headlands, in working crosswise a border strip on the narrow side of the plots, of a width varying with the length of the whole run (headland, Vorend, etc.), and in the cultivation, to be done by hand, of the corners not reached in cultivating the headland.”

But the 50 peasant holdings also need 50 ploughs, 50 harrows, 50 carts, etc., where the one large property manages with far fewer, perhaps a tenth of that number. The large-scale enterprise therefore saves considerably on equipment, with the same mode of farming. The statistics of agricultural machinery show us this too. One of the few machines that are accessible to the smaller enterprise in almost the same way as to the large is the threshing-machine. In 1883 there were counted, per 1,000 hectares of agricultural area, in the enterprises of

No one will want to ascribe this difference to the threshing-machine being more widespread in the small enterprises than in the large.

In spite of the saving on equipment with the same mode of farming, the equipment account of the large-scale enterprise can be much higher not merely absolutely but relatively too, because its mode of farming does not remain the same. For a whole series of implements, and especially machines, can be applied with advantage only in a large-scale enterprise. The peasant cannot make proper use of them.

According to Krafft’s Landwirthschaftliche Betriebslehre, they are fully used only when there is employed

Electric power too can be applied with advantage only in large enterprises.

“It seems out of the question for the present that the electric transmission of power offers a means of raising the net yields of all agricultural enterprises, above all the smaller ones. Even with estates of 1,000 morgen of arable the advantage is still questionable. Only with larger enterprises do favourable conditions arise.” (Köttgen, Ist die Elektrotechnik etc., in Thiels Landw. Jahrb. XXVI, p. 672.)

These data appear in their proper light when one considers that in the German Empire in 1895, of 5,558,317 agricultural enterprises only 306,828 comprised more than 20 hectares, only 25,061 more than 100 hectares. The immense majority of agricultural enterprises are so small that they cannot fully use even a team plough, not to speak of machines.

In 1884 the government of the United States asked its consuls for reports on the prospects for the sale of American agricultural machinery abroad. From all countries with small landed property the reports agree that the enterprises are too small to permit the use of machines or even of improved implements. So from Württemberg, Hesse, Belgium, France, etc. Consul Kiefer reports from Stettin that it is a ridiculous sight for an American to see how people still split wood with axes resembling the tomahawks of the Indians. Consul Mosher in Sonneberg reports: “The agricultural implements in Thuringia are extremely crude. I was recently looking at some old woodcuts depicting farming scenes of this region from the fifteenth century, and was surprised to see how closely the implements shown there resemble those now in use.” Almost only on the ducal model farms does one find modern implements. Consul Wilson in Nice reports something similar from the south of France: “In the interior the old plough of Roman times, which merely scratches the soil without throwing up furrows, is still generally, or at any rate frequently, in use.” (Reports from the Consuls of the United States on Agricultural Machinery, pp. 510, 524, 621.)

Of every 100 agricultural enterprises of each size class in the German Empire in 1895, there used

Everywhere the large-scale enterprise is far ahead in the use of machinery. Apart from the threshing-machine, the use of machines in the small-scale enterprise is scarcely noticeable.

As with implements, tools and machines, so it is too with the human, animal and other forces that move and guide them. The small-scale enterprise needs far more of them on the same area to obtain the same useful effect, and it cannot use them so fully or raise their efficiency so high as the large-scale enterprise. The 50 ploughs and 50 carts of the small peasants in our example need 50 teams and 50 drivers, while the 5 ploughs and carts of the large-scale enterprise need only 5 teams and 5 drivers. The 50 dwarf peasants, it is true, perhaps each have only one cow harnessed, whereas the plough of the large-scale enterprise is drawn by four horses, but that does not make matters better. The double plough, with one ploughman and three horses, does the same work as two single ploughs with two horses each. The three-furrow plough, with one worker and four horses, does as much as three single ploughs with three workers and six horses.

According to Reuning (cited by Roscher, Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 164), about the year 1860 there were found in the Kingdom of Saxony 3.3 horses per 100 Acker of peasant property, on the knights’ estates only 1.5. At the census of 1883 there were found in Germany, per 1,000 hectares of agricultural area,

With the peasant, as is well known, the cows often serve not merely for milk production and breeding but also as draught animals. The large number of cows in the small-scale enterprise is also to be ascribed in no small measure to the peasant’s carrying on more stock-raising and less corn-growing than the large-scale enterprise; the difference in the keeping of horses, on the other hand, cannot be explained in this way.

In Great Britain, according to the agricultural statistics of 1880, there were per 1,000 acres of land

Besides animal labour-power the large-scale enterprise also saves human labour-power, as the examples just given surely prove sufficiently, since, other circumstances being equal, it needs less livestock and fewer implements, applies more labour-saving machines, can give the areas it uses the most rational form and extent, and so on.

But if the single large-scale enterprise needs relatively — in proportion to its area, with the same mode of farming — less livestock and dead stock and fewer labourers, it naturally always employs absolutely more of them than the single small-scale enterprise; and that means nothing else than that it can turn the advantages of the division of labour to account on a far greater scale than the latter. To it alone is possible, in the fullest measure, that specialisation and adaptation of implements and tools to the individual operations of the enterprise by which modern enterprise is so superior to pre-capitalist. So too with the breeds of livestock. The dwarf peasant uses his cow as milch cow, draught beast and breeding stock; with him there is no question of selective breeding, of adapting the breed and the feed to special conditions. Nor can he allot the manifold tasks of his enterprise to different persons. But the large-scale enterprise can, and it gains various advantages thereby. It divides the tasks into those requiring particular skill or care and those requiring merely the expenditure of strength. The former it allots to those of its people who show particular aptitude or carefulness, and whose skill and experience grow by their devoting themselves exclusively or mainly to this particular work. In consequence of the division of labour and the greater extent of the enterprise, moreover, the individual also stays longer at his task, does not have to change it so often, and thereby reduces the loss of time and strength bound up with every change of work and of place of work. Finally, the advantages of co-operation are accessible to it: of the planned working together of many to achieve a definite effect.

An English farmer drew attention to this advantage as early as 1773. He pointed out that a farmer employing on 300 acres the same number of workers that 10 farmers employed on 30 acres each had “an advantage in the proportion of servants, which will not so easily be understood but by practical men; for it is natural to say, as 1 is to 4, so are 3 to 12; but this will not hold good in practice; for in harvest time and many other operations which require that kind of despatch by the throwing many hands together, the work is better and more expeditiously done; for instance, in harvest, 2 drivers, 2 loaders, 2 pitchers, 2 rakers, and the rest at the rick, or in the barn, will despatch double the work that the same number of hands would do if divided into different gangs on different farms.” (Cited by Marx, Capital, I, 2nd ed., p. 334.)

The extent of the enterprise also makes it possible to have particular tasks done quickly and well by specialists, tasks that the peasant does laboriously and badly or has done, often after long waiting in the most pressing circumstances, by a specialist living at a distance; large enterprises sometimes have their own smithies, saddlers’ and wheelwrights’ workshops to carry out repairs and to make simple implements, tools and appliances.

But the most important advantage the large-scale enterprise draws from its greater number of workers is surely the division of labour between so-called manual and mental work. We have seen how important scientific management has become for the agricultural enterprise; how it alone makes possible a planned economy that avoids all waste and all diminution of the wealth of the soil and yet obtains the highest yields; how only a scientifically trained farmer, with rationally arranged and exactly kept accounts, will always find the rotation of crops, the manuring, the machine, the breed of livestock, the kind of fodder that corresponds at any given time to the uninterruptedly changing requirements of science and of the market. In present-day society, however, manual and scientific training are strictly separated. Only an enterprise large enough for the work of directing and supervising the farm to occupy one person exclusively can employ a fully scientifically trained farmer.

This size is a given one under definite conditions. It varies with the mode of farming; with very intensive farming, for example viticulture, it can sink to 3 hectares; with extensive farming, for example pasture farming, rise to 500 hectares. On average, under Central European conditions, one may assume that with more intensive farming an estate of 80–100 hectares, with more extensive farming one of 100–125 hectares, occupies a special person exclusively with management.

Only from this size upwards, then, is an enterprise organised and managed on scientific principles generally possible with us. But in Germany in 1895, of 5,558,317 agricultural enterprises only 25,061 numbered 100 hectares or more! No wonder that so little is yet to be seen of rational agriculture! Goltz declares that the average yield of the harvest is very small “in comparison with the yields that can be, and actually are, harvested even on less good soils, but with careful cultivation. Among practical farmers who have wide experience I believe I shall meet with no contradiction when I assert that it is possible by better cultivation to raise the yields of the harvest by 4–8 hundredweight per hectare on average. In fact, in my opinion, the possibility of raising yields is a considerably greater one still, but I deliberately assume a figure that cannot be contested by any expert”. (Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse und der preußische Staat, p. 165.) Accordingly, with better cultivation Germany could produce 100 million hundredweight more corn without enlarging the area under corn.

The managers and owners of smaller enterprises, who are not fully taken up by management and must themselves lend a hand at the various tasks, are offered by the lower agricultural schools a higher knowledge than the elementary school provides. We are the last to dispute the usefulness of these schools, but it is obvious that the knowledge they spread cannot remotely compare with that offered by the universities and colleges. They seem to us better suited to rearing cheap subordinate officials for the large-scale enterprise, and so reducing its costs of administration, than to forming independent modern farmers. But the agricultural middle schools have yet another side. An expert complains that in them, all too easily, “habits of life are cultivated that are not suited to the middling and still less to the smaller farmer, and that have the consequence that the pupil afterwards does not feel at home in modest circumstances, or does not live in accordance with them, and then has drawn from attending the school no advantage but harm for his whole life”. (Kirchner, in Goltz’s Handbuch I, p. 421.)

Kirchner fears these consequences where student ways and student customs establish themselves in the schools; but the establishment of these externals is, after all, only the consequence of the inner transformation that the agricultural and farming schools bring about. Higher education and contentment with a proletarian standard of life are not compatible with each other. The mass of the educated is recruited from the bourgeoisie and grows up with the demands of a bourgeois standard of life, which, through the influence of the milieu, operating with natural necessity, imperceptibly communicate themselves also to those educated men who work their way up from below. On an income that allows the peasant, the artisan, the industrial worker a highly comfortable existence, the educated man in the long run goes to ruin — physically or morally, very often in both respects. Those conservatives are not so entirely wrong who declare that a higher education makes the peasant unfit for his calling. It is a ridiculous, more often a repulsive exaggeration of this standpoint when even the little bit of education that our elementary school teaches is declared incompatible with peasant existence. That means on the one side degrading the peasant to the level of a beast, and on the other cutting him off from the last possibility of arranging his enterprise at least to some degree rationally.

But that higher education which a completely rational enterprise requires is indeed hard to reconcile with the present conditions of existence of the peasant. That, of course, pronounces a condemnation not of higher education but of the peasant’s conditions of life. It says nothing other than that the peasant enterprise, as against the large-scale enterprise, rests not on its higher performance but on its lower demands. The large-scale enterprise must from the outset perform far more than the small one merely to reach the same net yield, since its expense account bears the costs of maintenance (in money wages and in kind) not only of peasant but also of urban-bourgeois labour-power.

In this respect the middle-sized estates are worst off; they have relatively the highest costs of administration. These fall rapidly the larger the enterprise. An estate of 100 hectares needs a trained manager (owner or tenant); an estate of 400 hectares needs only one subordinate official more; its yield, other circumstances being equal, is fourfold, its costs of administration only one and a half times as great.

Within the peasant class the larger enterprise is, other circumstances being equal, superior to the smaller; the same holds within the class of large-scale enterprises up to certain limits that we shall come to know. On the other hand, at the boundary between peasant and large-scale enterprise there takes place a transformation of quantity into quality, to speak with Hegel, which can bring it about that at this boundary the peasant enterprise is superior — if not technically, then economically — to the somewhat larger one managed by a scientifically trained farmer. The costs of scientifically trained management easily burden a small knight’s estate beyond its capacity. This happens still more easily, of course, where the management is trained not scientifically but merely in the manner of the Junkers. The smaller its capacity, the greater in this case its demands.

On the other hand, the large peasant is superior to the small, the large knight’s estate to the small — always, of course, on the assumption of otherwise equal conditions.

To the technical advantages of the large-scale enterprise over the small must further be reckoned those that accrue to it in constructional works that can operate successfully only when they are undertaken over a larger area, especially works of irrigation and drainage. To drain a small area is often quite impossible, and mostly of little value. As a rule only larger areas are drained. According to Meitzen, in Prussia in 1855 178,012 morgen had been drained on larger properties, only 20,877 on smaller ones. Field railways too are suited only to larger, connected areas.

To all these advantages of the large-scale enterprise in the field of production are now added manifold advantages in the field of credit and of commerce.

In no field is the superiority of the large-scale enterprise over the small greater than in commerce.

“It does not require more time to figure with large than with small numbers. But it costs ten times as much time to make 10 purchases at £100 each as it does to make one purchase at £1,000. … In commerce much more than in industry the same function, whether performed on a large or a small scale, costs the same labour-time.” (Marx, Capital, III, 1, p. 279.)

The costs of transport too, especially on the railway, are reduced for larger masses of goods. Whoever buys wholesale buys more cheaply and better than retail; whoever sells wholesale can sell more cheaply, with the same or even greater gain, and undersell the competition. But the great merchant not only has far lower costs than the small, in proportion to the extent of his turnover; he also commands and surveys the market quite differently from the small. This holds first of all for the merchant proper, but it holds also for the industrialist and the farmer, in so far as they have to perform the functions of a merchant as buyers and sellers of commodities. The factor last mentioned, the lesser command and knowledge of the market, holds far more than for the small merchant for the small artisan, who cannot keep a commercial staff and functions as a merchant only on the side; but it holds most of all for the peasant in his isolation in the countryside. He is the worst off of all buyers and sellers on the commodity market; his commercial knowledge is the least; he is the least able to make quick use of favourable opportunities, let alone foresee them, or to forestall unfavourable ones. Yet his enterprise is far more varied than that of the urban artisan; it comprises far more branches of work and therefore compels him to more various purchases and sales. The shoemaker, besides his tools, need buy only leather, thread and nails; he sells only shoes. The peasant buys, besides his implements, livestock, seed-corn, fodder, artificial manure; he sells livestock, corn, milk, butter, eggs, etc., etc. No one is so dependent on the middleman as he.

This dependence shows itself greatest and most ruinous where the middleman appears at the same time as usurer, where a pressing need of money to pay taxes or debts compels the peasant to dispose of his goods at any price, or even to sell them before they are ready for market.

Here we come upon yet another point in which the large-scale enterprise is superior to the small: credit.

We have seen in the previous chapter that modern agriculture cannot be carried on without capital. We have also seen that where the system of tenancy does not predominate, the mortgage is the chief means by which the farmer procures money. Besides this he can also make use of his personal credit, or he can sell a piece of his estate to get money for farming the rest. This last procedure, however, is not always possible, and very often not advisable. For by reducing the estate the owner loses the advantages of the larger enterprise. Moreover, he loses the prospect of the rise in price of the piece cut off, in consequence of the rise of ground-rent and the fall of the rate of interest. Personal credit and the mortgage, then, are his chief means of procuring capital.

Mortgage credit is employed especially where it is a matter of procuring fixed capital (improvements, buildings — we leave aside here changes of ownership as a cause of mortgage indebtedness); personal credit where it is a matter of procuring circulating capital — manure, seed, wages and the like.

Formerly the indebtedness of the landowner sprang from a state of distress; it was an abnormal condition. In the capitalist mode of production, wherever landowner and farmer are juridically one person, it becomes a necessity springing from the process of production itself. The indebtedness of landed property is there an unavoidable phenomenon. But with that the kind of indebtedness of landed property also becomes an essential factor of agricultural production.

This holds for the small-scale enterprise as for the large. But in obtaining credit the latter has manifold advantages. The concluding and the administration of a mortgage of 200,000 marks entail not correspondingly more labour and cost than those of a mortgage of 2,000 marks; 200,000 marks lent out in a hundred places cause a hundred times as much expenditure of labour as the same sum placed in one.

A drastic example of how this works is given by Lafargue in his noteworthy article on Small Landed Property in France in the Neue Zeit (I, p. 348):

“With a mortgage debt the costs are relatively the more considerable, the smaller the loan and the shorter the period for which it is taken up. The following, for example, are the interest and the usual costs of a mortgage debt of 300 francs:

So for a mortgage debt of a nominal 300 francs the debtor in reality receives only 251 francs 50 centimes.”

In Germany it is no different. In the annual report of the Preußische Zentral-Bodenkredit-Aktiengesellschaft for 1894 — submitted in April 1895 — we read:

“In recent years we have made it our particular concern to make borrowing easier for small and middling owners. If the latter have so far still been very heavily burdened with mortgages at high interest from private persons, foundations and savings banks, the reason lies in the fact that the land-credit institutions in most cases cannot dispense with a valuation even when lending on small properties, and that the costs of valuation actually incurred, which are to be refunded by the borrower, stand in no proportion to the amount of the loan itself in the case of small loans. To remedy this evil we introduced flat valuation charges two years ago. Under these the borrowers have to pay us, without regard to the amount of the costs actually incurred by us, two per thousand of the loan applied for — but at least 30 marks and at most 300 marks. For loans from 1,500 marks, the smallest loan permitted by our statutes, up to 15,000 marks, therefore, only the small sum of 30 marks is always to be paid for valuations and examination fees.”

This “social reform”, then, consists in the fact that for loans of 1,500 marks as much has to be paid in valuation costs as for loans of 15,000 marks! Loans under 1,500 marks are not given at all. The very small landowners get no mortgage credit whatever. They are thus fortunate enough to remain free of debt!

In Prussia, according to the inquiry Meitzen made in 1884, large landed property is more heavily burdened with mortgages than small. The debts entered in the land register amounted, as a percentage of the assessed value, for properties with a net yield for the land tax of

This need not indicate a greater distress of large landed property, but can arise from the greater difficulty of mortgage credit for the peasant. All the more is he dependent on personal credit.

With personal credit, however, matters are still worse than with mortgage credit. The large farmer sells his products directly on the great market; he is in constant contact with it, and so finds credit, if he is a good manager, just like a merchant or an industrialist, in the economic centres in which great loan capital accumulates in great masses looking for opportunities of investment.

The peasant in his isolation, with the small quantity of products he has to sell, does not reach the great market with them. He does his business with the middleman who lives in the nearest small town or visits him. His business transactions remain entirely unknown to the great loan capital of the towns; he has no banker in the town with whom he deposits his receipts and who then also gives him credit. If the peasant needs money, he must turn to one of the rural capitalists near him, and there he has no great choice, for they are thinly sown in the countryside. Often it is the middleman himself, or a village innkeeper or big peasant — people who know his circumstances, to whom small loan transactions are not too insignificant, but who seek to draw, and can draw, all the greater profit from the small loan, since the demand for capital in the countryside far exceeds the supply, the peasant’s distress is often urgent, and the economic superiority of the capitalist enormous. While for the large landowner, at least if he is a sensible and capable farmer, money-usury takes on in the course of capitalist development the shape of modern productive credit, whose rate of interest is adapted to the rate of profit, the peasant remains dependent on the medieval forms of bloodsucking usury, which extorts what it can extort, takes interest out of all proportion to the rate of profit, and thereby, instead of promoting production, entirely undermines the debtor’s existence. Capitalist development brings with it the compulsion to get into debt for the peasant as for the large landowner, but for the former, thanks to his small-scale enterprise, it does not, as for the latter, simply remove the phenomena of medieval debt that are incompatible with the needs of capitalist production.

When we weigh all these advantages of large-scale enterprise in agriculture — the smaller losses of cultivated area, the savings on livestock and dead stock, the fuller use of equipment, the possibility of applying machines denied to the small-scale enterprise, the division of labour, the scientifically trained management, the commercial superiority, the easier procurement of money — we shall find it hard to understand how Professor Sering can assert with complete decision:

“There is not the slightest doubt that absolutely every branch of cultivation can be carried on as rationally in the middling and smaller enterprise as in the large; indeed, that, quite contrary to industrial development, the advancing intensity of cultivation lends the smaller enterprise a very essential preponderance over the large.” (Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland, p. 91.)

In view of this “essential preponderance” one would expect Professor Sering to demand the breaking up of the large estates. But that does not occur to him at all. Immediately after the assertion quoted above he declares:

“From the fact that the large landowners are the leaders in the field of economic progress, it follows only that it would mean a grave injury to our development if large-scale enterprise in the East were to cease entirely. Nowhere does absolute levelling do any good; differentiation is the precondition of all development; it is not only the political but also the economic achievements of our eastern landed aristocracy that make its continued existence appear a national need.”

So the small-scale enterprise has an essential preponderance over the large in respect of rational farming in all fields, and the more so the more intensive the farming; and yet the economic achievements of the large-scale enterprises east of the Elbe make their continued existence appear a national need.

We shall see later how this simultaneous enthusiasm for small-scale and large-scale enterprise is to be explained; here let it only be established that even so enthusiastic a veneration of small-scale cultivation as Sering’s does not dare to draw the consequence of its standpoint and demand the abolition of large-scale enterprise, for fear of thereby paralysing the progress of agriculture.

Among unprejudiced judges, however, one finds very little of this enthusiastic veneration of small-scale enterprise. Krämer, by no means an opponent of the peasantry, aptly sums up the advantages of large-scale enterprise (in Goltz’s Handbuch, I, p. 196):

“It is well known and explicable that the small-scale enterprise is burdened with a disproportionately high outlay on buildings, draught animals and dead stock, and likewise that some of its current needs, for example for heating and lighting, come out higher than in the large-scale enterprise. It lies in the inner nature of certain economic tasks that they can be carried out successfully only on a quantitatively broad basis. So with the breeding of animals, the carrying on of technical industries, the use of machines, the execution of improvements and so on. In such fields the large-scale enterprise is always superior. Similar advantages may accrue to it in the disposal of its products and in the use of credit. Above all, however, it works to its advantage that, by virtue of its position and its task, it is in a position to base its undertaking on a definite plan serving to keep it surveyable and to carry it through in an orderly way, and, in applying the important and fruitful principle of the concentration and division of labour, to develop the economic forces to higher performance as well through practice in particular directions. There is no doubt that the modern development of agriculture has offered precisely the large-scale enterprise more abundant aids of science and technique, which enable it, by means of a specific training of the farm staff, to maintain a superiority in all those respects.”

That sounds somewhat different from the assertion of Professor Sering.

What has the small-scale enterprise to set against these advantages of the large? The greater diligence and greater care of the worker who toils for himself, in contrast to the wage-labourer, and the frugality of the small independent farmer, which exceeds even that of the agricultural labourer.

John Stuart Mill, one of the most zealous champions of small-scale cultivation, brings out as its foremost characteristic the untiring drudgery of its workers. Among other things he quotes in his Principles of Political Economy an English author on the peasants of the Palatinate:

“They labour busily, early and late, because they feel that they are labouring for themselves. … They plod on from day to day, and year to year — the most patient, untirable, and persevering of animals. … It would astonish the English common people to see the intense labour with which the Germans earn their firewood.”

And he speaks further of the “almost superhuman industry” of the small peasants, which makes a powerful impression on all observers. Whether the impression made by the sight of human beings as “the most patient and untirable of beasts of burden” was also an uplifting one may well be doubted.

But the small peasant drives not only himself to work but his family too. In agriculture, after all, household and farm enterprise are intimately bound together, and so the least resistant of all labourers, the children, are always to hand! As in domestic industry, so too in the small peasant economy the family labour of the children works even more ruinously than wage-labour for strangers.

“The labour of women and children in the service of others”, says a reporter from Westphalia, “occurs very rarely and brings no disadvantages whatever in its train; the latter indeed has a decidedly favourable effect. But the children are sometimes overstrained by their own parents, and to such a degree that the reporter believes he can establish an unfavourable effect of this at the recruitment for military service.”

And another writes soothingly:

“The employment of children to an alarming degree occurs at most (!) on the part of their parents and in regard to those children whom the Heuerlinge take in for their board and clothing.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in Nordwestdeutschland, Erhebungen des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, I, pp. 83, 122.)

Truly very soothing!

One must be a very obstinate admirer of small landed property to see an advantage in this compulsion it lays on its workers to become mere beasts of burden, whose whole lifetime, except for the hours of sleeping and feeding, is working time.

This frenzy for work, however, is not a quality inherent in the peasant from the outset. The numerous holidays of the Middle Ages, which have survived to this day in some Catholic regions, already speak against that. Roscher cites the example of a district in Lower Bavaria where 204 holidays a year were counted (among them 40 church-ale days and after-church-ale days in the surrounding parishes, 12 shooting matches, etc.) and where the day’s work ends as early as 4 o’clock in the afternoon! How modest, compared with this, is the demand for an eight-hour working day for 300 days in the year!

Only in the measure that labour for the market arises out of labour for one’s own use does the excessive straining of labour-power develop. It is the spur of competition that drives to it. But the conduct of the competitive struggle by extending working time always goes hand in hand with the technical backwardness of the enterprise. The latter produces the former — and vice versa. An enterprise that is not able to meet competition by technical improvements is driven to stand up to it by straining its workers harder. On the other hand, an enterprise in which the workers can be strained to the utmost will be under far less compulsion to be equipped in the most perfect way technically than an enterprise whose workers set limits to their drudgery. The possibility of extending the working time of the workers is an effective hindrance to technical progress.

The possibility of making fuller use of child labour works in the same direction. We have seen above that a rational agriculture is impossible without considerable scientific insight. The agricultural middle schools and continuation schools are not, it is true, able to replace a thorough university training in the natural sciences and political economy, but they do enable the peasant taught by them to conduct, if not the most rational, at any rate a more rational farming than that of the ignorant peasant. But the need for higher knowledge is triumphantly blocked by the need for the earliest and fullest possible exploitation of the members of the family in the farm. There are, indeed, regions, especially in Bavaria and Austria, where even compulsory elementary schooling up to the age of 14 goes too far for the peasants, where they either cling tenaciously to the reduction of the school-leaving age to 12, or at most 13, or strive for it most energetically.

In the measure that agriculture becomes more of a science, that the competitive struggle between rational farming and the routine farming of the small peasant intensifies, in the same measure the need of the latter grows for increased exploitation of children’s labour-power and for restricting the knowledge imparted to the children.

The greater straining of the labour-power of the small independent farmer and his family is therefore, apart from all ethical and other objections, not to be called an advantage of the small-scale enterprise even from the purely economic standpoint.

Matters stand no better with the small peasant’s greater frugality than with his greater diligence.

We have already seen that the large-scale enterprise is economically at a disadvantage against him because it has to pay, besides manual workers, “brain-workers” too, who make far higher demands than the former. But it must also concede to the manual worker a higher standard of life than that to which the small peasant lets himself be pressed down. The property that whips the peasant into slaving harder than the propertyless wage-labourer also drives him to reduce his demands on life to a minimum, below the level even of the latter’s.

But no more than the first is the second effect in all circumstances a consequence of peasant farming. The same Middle Ages that knew so many holidays also saw the peasants live in merry plenty, stinting themselves of nothing in food and drink, as we have seen. And where medieval conditions, or at least traditions, have survived to the present day, the peasant is still no skinflint even now.

But he becomes one where competition takes hold of his enterprise. This is shown us most clearly by the French peasant, who has been exposed longest, as a free private owner, to the effects of free competition.

An English observer of the early eighties declares that he could imagine no more wretched existence than that of a French peasant. Their houses, he says, deserved the name of pigsties. A French peasant’s house is described as follows:

“There was no window, only two panes that could not be opened, above the door, and neither light nor air unless the door stood open. No shelf, no desk, no cupboard was to be seen; on the floor lay onions, dirty clothes, bread, sacks and an indescribable heap of sweepings. … Almost always men, women, children and cattle lie at night all higgledy-piggledy together. And this lack of comfort does not always come from poverty; the people had lost all sense of decency whatever; they thought of nothing but saving fuel.”

Their avarice degenerates into meanness, says the author elsewhere; they seem even to have lost the capacity for enjoyment already, and so long as they could save a sou, every pleasure and every amenity of life was a matter of indifference to them.

“Not a book or a newspaper was ever to be seen, not a picture or a woodcut on the wall, not a bit of china, not an ornament, not a good piece of furniture, no clock, the pride of the English farmhouse. It is impossible to imagine a life so entirely without any progress, without amenity of any kind. Every penny that is to be spent on the most necessary things is grumbled over. The result is a stingy, miserable, abominable existence that knows no other ideal than to put as many sous as possible into the old stocking.”

Matters are no better, however, in the small rural enterprises of England. How their owners and tenants work and live there is shown us by the latest report of the British parliamentary commission on agriculture (1897). It says there:

“In the whole district (Cumberland) the sons and daughters of the farmers work for nothing. I know of no case where a father pays his son or daughter a wage. They give the sons 1 or 2 shillings for tobacco.”

A small peasant (a small freeholder) from Lincoln declares:

“I have brought up a family and nearly worked them to death. My children said: ‘Father, we won’t stay here and work ourselves to death’, went into the factories, and left me and my wife to our fate.”

Another:

“My children and I sometimes work 18 hours a day, 10 to 12 on average. I have lived here twenty years. I get by only with great difficulty. Last year we lost money. We eat very little fresh meat.”

A third: “We work harder than day-labourers, like slaves. The only advantage we have is that we are free. We live very sparingly”, and so on.

Mr. Read stated before the commission, on the position of the small farmers in the arable districts:

“The only way for him to hold his own is to work like two day-labourers and spend no more than one. His children are more overworked and worse educated than the children of day-labourers.” (Royal Commission on Agriculture, Final Report, pp. 34, 357.)

Only from districts where fruit or vegetable growing predominates, or where there is opportunity for by-employment, do the reports sound less gloomy.

Matters are similar in many regions of Germany. An observer reports from Hesse in the Neue Zeit (XIII, I, p. 471):

“The small peasant ekes out the worst existence imaginable. The rural day-labourers are much better off than he; for, as they themselves say, they are also with the employer ‘with their mouths’, that is, they get their board. With their income they are not so much subject to the whims of the weather, apart from the fact that in bad years the board is worse too.”

As the reason for the day-labourers’ better board it is stated that “giving better food is the only attraction for still getting good workers”. The chief food is potatoes.

“The dwellings of the small peasants are extremely poor, the houses usually of wood and clay, built in an unsightly form and very much neglected in recent years. Besides, the dwelling is very scantily furnished: a table, a bench, a few chairs, a bed with a curtain — a four-poster — a cupboard; that is mostly all their wealth.”

An example of how the peasant art of starving can lead to the economic superiority of a small enterprise is shown us by A. Buchenberger in the Grand Duchy of Baden. In the commune of Bischoffingen he compared a larger peasant holding of 11 hectares with one of 5.5 hectares. The former was compelled by extraordinary circumstances to employ wage-labourers exclusively — a most unfavourable case, since the holding was too small to make up for the disadvantages of wage-labour by the advantages of a large enterprise. The smaller holding was worked exclusively by the owner and his family (wife and six grown-up children). The larger enterprise showed a deficit of 933 marks, the smaller a surplus of 191 marks. The chief cause of the difference is to be sought in the fact that in the enterprise with wage-labourers the board was ample — worth almost one mark per head per day — while in the enterprise in which the members of the family were fortunate enough to be allowed to toil for themselves, the value of the board amounted to only 48 pfennigs per head per day, that is, scarcely half of what the wage-labourers consumed. (Bäuerliche Zustände in Deutschland. Berichte, published by the Verein für Sozialpolitik, III, p. 276.) Had the peasant family of the small enterprise eaten as well as the wage-labourers of the larger, it would have had to show, instead of a surplus of 191 marks, a deficit of 1,250 marks! Its surplus came not from the full barn but from the empty stomach.

Let this picture be completed by a report from the district of Weimar. It says there:

“If, in spite of all these uneconomic conditions, forced sales are not much more frequent still, this rests only on the fact that our small countryman knows how to bear an unbelievable sum of privations for the sake of his independence. There are whole classes of them with whom fresh meat, which the farm-hand on the estate must have at least twice every week, comes to the table only on high feast-days, and with whom fresh butter likewise is one of the delicacies. So long as the people on a small property do not yet keep a team, and still go out as day-labourers besides, they are relatively very well off; it is only with their own team that the meagre life begins.” (Op. cit., I, p. 92.)

Here again the phenomenon that the wage-labourer of the large-scale enterprise is better off than the independent owner of the small.

Finally, let us point to some remarks that we find in a treatise by Hubert Auhagen on Großbetrieb und Kleinbetrieb in der Landwirthschaft (Thiels Landwirthschaftliche Jahrbücher, 1896). Auhagen compared two farms, one of 4.6 hectares and one of 26.5 hectares, as to their profitability, not as to the productivity of the labour-power employed in them. He calculated a greater profitability for the smaller enterprise.

But how does this come about? The children help the small-scale enterprise; they cost the large one money.

“The small peasant, as soon as his children grow bigger, receives substantial help from them. The help of the children often begins as soon as they can walk.”

In the case examined, the small peasant already employs his children in the enterprise, even his youngest at seven. On schooling he spends 4 marks a year. The larger peasant sends his children to school. He has a fourteen-year-old son studying at the Gymnasium, who alone costs him 700 marks a year — more than the whole family of the small peasant spends in cash on its household. What a superiority of the small-scale enterprise!

Besides the youngest, however, the oldest too still slave away hard in the small-scale enterprise.

“I have often found such pensioned old people over seventy who could still replace a full labourer and naturally furthered the prosperity of the farm in high degree.”

Naturally those in their full strength slave all the harder.

“The ordinary day-labourer, especially in the large-scale enterprise, thinks at his work: if only it were knocking-off time; the small peasant, at least at all urgent work: if only the day lasted a few hours longer. … If a particular time is especially advantageous for carrying out a task, as is the case with most tasks, the small-scale enterprise can make better use of that favourable time by getting up earlier and working longer, and in this case also faster, than the larger owner, whose workers then do not usually want to get up earlier, or work longer or better, than on other days.”

But this immoderate toil also reaps its due success: the peasant resigns himself to the most wretched condition. Auhagen tells us with admiration of a peasant in the district of Deutsch-Krone; he

“lives in a clay cottage 9 metres long and 7½ metres deep. In the middle of the house is a door leading directly into the living-room. This living-room is at the same time the bedroom; husband, wife and four children sleep in it. From this room one comes into a small kitchen, and from there into the room of the maid, the only stranger in the household. This room is the best in the house, for the maid rightly wants to be as well off as she could be in another place. The house cost 860 marks to build. Only the master carpenter, the joiner and the stove-fitter were paid out of this; everything else the family had done itself, together with relatives. The wife had been married seventeen years but had used only one pair of shoes; summer and winter she went barefoot or in clogs. She wove clothes herself for herself and her husband. Potatoes, milk, more rarely a herring, formed their food. The husband smoked a pipe of tobacco only on Sundays. The people did not know that they lived particularly simply (simply is good! — K.) and did not express themselves dissatisfied with their condition. … With this simple way of life the people had a small surplus from their farm almost every year. When I asked the people the value of their farm, they answered that it was not for sale to them for less than 8,000 marks.”

What an uplifting hymn of praise to the blessings of the small-scale enterprise, which knows how to produce surpluses even out of the “simplest” conditions, that is, out of the filthiest, most degrading want! The wage-labourer, even in the countryside, already feels himself a human being, not a mere beast of burden; he has higher needs than the small peasant and represents a higher culture than he. So away with the wage-labourer, that is, with the large-scale enterprise; long live the small-scale enterprise, so infinitely superior to it!

For us, to be sure, the subhuman nourishment of the small peasant means as little an advantage of the small-scale enterprise as his superhuman diligence. Both rather testify to us the economic backwardness of the small-scale enterprise; both are obstacles to economic progress. Thanks to them small landed property becomes a means that “creates a class of barbarians standing half outside society, combining all the crudeness of primitive forms of society with all the torments and all the misery of civilised countries”. (Marx, Capital, III, 2, p. 347. Cf. The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, pp. 50, 51.) That conservative politicians seek by every means to preserve this barbarism as the last bulwark of capitalist civilisation is, to be sure, understandable.

Matters stand better with the peasants’ greater care than with their diligence and frugality. Care plays, on the whole, a greater part in agricultural production than in industrial, and it is certainly more likely to be present in the worker who toils for himself than in the wage-labourer. If not against every kind of large-scale enterprise, it does at least form an advantage of the small-scale enterprise against the capitalist kind. But one must not attach too exaggerated an importance to this point. The other weapons of the small-scale enterprise against the large — its overwork, its underfeeding and the ignorance that goes hand in hand with them — work directly against its carefulness. The longer the worker must toil, the worse he feeds himself, the less time and money he can spend on his education, the less the care in his work. And what use is the greatest care to him when he lacks the time to clean the cattle and the cowshed, when he must overburden his draught animals — often only the milch cow — and feed his cattle as inadequately as himself!

On the small peasants in the district of Merzig (government district of Trier), J. J. Bartels, director of the agricultural school at Saarburg, says:

“These small owners live almost solely on potatoes and rye bread; the consumption of meat and fat is very small. One may boldly assert that the nourishment is inadequate, and that the energy of the will suffers from it in particular. The generation is becoming dull, indifferent, incapable of a correct grasp of causes and effects in their own business.” (Bäuerliche Zustände, I, p. 212.)

But the small-scale enterprise becomes most wretched where it does not suffice to feed its man even tolerably, where he must take to a by-employment in order to hold his own. Thus, for example, Professor Heitz of Hohenheim writes of the small peasants in the Swabian districts of Stuttgart, Böblingen and Herrenberg:

“What conditions the higher yields of the large estates — the deeper furrow and careful treatment of the fields, the attractive outward appearance of the produce, the more ample feeding and greater cleanliness of the cattle — all this makes its way only very slowly and laboriously with the peasant, who lacks the courage and the money to venture more. Likewise numerous machines long introduced elsewhere are almost unknown. … And now there is added a circumstance that has its deep roots in the existing conditions. We should like at least to trace the lack of real diligence and perseverance censured in many places not to the character of the people but to small property. It is recognised that the combination of entirely different occupations has a paralysing effect. If the small trader and pedlar loses the inclination and the strength for strenuous work on the land, the peasant is mostly a bad craftsman and the craftsman a bad peasant.” (Bäuerliche Zustände, III, 227; cf. I, 83, 120.)

What this means for German agriculture is shown by the following figures:

The number of wretched hybrid enterprises is thus immense.

If the greater part of the small farmers find themselves in a position that by no means promotes the development of particular care, the large-scale enterprise, on the other hand, is quite able to obtain careful work even with wage-labourers. Good pay, good food, good treatment already do much.

“Through the negligence or the intentional faults of discontented workers, inadequately paid or fed, very much harm can be and will be done to the farm, far more than is saved on wages, while, as experience shows, those enterprises that employ sufficiently paid workers prosper and pay.” (Kirchner, in Goltz’s Handbuch, I, p. 435.)

Well fed and well paid, and intelligent besides — such workers are an indispensable precondition of a rational large-scale enterprise. There is no doubt that this precondition is still lacking today in most cases, and that it would be folly to expect an improvement from the “enlightened despotism” of the large farmers. In agriculture as in industry, the improvement will have to be forced on the entrepreneurs by the organised working class, either directly or indirectly, by means of the power of the state. The labour movement has the task, through the moral and physical raising of the rural proletariat, through the struggle against rural barbarism, of creating an important precondition of rational large-scale agricultural enterprise — and thereby also of clearing away one of the last props of small-scale enterprise.

Besides good pay and good feeding of the workers, however, the large-scale enterprise has yet other means of obtaining greater care in work. Thünen, for example, introduced a system of profit-sharing under which all the permanent workers on the estate received a share of the excess of net profit above a certain minimum. But the method generally used is to employ the division of labour to obtain greater care and conscientiousness from the workers. The large-scale enterprise, as already remarked above, with the great number of workers it employs, has the possibility of picking out individual workers who are particularly skilful, conscientious and intelligent and entrusting them especially with tasks in which quality plays an important part — either as sole workers or as foremen and overseers of the others.

Finally, however, it must be remarked that precisely in the decisive branches of agriculture, above all in arable farming proper, the machine works not only more quickly but also more perfectly than the manual worker with simple tools, and obtains results that the latter cannot reach even with the greatest care. We have seen, indeed, that the machine ploughs, sows, cuts (except with laid corn), threshes, cleans and sorts the grain better than the peasant with a simple tool or implement. Nor have we yet found, Professor Sering notwithstanding, any expert who holds that in arable farming the small-scale enterprise can produce as rationally as the large. No, it is far more modest branches of production in which they still declare it capable of competing.

For certain systems of farming, says Professor Krämer, the large-scale enterprise is to be preferred, for others the small. The latter is the case where one has to do with “complicated and valuable crops, in which the individual tasks demand quite particular care. … Precisely in these tasks of plant cultivation the most abundant opportunity arises for the expedient use of spare hours and the utilisation of the weaker forces too (the little children?! — K.) of the entrepreneur’s family, and hence also for getting the work done cheaply, as is proved in particular by the success of garden and vine cultivation and of the growing and preparation of certain industrial crops in the small-scale enterprise.” (In Goltz’s Handbuch, I, p. 197.)

The importance of these kinds of cultivation, still favourable for the present to the small-scale enterprise, as against arable farming and stock-raising, is shown by the following figures: in 1889 there were planted in the German Empire with commercial crops 161,408 hectares, with vines 120,935 hectares; as against this, with fodder crops and meadow hay 8,533,790 hectares, with corn 13,898,058 hectares, with potatoes about 3 million hectares.

Moreover, there are already enough successful large-scale enterprises in the field of garden and wine cultivation too.

Besides, the area under many commercial crops is declining. That under tobacco in the German customs territory fell from 1881 to 1893 from 27,248 hectares to 15,198 hectares. Since then it has risen somewhat again (1896: 22,076 hectares), but is still far from the extent it had in 1881. The cultivation of flax and hemp has likewise declined. Flax and hemp were grown on 155,100 hectares in 1878, 123,600 hectares in 1883, 68,900 hectares in 1893.

Matters are not much better with hops, whose area rose from 1878 to 1883 from 40,800 hectares to 45,900 hectares, but has since fallen again to 42,100 hectares (1893).

A preference for growing commercial crops can sometimes prove quite disastrous for the peasants.

“As for Bohemia”, writes Dr. Rob. Drill, “it is well known that in hop-growing districts the peasants carry on hop cultivation almost exclusively and thereby make their weal and woe dependent on this one plant. But this procedure is downright gambling, because hops are subject to very violent fluctuations of price. It has happened before now in Bohemia that whole villages were reduced to beggary after one or two bad hop harvests.” (Die Agrarfrage in Oesterreich, p. 24.)

According to Krafft, Betriebslehre, p. 82, the price of hops fluctuates by 1,000 per cent and more.

If one speaks of agriculture in general, the kinds of cultivation in which the small-scale enterprise is superior to the large scarcely come into consideration, and then one may well say that the large-scale enterprise is decidedly superior to the small.

Precisely the “practical men” recognise this too. As a rule they prefer the farming of a large, indebted estate to that of a small, debt-free one representing the same value. A large part of mortgage indebtedness springs from this preference of the “practical men” for the large-scale enterprise. Whoever wants to lay out 50,000 marks on acquiring an estate prefers to buy an estate with a market value of 100,000 marks and take up a mortgage of 50,000 marks on it, rather than acquire one worth 50,000 marks for cash.

But they recognise the superiority of the large-scale enterprise in yet another way: by founding co-operatives. Co-operative enterprise is large-scale enterprise.

It cannot occur to us to deny the importance of co-operatives. The question is only this: are the advantages of co-operative large-scale enterprise accessible to the peasant in all those fields in which the large-scale enterprise is superior to the small? And how far does this superiority reach?

Above all we observe that agricultural co-operation has so far confined itself almost entirely to the fields of credit and commerce. We leave aside here the industrial undertakings of individual co-operatives, such as dairies, sugar factories and the like. Their importance for agriculture we shall discuss further on, in considering agricultural industry. Here we are concerned only with agriculture proper. In it only the co-operatives for improvements can be described as associations that intervene directly in production. The other agricultural co-operatives serve, as has been said, mainly the purposes of credit or of trade.

In these fields, however, the co-operative is of advantage not only to the small enterprise but also to the large.

Nowhere are the preconditions of co-operative organisation more weakly developed than with the peasant, whom his conditions of work and life isolate, confine to a narrow horizon, and rob of the leisure that co-operative self-government requires. Matters are worst in this respect in the police states, in which centuries of bureaucratic tutelage and oppression have entirely killed the habits of a co-operative democracy. Besides ignorance, political unfreedom proves a grave impairment of peasant prosperity. Nowhere are the peasants harder to move to co-operative combination than where the traditions of the patriarchal regime have not yet been shaken and the props of “throne and altar” still stand firm.

Co-operative combination comes far more easily to the large landowners than to the peasants: they are far fewer in number, and leisure, far-reaching connections and commercial knowledge — their own or hired — are amply at their disposal.

And so we find here too, as with every other advance in agriculture, that the large-scale enterprise leads the way. Co-operation has become indispensable for the peasant, but in most cases not as a means of becoming the equal of the large landowner’s isolated performance by uniting many small forces into a joint performance, but as a means of not leaving the advantages that co-operation brings to everyone taking part entirely in the hands of the large-scale enterprise alone, and of snatching a little share of them for himself as well.

In mortgage credit it was the large-scale enterprise that first seized upon the advantages of co-operation. The Prussian Landschaften go back to the last century. They were originally mere compulsory associations of the knights’ estates of individual provinces for granting mortgage credit. In the sixties and seventies of our century they went on, one after another, to lend on estates other than knights’ estates as well. But like the mortgage institutions that make a business of lending, they have no desire whatever to concern themselves with lending on small properties, which causes too much bother and cost. Properties that yield less than a certain net yield for the land tax (150 marks in the province of Saxony, in Schleswig-Holstein, Westphalia, Brandenburg, 240 marks in Pomerania) or stand below a certain assessed value (6,000 marks in Posen) are not lent on.

Here co-operative organisation is a means of procuring for larger landed property advantages that are not accessible to small.

“Drawing a quite summary distinction”, declares F. Hecht in the introduction to his book on the state and provincial land-credit institutions in Germany, already cited, “one may say: the co-operative organisation of land credit has benefited mainly large landed property.”

For the small peasant the credit co-operative comes into consideration mainly for personal credit. What the isolated peasant cannot do, the credit co-operative can: obtain the credit of the great money capital of the towns on modern capitalist terms. If the loans of individual peasants are too insignificant to interest big capital, the borrowings of a whole co-operative play quite another part. And if a loan to a peasant quite unknown to it is too risky a matter for an urban bank, the joint liability of the members reduces the risk to a minimum. So through the credit co-operatives the possibility arises for the peasant too of obtaining money at moderate interest, which, thanks to the improvement of his enterprise that the loan makes possible, he can pay without ruining himself. There is no doubt that the credit co-operatives are of the greatest importance for the peasants, as a means of economic progress — not, it is true, of progress towards socialism, as is often thought, but towards capitalism; yet even as such they are economically most valuable.

But only, of course, where they take root and thrive. And that does not happen so easily. Founding and managing them is no easy matter for simple peasants, and it is questionable whether the great mass of the peasant population is able to make them general without paying too dearly for its lessons. Indeed, to this day there is still very lively dispute about which form of organisation is most suited to the peculiarities of agriculture, and the adherents of one tendency reproach the other with being unable to do anything for the farmers.

The Raiffeisen banks stand under the guardianship of the clergy; in the Schulze-Delitzsch banks the artisans predominate. But even the best-organised rural loan banks will be able to benefit only a part of the peasantry. Not every farmer can get a loan when he needs one. One must proceed with the utmost caution if serious injuries to the co-operative are to be avoided. Those who are not creditworthy, that is, precisely the neediest, fall into the clutches of the village usurer as before. All the same, the credit co-operatives are the co-operatives (apart from those of the agricultural industries) that are the most important for the peasantry. They are also growing rapidly. According to Sering (Das Genossenschaftswesen und die Entwicklung der preußischen Zentralgenossenschaftskasse, Verhandlungen des preußischen Landes-Oekonomie-Kollegiums, February 1897), there were in the German Empire in 1871 only about 100 rural loan banks, in 1891 2,134, in 1896 6,391. In Prussia, according to statistics compiled by the Zentralgenossenschaftskasse, there were about 5,000 co-operative banks on 1 October 1895, when the Kasse came into being, and already 7,636 on 30 October 1897. Among them, to be sure, are the well-known “borrowing co-operatives”.

The large landowner has no need of such institutions. If he is creditworthy, he finds the credit he needs in a simpler way.

Like the co-operatives for mortgage credit, the co-operatives for improvements are no institution peculiar to the small-scale enterprise, and the same holds for the purchasing and selling co-operatives.

Trade — cutting out the competitor on the market, winning the customer and exploiting the state of the market — is not exactly the activity best suited to the peculiar character of co-operation. The individual entrepreneur, independent, ruthless, interested in the liveliest way, sees to it better than the co-operative official.

This holds for the sale of particular goods the more, the more irregular demand and supply and the quality of the products are. It is chiefly to this irregularity that we ascribe the fact that the sale of livestock is so hard to carry on co-operatively. Almost all attempts aimed at it have failed in Germany. But the irregularity of the products makes itself felt far more strongly in a selling co-operative when it is formed by numerous small peasants, who produce in the most various ways under the most various circumstances, than when only a few large enterprises belong to it, each of which farms rationally. Thus, for example, von Mendel-Steinfels reports:

“The co-operative sale of butter has proved itself everywhere where it was a matter of disposing of larger and uniform quantities of butter, that is, of goods from dairy co-operatives or from large landowners. But where the co-operative had to see to the disposal of the butter of many small producers, it has always suffered shipwreck.” (Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, IV, p. 950.)

What the dairy co-operatives mean for the small peasant we shall, as already said, examine later. Here we wish only to establish that the thriving selling co-operatives are as a rule those of the large-scale enterprise, not of the small. That holds not only for the sale of butter but also for that of livestock, corn and spirits. The co-operatives for selling spirits, which have been shooting up so fast in North Germany lately, are, looked at in the light of day, nothing but cartels of the distilleries for keeping up the price of spirits.

The selling co-operative will be made useful to the small-scale enterprise on a larger scale only when it becomes possible to bring the individual members of the co-operative to uniform production according to a uniform plan and with uniform means. The prospects for this are slight, and it rather seems that the German peasants are not inclined to pay any more for their lessons in this field. A rapid advance of the peasant co-operatives in this field in the near future is certainly out of the question.

Here they are in the stage of groping and experimenting.

Matters are better, on the other hand, with the purchasing co-operatives for the joint acquisition of artificial manure, fodder, seed, livestock, machines and the like. These are increasing rapidly. Agricultural associations for raw materials were counted: 1875, 56; 1880, 68; 1888, 843; 1894, 1,071; 1896, 1,085.

Besides these there were, in 1894, 214 agricultural co-operatives for implements and machines.

In the field of buying raw materials and machines the agricultural co-operatives may well develop a very fruitful activity. Here the conditions are simple. The market is known; it is the members themselves who place their orders; and the sellers to the co-operative are not scattered small-scale enterprises but large industrial undertakings or large agricultural enterprises (for example, stock-breeders).

The beneficial influence of these co-operatives for the farmer is not to be denied. They save the costs of the middleman’s trade; to be sure, what the farmer gains by it the middleman loses — remarkably enough, no one rails more against the great department stores and consumers’ co-operatives that make their means of consumption cheaper for the workers than the agrarians, the same people who are most zealously bent on ruining the middleman’s trade where it makes goods dearer for officials, officers and landowners. Besides saving the costs of the middleman, the rural purchasing co-operatives have the further advantage of protecting the farmer from adulteration. But here again we must raise the question whether the large-scale enterprise does not have more to gain by it than the small. If, for example, the Berlin central co-operative supplies cheap coal to the large landowners for their steam engines, that is not a mode of proceeding suited to furthering the small-scale enterprise in particular. And the co-operatives that acquire machines in order to sell or hire them to their members will naturally be of the more use to a member, the more machines he can employ, that is, the larger his enterprise. It is evidently not the small peasants but the big peasants and the large landowners who draw the greatest advantage from the steam-plough co-operatives.

On the larger farms of the province of Saxony ploughing is done almost throughout with the steam plough. But only a few of them own one; most of the ploughs belong to steam-plough co-operatives.

At the National-Social party congress at Erfurt (September 1897) Pastor Göhre, in his report on co-operatives, expressed the fear that large landed property would seize the rural co-operatives and make them serve its ends. At the agricultural co-operative congress held at Stettin in 1896, he said, the bureau had been entirely in the hands of the large landowners. Of 41 speakers only 4 small landowners took the floor, for brief remarks. The co-operative congress held at Dresden in 1897 too had been entirely Junkerised. With this agrees the song of praise that Sering sang to the co-operatives in his lecture before the Landes-Oekonomie-Kollegium cited above, because they found a “new community of interests and of work”. “Here we find peasants and large landowners, clergy and teachers, employers and workers active on one another’s behalf and standing up for one another.”

These indications should suffice to show that co-operation is of great importance for modern agriculture, but that it is by no means a means of removing, even in those fields in which it comes into operation, the lead that the large-scale enterprise has over the small. On the contrary, it is in many cases even a means of increasing this lead still further. It seems to us to benefit the middle-sized enterprises most, and the small ones least.

The most important fields of agricultural activity, however, are not accessible at all to the co-operatives of independent individual enterprises.

We have seen that the steam plough of the machine co-operatives (and other machines too, for example drills) cannot be used by the small farmers. Other machines, again, are unsuited from the outset to co-operative use by independent farmers. These are the ones whose use is bound to definite, short periods of time. What is the value of possessing a co-operative reaping-machine when all the members must reap at the same time? Even the co-operative use of threshing-machines is apt to cause quarrels and losses. For the large farmer who owns his steam threshing-machine it has the advantage that he can thresh out the corn while still in the field, immediately after the harvest; he saves the costs of transporting and storing (barn space) the unthreshed grain, and has it ready for sale immediately after the harvest, so that he can take advantage of every turn of the market. These advantages are lost to the co-operator, who must bring in his grain unthreshed and wait until his turn comes.

The advantages of the larger connected area, of the division of labour, of management by scientifically trained people — precisely the decisive advantages of the large enterprise — this kind of co-operation can of course never bring the small farmers. And that is why it is a vain hope to expect that the co-operative will enable the small-scale enterprise to farm as rationally as the large. If the small farmers really want to seize the advantages of agriculture carried on on a large scale by means of co-operation, they must not take roundabout ways but march straight at their goal; then they must not confine themselves to the fields of trade and usury, but must betake themselves to the field that is the decisive one for the farmer, the field of agriculture itself.

It is obvious that a large estate farmed co-operatively can seize all the advantages of the large-scale enterprise, which by mere co-operatives for raw materials, machines, credit and sales can be attained partly not at all, partly only meagrely and imperfectly. At the same time, however, a landed estate farmed co-operatively must have the benefit of the superiority of labour for one’s own advantage over wage-labour. Such a co-operative would therefore have to prove not merely the equal of the capitalist large-scale enterprise but even its superior. But strange to say — this is precisely the kind of co-operative that no farmer takes into consideration. One might perhaps regard some stock-raising co-operatives as timid transitions to such co-operatives, for example the co-operatives for rearing foals. The peasant mostly has no paddock for his foal and is tempted to put it to work too early and thereby ruin it. Nor can he procure suitable stabling and expert supervision, and often not suitable fodder either. The foal-rearing co-operatives remedy this evil, for example the one founded in 1895 at Ihlienworth, in which the members place their foals and where these find healthy stables, a roomy paddock and expert keepers. But this kind of co-operative too, even if it does represent an agricultural enterprise, relates only to subsidiary branches of agriculture, and is likewise only a palliative for removing particular consequences of the isolation and narrowness of the peasant enterprise without taking these qualities themselves from it.

But why is it that the peasants show no sign of carrying on their main enterprises co-operatively as well? Why do they confine themselves to inadequate palliatives?

People have tried to explain this by saying that agricultural labour is not social in nature and therefore not conducive to social enterprise. But the only proof of this is the very phenomenon that is to be explained.

It is not to be seen why modern agriculture, which is fit for capitalist enterprise, should not be fit for co-operative enterprise. Simply because the latter has not yet been tried? That would be a poor reason, for attempts have already been made, and successful attempts at that.

In the first decades of our century, when great thinkers had already recognised that not the small-scale enterprise but the socialist large-scale enterprise is the means of overcoming capitalist exploitation, but when people had not yet learnt to see that the socialist large-scale enterprise requires a series of definite economic, political and intellectual preconditions if it is to come into being on a larger scale and maintain itself — at that time not a few enthusiasts, among them the first and by far the greatest, Robert Owen, tried by founding socialist colonies and co-operatives to call into being at once the beginnings of a socialist society. Not all the attempts succeeded, and those that did were anything but beginnings of a socialist society. But one thing they undeniably proved: the possibility of co-operative production, the possibility of replacing the individual capitalist by social institutions.

Most of these attempts were naturally made in the field of industry. But one was made in the field of agriculture too. It was the co-operative of Ralahine, which prospered splendidly and came to grief only through an unlucky accident. This co-operative experiment is so interesting and so little known that we reproduce the account of our source in full. We take the report from the appendix to Charles Bray, Philosophy of Necessity, II, pp. 581 ff. Brentano has given the same report in his notes to Mrs. Webb’s work on Die britische Genossenschaftsbewegung, p. 229.

“In Ireland”, Bray tells us, “a successful co-operative experiment was made by Mr. Vandaleur on his estate of Ralahine in the county of Clare. His tenants belonged to the lowest sort of Irishmen; they were poor, discontented, dissolute and vicious. Vandaleur very much wished to raise their character and condition, and would also have liked, in his own interest, to obtain steady and useful labourers; he therefore resolved in 1830 to make an experiment on Owen’s principles, with some alterations adapted to the circumstances. About 40 agricultural labourers were ready to enter into his plan, and he formed them into a society under his own direction and supervision. To this society he leased his estate of Ralahine, which comprised 618 English acres (1 acre = 40.49 ares), of which about 267 acres were pasture, 285 arable, 63½ bog and 2½ acres garden. The soil was good on the whole, stony here and there. To it belonged six cabins and an old castle, which were converted into dwellings for the married, as well as other farm buildings, stables, barns, etc., part of which had to serve for fitting up a common dining-hall, a meeting-room, a school, and sleeping-rooms for the children and the unmarried. All this he leased for £700 a year, including a saw-mill, a threshing-machine driven by water and the buildings of a factory and a weaving-shop, but without machinery. For the livestock and dead stock, and for advances made to them so that they would have food and clothing until the next harvest, they had to pay a further £200. They were to live together in the buildings fitted up for the purpose and to work together with the common capital in the common interest. The surplus over the rents named above was to be the property of the members of the society over 17 years of age, in equal shares for men and women, for married and unmarried. The tools, implements and machines were to be kept in good repair and renewed when worn out; the livestock was to be kept at the same level in number and value. The rent was always to be paid in produce of the estate; in the first year it was to be reckoned according to the market prices of the produce at Limerick; in later years the same quantities of corn, beef, pork, butter, etc. were to be delivered in kind as in the first year; and whatever improvements the society made, the rent was not to be raised; they were also promised a lease of long duration at the same rent as soon as they had collected sufficient capital to buy the stock.

“Until then Vandaleur remained its owner. The rent amounted to more than he had ever obtained before. In 1831 the rent of £900 was paid. In 1832 the value of the produce amounted to almost £1,700; the society had received £550 in advances for food, clothing, seed, etc. in that year. Extra advances for building cottages, buying furniture and the like absorbed the surplus; but prosperity was rising and a foundation-stone of welfare and happiness had been laid.

“The members of the society were to work as long, do as much work and take only as much in wages from the common fund as if they were ordinary agricultural labourers, and this until they possessed a capital of their own. For this purpose the secretary kept an exact account of each man’s working time and performance on each day, and at the end of the week each received as much in wages for his work as Vandaleur had formerly paid for it. The prospect of a share in the surplus proved a strong spur to work, and these people did twice as much in a day as the wage-labourers of the neighbourhood. The wages advanced from the common fund were paid in labour notes, which were accepted only in their own store. This enabled the landowner to maintain them without advances in cash, and worked against drunkenness, since intoxicating drinks were not kept in their store and the labour notes were not accepted in the public-houses.

“The store kept only goods of the best quality, which were supplied at wholesale prices. In the Irish manner potatoes and milk formed the chief food, and the amount drawn from the common fund was relatively small, but the advantages the members of the society drew from their union raised their condition high above the usual standard of life of their class. The men received 4 shillings a week. Their expenses were: for vegetables, chiefly potatoes, 1 shilling; milk (10 quarts) 10 pence; washing, etc., 2 pence; sick fund 2 pence; clothes 1 shilling 10 pence. The women received 2 shillings 6 pence a week; they spent 6 pence on vegetables, 8 pence on milk, 2 pence on washing, etc., 1¼ pence on the sick fund, 1 shilling ¾ pence on clothes. Married members who lived separately paid the society 6 pence rent a week and about 2 pence for fuel. All the children from the fourteenth month onwards were maintained from the common fund, without charge to their parents. Up to the eighth or ninth year they were placed in the infant school, then in the common dining-hall together with the unmarried members. The adults paid nothing out of their wages for rent, fuel, lectures, schools or amusements. They bought every article on average 50 per cent cheaper, and got better goods, from their own store than they could get elsewhere. Every member could always count on full employment and on the same daily wage, and the prices of provisions in the store were always the same. The sick and the disabled received a full day’s wage from the sick fund. When a father died, his family was provided for.

“Gradually the number of members rose to double the original number. Dwellings and furniture were clean and neat, the food good and prepared without waste, and they made use of machines as much as possible in every branch of production. The young people of both sexes under seventeen did the work of servants in turn. The working hours lasted in summer from 6 in the morning to 6 in the evening, with an hour’s break at midday. Every evening the managing committee met to arrange the work for the following day, individual inclinations and abilities being taken into account as far as possible. The young people were encouraged to learn a useful trade besides farm work, and everyone, whatever his function in the society, had to help with work in the fields, especially at harvest time. The storekeeper distributed the food, clothing and so on, the gardener the garden produce. Vandaleur sold the surplus produce and saw to the purchases for the farm and the store. All disputes were decided by arbitration, and during the three years of their life together they never needed the intervention of a lawyer or a justice of the peace. Craig, Vandaleur’s zealous and gifted adviser, tells with what admiration visitors to Ralahine spoke of a system that tamed the wild Irish and set cleanliness, health and well-being in place of poverty, rags and misery.

“It is painful to report how this society was suddenly shattered just at the time when it was making rapid progress, and how melancholy the cause of this end was. Vandaleur belonged to the aristocracy, and with all his merits he shared one of its vices. A mania for gambling ruined him, his family and his foundation. He fled from his home; his creditors seized all his property and, without inquiring what claims the labourers of Ralahine had on it, used it to cover their own. The society was not registered, nor had Vandaleur concluded a lease with it; hence the law offered it no protection.”

No less decidedly than Ralahine, the communist communities in North America show what excellent results the co-operative conduct of agriculture on a modern basis can achieve. Nordhoff, in his book on these communities, points out repeatedly that their agriculture far surpasses that of their neighbours in intensity and in the rational use of the forces available. Their prosperity rests not least on their superior agriculture. “They are excellent farmers”, he says of the Amana community, “who keep fine cattle, which they tend with German care; they practise stall-feeding in winter” (p. 40). The Shakers have

“usually fine barns, and all the facilities for work are arranged in the best and most convenient way. … In farming they spare no pains; slowly, year after year, they work at bringing the soil into cultivation, clearing it of stones and making good arable land. They like crops that require much detailed care, such as the raising of garden seeds. They keep fine cattle, and their farm buildings are as a rule excellently arranged to save labour.” (P. 149.)

“The farm (of the Perfectionists of America) is excellently kept.” (P. 278.) “I must not forget to mention that (in the Aurora community) the orchards, vineyards and ornamental gardens are rationally and excellently cultivated. … I do not doubt that they have made Aurora, with its orchards and other valuable crops, what it is at half the cost a private enterprise would have required.” (Pp. 319, 323.)

The Bishop Hill colony “possessed in 1859 ten thousand acres of land, all properly fenced and in excellent condition. They have the finest cattle in the state” (p. 346). And these were not exceptions. Nordhoff in his summary expressly declares superior agriculture to be one of the peculiarities of the communist colonies (p. 415). (The Communistic Societies of the United States.)

That should suffice to show that agricultural labour by no means resists the co-operative form. If, in spite of this, the peasants make no serious attempt to seize this form in the field proper to their activity, the reason for it lies very close to hand.

No one will want to assert that industrial labour cannot be carried on co-operatively in the best way. Yet we see that, in spite of this, the artisans, like the peasants, show no sign of passing over from individual production to co-operative production. Like the peasants, they too try to gain the advantages of the large-scale enterprise through co-operative organisations only in the fields of the circulation of commodities and of credit. Here as there, co-operative large-scale enterprise is to be merely a means of prolonging the life of irrational small-scale production instead of transforming it into large-scale production.

And that is understandable enough. The artisans cannot pass over to co-operative production without giving up their private property in the means of production. The more they possess, the more able they would be, by uniting, to found a large-scale enterprise capable of competing and strong in capital — the less are they inclined to put their private property into a common fund. All the less since in present-day society every such foundation is a leap in the dark, an experiment in which the individual taking part cannot rely on his own abilities, like the venturing merchant in his speculations, but in which his success is entirely dependent on the abilities, the public spirit and the discipline of others — qualities of which the last two are least developed precisely in the artisan working in isolation.

All this holds for the peasant even more than for the artisan. The phrase about the peasants’ fanaticism for property has been declared an insult, but it only expresses a well-known fact. Far more even than the artisan to his individual workshop does the peasant cling to his land. The more the population grows, the greater the craving for land, the more tenaciously he sticks to his plot. In America he leaves his farm, or at least he did until recently, with a light heart when it no longer yielded a sufficient return, in order to move West, where there was still land enough. In Germany and France no privation is too great for him to keep his parcel, no price too high to add a new one to it. One need only think of the difficulties met by so necessary and beneficial an operation as the consolidation of the plots of an individual, scattered higgledy-piggledy among other people’s holdings!

Here it is only a matter of an exchange of plots, by which everyone taking part gains. This operation can be forced on the resisting minority of a commune. Already in the last century “enlightened” absolutism proceeded in this direction, sometimes quite ruthlessly. But even today in Germany we are still far from carrying through the consolidation of holdings generally. One can imagine, then, how hopeless would be the attempt to found a peasant productive co-operative in which those taking part would have not to exchange their plots but to hand them over to the co-operative — an operation that could not be forced on the resisting elements.

And the peasant, inclined to mistrust from the outset, would be particularly inclined to it towards the co-operative, for his present conditions of work and life isolate him even more than the artisan, and develop the co-operative virtues in him even less than in the latter.

Only those elements are able to introduce co-operation into production that have nothing to lose but their chains — those elements whom capitalist enterprise has schooled in social working together, in whom the organised struggle against capitalist exploitation has reared the co-operative virtues: confidence in the whole body of comrades, devotion to the whole, voluntary subordination to it.

No stage of development can be skipped. The great mass of average people cannot under normal conditions pass over directly from handicraft or peasant enterprise to co-operative large-scale enterprise. Private property in the means of production stands in the way of it. Only the capitalist mode of production creates the preconditions for co-operative large-scale enterprise, by producing not only a class of workers for whom private property in the means of production is abolished, but also by making the process of production a social one, and by creating and sharpening the class antagonism between the capitalists and their wage-labourers which compels the latter to strive for the replacement of capitalist property in the means of production by social property.

Not from the possessing, only from the propertyless, can the transition to co-operative production proceed. This is not to say, however, that for peasants and artisans only a single way leads to co-operative production, the way through the transitional stage of the proletariat; that they must of natural necessity be expropriated by capital; that socialist production is impossible so long as there are still peasants and artisans. Nothing could be more mistaken than that. All that is said is that only the victorious proletariat can take the initiative in co-operative production and create the conditions that will make it possible for artisans and peasants too, not merely in idea, as today, but in fact, to pass over to co-operative large-scale production.

Once the socialist co-operatives — we can then no longer speak of proletarian ones — have proved themselves, once the risk has disappeared that still attaches today to every economic undertaking, once the peasant is no longer threatened with proletarianisation by giving up his land, then he too will recognise that private property in the means of production is only an obstacle to his passing over to a higher form of enterprise, an obstacle of which he will then gladly rid himself.

On the other hand, it is an absurdity to expect that the peasant will pass over to co-operative production in present-day society. But that means nothing else than that it is out of the question that co-operation can become for the peasant, in the capitalist mode of production, a means of seizing all the advantages of the large-scale enterprise, and thereby of strengthening and consolidating his peasant property, that tottering pillar of the existing order. The peasant who has once recognised that he can hold his own only by co-operative agricultural production will also come to recognise that such production is attainable for him only where the proletariat has the power to shape social conditions in accordance with its interests. But then he will become a Social Democrat.