I.7. The Limits of Capitalist Agriculture

The upshot of the investigations of the previous chapter is this: large-scale enterprise is technically superior to small-scale enterprise in all the important branches of agriculture, even if not to the same degree as in the decisive branches of industry. That is no new truth. As early as the middle of the last century, when machinery in agriculture was still in its beginnings and the scientific foundations of agriculture had not yet been laid, the founder of the physiocratic school, Quesnay, demanded in his Maximes générales du gouvernement économique d’un royaume agricole:

“The lands devoted to the growing of corn should as far as possible be brought together in large farms worked by rich farmers; for in large agricultural enterprises the outlays on the upkeep and repair of buildings, and proportionately the costs of production, are much lower, and the net product (produit net) much greater, than in small ones.”

In England, too, the economists of that time were mostly supporters of large-scale enterprise, for example A. Young. When Adam Smith says in his Wealth of Nations that a great proprietor is seldom a great improver of agriculture, he is turning not against capitalist large-scale enterprise but against the feudal latifundian estate, with its numerous small tenants, bound to the most varied services and dues and wholly dependent, besides, on the caprice of their lord. Against these he stressed the advantages of free peasant property. But, he adds, “after small proprietors, however, rich and great farmers are, in every country, the principal improvers.” (III, 2.)

It was soon generally admitted that large-scale agriculture, carried on in the capitalist (not the feudal) manner, yields the greatest net return. But however much English agriculture became the model for Europe, English conditions did not always seem exemplary. And the expropriation of the peasantry for the benefit of large-scale enterprise seemed especially questionable. To monarchs and politicians it did so if only because the peasantry formed the core of the army. The English kept no great land army; they could do without the peasant. But a continental nation without peasants could hardly hold its own against a neighbour that possessed a strong peasantry. To this was added another consideration: in England the peasantry had been replaced by a numerous proletariat, as wretched as it was restless, which found no counterweight in a propertied working class. The philanthropists in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, who lacked the courage to press on to socialism like the utopians, as well as the champions of capitalist exploitation, who sought to give private property in the means of production a secure support among the people, therefore became eulogists of small-scale farming, Sismondi and J. St. Mill as much as the “nothing-but-free-traders” and their counterpart, the agrarians. As a rule, it is true, they did not assert its technical superiority, but granted that large-scale enterprise yields the greater net return; they merely pointed to the political and social dangers of the latter.

“The new economists on the one side,” cried Sismondi in his Études sur l’économie politique, “the most experienced agronomists on the other, never tire of praising the richest and most intelligent farmers, who direct large enterprises; they admire the extent of their buildings, the perfection of their implements and tools, the beauty of their cattle. But in the midst of their admiration for things they forget men; they forget even to count them. The English square mile contains 640 acres: that is about the extent of a fine and rich English farm. The former farms, which a family could work with its own hands, without outside help, without day-labourers, but also without unemployment, and which assured every member of the family work for every day in the year, comprised no more than 64 acres. Ten such farms were needed to make one modern one out of them. Ten families of peasants were driven out to make room for one farmer of the new system.”

He combats large-scale enterprise because it creates proletarians, not because small-scale enterprise can produce more or better.

Since then modern large-scale agriculture has developed enormously, but precisely now economists are appearing who assert that small-scale farming is the equal of large-scale enterprise; indeed economists who in the seventies were themselves still proclaiming that the former was untenable now prophesy the end of the latter, for example Dr. Rudolf Meyer, or at least declare it doubtful which form of enterprise is the more rational. At the beginning of this work we cited a statement of Sombart’s to this effect, a statement by an investigator whose impartiality in this question no one will dispute, and who would not put forward his assertion without resting it on definite facts.

What are these facts? They are not to be sought in the field of agronomy; they come from statistics. These show that the rapid disappearance of small-scale farming before large-scale enterprise, which was expected or feared on the Continent after the English model ever since capitalist large-scale enterprise made its entry there on a larger scale, that is, roughly since the fifties, has not taken place. Indeed, here and there there is rather a tendency towards an increase in the enterprises that are small in territorial extent. Thus the German censuses of enterprises found, for example:

In France the development did not go quite in the same direction. There the count was:

While in Germany the middle-sized enterprises grew most (in the area they occupy), in France we find that the largest and the smallest enterprises have gained in land. The middle ones decline in number and area. But this decline is insignificant, with the exception, it is true, of the peasant enterprises proper (10–40 hectares). In any case the development is not a rapid one.

In Great Britain we find:

As in Germany, so in England too we find a growth of the enterprises of middling extent. It is true that in the German Empire it is the enterprises of 5–20 hectares that have gained most in land, while in England it is those of 40–120 hectares, which no one will want to count among the small-scale enterprises. The smallest enterprises, in contrast to Germany, have declined. But so too have the largest enterprises, those over 120 hectares.

From the data available on American agriculture various economists, such as Schäffle, Dr. R. Meyer and others, have sought to deduce that small-scale enterprise is displacing large-scale enterprise there. We shall look a little more closely here at the figures of the American census that point to this. It is true that the average size of farms had been declining since 1850. It was

but by 1890 it was already higher again, 137 acres.

The temporary decline in the average size of enterprises is chiefly to be ascribed to the break-up of the great plantations of the South, which was a consequence of the emancipation of the Negroes. Thus from 1860 to 1890 the average size of the farm fell, for example, in Florida from 445 acres to 107, in South Carolina from 488 to 115, in Alabama from 347 to 126, Mississippi from 370 to 122, Louisiana 537 to 138, Texas 591 to 225. In general the average size of the farm in the South Atlantic states fell in the period named from 353 to 134 acres, in those of the South Central zone from 321 to 144. No expert will see in these figures a victory of small-scale enterprise over modern large-scale enterprise. On the other hand, it is true, we also find a decided reduction in the area of farms in the relatively old cultivated land of the North Atlantic states. There the average size falls steadily, in the last decade too. But this fall is chiefly to be ascribed to the decrease of uncultivated farm land, not to the narrowing of the enterprise. In the region of the North Atlantic states the figures were:

The percentage increase of uncultivated land in the last decade coincides with a decay of agriculture, which shows itself in a general decline of farm land. In the region named this fell from 67,985,640 acres (1880) to 62,743,525 (1890), that is, by more than five million. In the states of the North Central region, on the other hand, the wheat states proper, the average size of farms grew from 1880 to 1890 from 122 to 133 acres.

The movement in the number of large-scale enterprises points to the same development as that indicated by the changes in the average size of the farm. In the Union as a whole, it is true, they decline somewhat relatively. Unfortunately the figures of 1870 are not comparable with the later ones, for at that time the farms were classified according to the extent of their improved land, in 1880 and 1890 according to that of the land they occupied.

The count was:

The increase of the large-scale enterprises, as one sees, lagged behind that of all the others; but this phenomenon too is only a consequence of the development in the former slave states, where the old backward plantation economy became impossible, and of the decay of agriculture in the exhausted North-East.

The count of farms in the North Atlantic states was:

Here the large-scale enterprises declined much faster than the smaller ones. The latter hold out more tenaciously in a hopeless position. Whether that is an advantage of small-scale enterprise may fairly be doubted.

There were farms in the South Atlantic states:

In the South Central states:

In the West, on the other hand:

Finally, in the North Central states, the wheat states proper:

These last figures certainly do not indicate any decline of large-scale enterprise. Where modern agriculture is advancing in America, the enterprises that are large in area are increasing rapidly. Small-scale enterprise keeps the upper hand only where agriculture is decaying, or where pre-capitalist large-scale enterprise enters into competition with peasant enterprise.

But all the same, even if agricultural development in America has so far proceeded faster than in Europe, and even if it shows itself more favourable to large-scale enterprise than is usually assumed, there can be no question there either of a displacement of the small holdings by the large ones.

It would, however, be very rash to conclude from these and similar figures that economic development in agriculture proceeds in quite a different direction from that in industry.

Figures prove! Certainly, but the question is what they prove. In the first place they prove only what they say directly, and with statistical figures that is as a rule very little. Let us take, for example, the figures that are supposed to prove that the prosperity of the mass of the people increases under the capitalist mode of production. Among other things the growth of savings-bank deposits is pointed to. These figures are not to be disputed. But what do they prove irrefutably? That savings-bank deposits are increasing. No more and no less. About the cause of the increase they leave us completely in the dark.

An increase of prosperity may be at work here, but need not be. Quite other causes can produce the same result.

Thus, for example, the mere increase in the opportunities for putting savings into savings banks must lead to an increase of the deposits in them. The Hindu used formerly to bury his savings in the ground. Now savings banks have been founded in the East Indies, and he prefers to deposit his savings there. Does that prove that he can now save more, that his prosperity is growing? The chronic famine does not speak for it.

In Europe the savings banks are of older date. But here too the opportunities for making savings-bank deposits without too great a loss of time are still growing, both through the increase of rural savings banks and through the increase of the population in the towns, where the best opportunities exist for dealing with the savings banks.

Similarly, the increase in the number of wage-labourers, officials and other employees can bring about an increase of savings-bank deposits. A small peasant uses his savings to buy land, an independent handicraftsman to improve his workshop. Whoever works for a salary or wage mostly knows of no better use for his small savings than to deposit them in a savings bank. The displacement of independent small-scale enterprises by capitalist undertakings will therefore be accompanied by an increase of savings-bank deposits. This is then a product of growing proletarianisation; it can go hand in hand with a decline in the prosperity of the mass of the people.

Finally, an increase of this kind can also arise from a mere change in economic habits. Under commodity production there come, for every undertaking and every household, definite moments at which larger payments have to be made, so that the money needed for these occasions must be put by out of the regular income. Before the development of the system of banks and savings banks these sums of money must lie idle as a dead hoard. Today they can be put out at interest until they are called for. The greater the sums that the individual undertakings and households are compelled to put by for periodic payments — in the case of workers, say, for rent, or for times of unemployment — and the more widespread the habit of putting out at interest even the smallest sum not needed for daily consumption, the higher the savings-bank deposits will be, even without any increase of prosperity whatever.

The figures of savings-bank statistics, then, give by themselves no answer at all to the question of the growth of prosperity; instead of solving a problem, they set one.

It is much the same, for example, with the figures of the income tax, which are likewise supposed to prove irrefutably an increase of prosperity. In fact they too, by themselves, prove only what they state, namely that in certain circumstances the number of the smallest taxed incomes, or of the incomes exempt from income tax, grows less rapidly than that of the next higher ones. This can of course indicate an increase of prosperity, but such an increase by no means necessarily follows from it. If the prices of the means of subsistence, of dwellings and so on rise faster than incomes, then the growth of incomes can even go hand in hand with a decline of prosperity.

Other circumstances can bring about the same thing. Let us take, for example, a small peasant with a money income of 400 marks, who, however, pays no rent and produces a large part of his means of subsistence himself. He can perhaps live quite adequately. An accident throws him into the proletariat; he has to move to the town, and there he finds a place with an income of 800 marks a year. His income has doubled, and yet his position has probably worsened. He must now pay rent, perhaps also the railway fare to and from his place of work. Milk, eggs, vegetables, pork, which formerly cost him nothing at all, he must now buy dear; his children may no longer run about barefoot; the worse sanitary conditions call for larger outlays on doctor and chemist. But for the statistician of incomes the man is now twice as well off as before, and the proof is irrefutably furnished that the prosperity of the population is constantly increasing. The case put forward here is typical; the transition from natural economy to money economy and the increase of the urban population at the expense of the rural go on without interruption. These two processes alone may suffice to explain the growth of incomes among the population, without the slightest increase of prosperity.

How the increase in the consumption of meat is to be understood we have already shown above in another connection.

The figures of statistics show us irrefutably that modern society is in a state of constant and rapid upheaval, and they acquaint us with some of its superficial mass phenomena, with symptoms and effects which give us many a valuable hint in searching out the tendencies at work at bottom, but which do not yet reveal these tendencies themselves to us.

So too the figures that show no decrease, or even an increase, of small-scale farms do not yet contain for us any verdict on the tendencies of capitalist development in agriculture, but only a call to investigate them further. At first sight they show us only that the development does not proceed as simply as has hitherto often been assumed, and that this process is probably more complicated in agriculture than in industry.

The course of development of modern industry is in itself highly intricate, although it is simpler than that of agriculture; the most diverse tendencies act on one another there in the most diverse directions, and often the fundamental tendencies can be made out in the tangle only with difficulty.

Large-scale enterprise does not appear in all fields of industry at once. It conquers one after another. Where it attains dominance, it displaces the smaller enterprises; but that is not to say that the smaller entrepreneurs now all become factory workers. They turn to other branches of occupation in which large-scale enterprise does not yet predominate, and overcrowd them. In this way capitalist competition ruins even those branches of trade in which large-scale industry does not yet rule. But this process does not come to light in the form of a general reduction of small-scale enterprises; on the contrary, here and there it produces an increase of small-scale enterprises, so that, relying on the bare figures of statistics, one might suppose that small-scale enterprise was here enjoying a particular upswing. The fields of the numerous impoverished small-scale enterprises are at the same time those in which modern domestic industry, exploited in the capitalist manner, finds the best conditions for its rise and rapid growth. In these circumstances the penetration of capital can lead, instead of to a decrease, to a strong increase in the total number of small-scale enterprises; but whoever knows the social conditions that lie hidden beneath the statistical figures will not read out of them a victorious competitive struggle against big capital.

But even in those fields of which the machine has taken possession, the advance of large-scale industry need not necessarily lead to the disappearance of the small enterprises. It ruins them, it makes them economically superfluous, but it is incredible what tenacity such superfluous existences can display. Hunger and overwork prolong their death-struggle to the utmost; the misery of the Silesian and Saxon hand-loom weavers has been proverbial for a century, and yet they have not died out to this day. If one cannot hold one’s own in production, one goes over to activities that seem too trifling to large-scale enterprise, to repair work, or seeks one’s bread as agent and middleman of the large undertaking.

The democratic forms of the modern state, too, may prove to be one of the factors that serve to preserve outlived small-scale enterprises.

That the power of the state should support, for political reasons, social strata that have lost their economic footing is nothing out of the ordinary. Superfluous as the lumpenproletariat of decaying ancient Rome had become, political considerations compelled the state to maintain it. In more recent times a similar example is offered by the estate of the “noblest and best”, the nobility, which from the seventeenth century on became ever more superfluous and ever more bankrupt; but by its submission to absolute princely rule it knew how to procure itself a parasitic existence, which fed on the marrow of society and whose removal required a revolution.

The traditions of this parasitic life are nevertheless still very much alive in Eastern Europe, and our Junkers know how to shout just as loudly as the Roman rabble two thousand years ago; only they are less modest in their demands. They are not content with dry bread, and their games are more costly than those the state had to give the Roman lumpenproletarians. Only the gladiators they supply themselves, thanks to their peculiar code of honour.

In their demands on the state they have found apt pupils in a section of the petty bourgeoisie. One part of it, it is true, which already feels itself proletarian, joins the wage-labourers in order to fight for better conditions of life, if not for itself, then at least for its children. But another part thinks it will get further by selling its services to the government in return for state support. The ruling classes need these elements; under universal suffrage they need a broad popular class that they can set against the pressing proletariat, and they are ready to buy that part of the petty bourgeoisie which is to be bought. It is not the best elements of the petty bourgeoisie that call out to the governments that they are monarchist to the bone, but that if they are not granted privileges at the expense of the community they will become Social Democrats. Such threats bespeak a thoroughly shabby frame of mind, but whoever needs praetorians is not scrupulous in choosing them. If in 1848 the lumpenproletariat was set on the workers, why not now those sections of the petty bourgeoisie that lend themselves to this dirty work? Indeed it is in fact the workers, not the large-scale enterprises, at whose expense the life of the small-scale enterprises is to be prolonged: by privileging middlemen at the expense of the co-operative stores, by privileging guild masters at the expense of their journeymen and apprentices, by cheap credit, cheap insurance and the like at the expense of the taxpayers.

The more the class struggle sharpens and the more menacing Social Democracy becomes, the more inclined the governments will be to make possible, at the expense of society, a more or less parasitic existence for the economically superfluous small-scale enterprises. The process of their disappearance may perhaps be slowed down by this — the hopes aroused by the promises and measures of the governments must work in that direction, inducing many a man to go on fighting a hopeless fight for longer still, which he would otherwise long since have given up. But no reasonable person will see in this a refutation of the Marxian “dogma”, which speaks only of economic tendencies.

If the “state aid” of the ruling classes can keep economically bankrupt existences afloat for a while yet, and thereby veil the decline of small-scale enterprise, the extravagance in which these classes indulge works no less in this direction.

The development of the capitalist mode of production means a growth in the mass of surplus-value, a growth not only of accumulated capital but also of the revenues of the capitalists, and with it, however, an increase of extravagance among them. Among other things this leads to the revival of feudal forms that were long ago overcome economically. Thus, for example, the kings of finance and owners of latifundia strive to create hunting-grounds of the extent of the medieval forests. It is known from the descriptions in Marx’s Capital how the brutal insolence of a class that has no need to spare money and thinks it ridiculous to spare men drove the tillers of the soil out of wide areas in Scotland in order to replace them first with sheep and then with deer. The same process is going on today in particular parts of France, Germany and Austria. In Austria, according to Endres in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, the forest area has increased since the middle of the century by almost 700,000 hectares, almost 2 per cent of the total area, above all in the Alpine and coastal provinces, which account for almost 600,000 hectares of the increase. From 1881 to 1885, 3,671 hectares of forest land were cleared, while 59,031 hectares of new afforestation were ordered.

In France the area of private forests was roughly 6 million hectares in 1781; it fell to 4.7 million hectares by the year 1844, and has since risen again to 6.2 million hectares today. This despite the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.

In Germany a comparison of the census of 1895 with that of 1882 is unfortunately not possible, for in 1882 forest land was recorded only in so far as it was connected with agricultural enterprises, whereas in 1892 all forest enterprises were counted.

That in Austria it is not only waste lands that are being afforested, but also cattle pasture and arable land, numerous individual examples are to be found in Teifen’s book on Social Misery and the Propertied Classes in Austria. Significant too is the fact that in the province of Salzburg the number of cattle fell by 10.6 per cent from 1869 to 1880, and by a further 4.1 per cent from 1880 to 1890, essentially “through the ever-spreading sale of Alpine pastures to the owners of shooting-rights.” (Drill, Die Agrarfrage in Oesterreich.)

Another feudal form that is endowed with new life by the growth of capitalist revenues is a numerous body of servants kept for personal service, the flunkeydom whose livery already points back to earlier centuries and shows that it stands in contradiction to the spirit of the nineteenth century. To these feudal tendencies corresponds the preference that the fashionable world gives to handwork over machine work in products that serve its personal consumption. Machine production, which works for mass consumption, acts on all in the same way and does not adapt itself to individual whims and needs, is too democratic for the aristocracy of money. That handwork, as against the machine, means a waste of labour-power only makes it seem the more precious and the more suited to raise its buyers above the mass of the rabble.

So handicraft falls heir, alongside domestic industry, the most wretched and miserable of the modern branches of production, to the most distinguished of them as well, the making of articles of outstanding quality. But like the former, this kind of handicraft too becomes a domain of capitalist exploitation. The production of outstanding qualities, whether of clothes and footwear, of paper or textile products, of vegetables or fruit, requires outstanding knowledge, a great expenditure of labour and choice means of production, all things that cost money, a great deal of money. The workshops from which such choice products come may be small ones for the statistician, but for the economist they are workshops that require a great outlay of capital, in which highly skilled handworkers are exploited in the capitalist manner. In many cases they are rather a means of degrading art into capitalist industry than a means of helping handicraft to a new flowering.

But even if this were not the case, it would be absurd to expect a revival of small-scale enterprise from the growth of capitalist extravagance. The growth of this extravagance presupposes the steady and rapid growth of large-scale industry, of mass production, and therefore the steady displacement of small-scale enterprises, the steady increase of the proletariat. For particular districts, for particular branches of trade, the extravagance of the capitalists may call forth a kind of flowering of small-scale enterprise; it cannot do so for the mass of the nation as a whole, for it is itself a product of the progressive proletarianisation of the whole mass of its own nation, and of other nations too. To commend to handicraft the transition to the production of choice qualities as its way of salvation is about as justified as it would be to assume that the capitalist mode of production has the tendency to turn the nations in which it has attained dominance back into hunting peoples. Statistically that could be demonstrated without difficulty.

All this proves not that the “Marxian dogma” is false, but only that the process of the decline of small-scale enterprise is a highly intricate one, crossed by manifold counter-tendencies, which, however, can only disturb and slow it down, here and there outwardly twist it into its opposite, but nowhere in reality arrest it.

The same cross-currents and counter-tendencies that confuse the process in industry also make themselves felt in agriculture; and the analogy is so obvious that we need not dwell on it further. But in agriculture there are still other counter-tendencies at work that do not operate in industry, and these make the whole process more intricate still.

These counter-tendencies peculiar to agriculture, as distinct from industry, will occupy us in what follows.

Here we are struck above all by the great difference that the means of production of industry can be multiplied at will, while the decisive means of production of agriculture, the land, is under given conditions a given magnitude that cannot be multiplied at will.

With regard to capital two great movements can be distinguished: accumulation and centralisation. Accumulation is a result of the formation of surplus-value. The capitalist does not consume the whole profit that falls to him, but only a part of it; under normal conditions he puts a part by and uses it to enlarge his capital. This movement is intertwined with another, the union of various small capitals in one hand into a great capital, the centralisation of capital.

It is quite otherwise with the land. The sum of land that can be newly won for cultivation in old countries of cultivation is a minimal magnitude, hardly worth considering when set against the sums that are accumulated year in, year out by the capitalist class. The landowner can enlarge his landed property only by the process of centralisation, the union of several enterprises into one.

In industry the process of accumulation can go on independently of that of centralisation; indeed, as a rule the former precedes the latter. A great capital can be formed, a great industrial undertaking founded, without touching smaller capitals, without abolishing the independence of smaller enterprises. The latter is as a rule the consequence, not the precondition, of the formation of a large industrial enterprise. In order to found a shoe factory in a place, it is not necessary to expropriate the master shoemakers there. Only when the shoe factory exists and flourishes does it bring about the ruin of the small shoemaking enterprises and their expropriation by the large one. It is the process of accumulation, the piling up of new capital out of unconsumed profits, that creates the great capital for founding the shoe factory.

Where, on the other hand, all the land has passed into private property and small landed property alone prevails, the farmer’s most important means of production, the land, can be obtained for a large-scale enterprise only by the centralisation of several small properties. The ruin of several small-scale enterprises is there the indispensable precondition for the rise of a large one. And not only that: the expropriated small-scale enterprises must form a continuous area if a large-scale enterprise is to be formed out of their centralisation. Some hundreds of peasant holdings sold up by compulsory auction may fall to a mortgage bank in a year; it still cannot form a large-scale enterprise out of them, because, far from adjoining one another, they are scattered in the most various localities. The bank knows nothing else to do with them than to sell them off separately, just as they fell to it, and sometimes, if it finds buyers more easily for smaller parcels, even to split them up and make still smaller enterprises out of them.

As long as the pleasure of the lords decided, it was very easy for them to obtain the land for founding a large-scale enterprise. They quite simply drove out, with more or less disguised force, the peasants who stood in their way.

But the capitalist mode of production needs security of property. As soon as it is out of its revolutionary times and has firmly established its rule, it recognises only one ground for expropriation, inability to pay debts. As long as the peasant can pay his debts to the capitalists and the state, his property is sacred. Private property in land is firmly established. We shall see later what inadequate protection it affords the peasant; but it proves a most effective obstacle to the formation of large landed property, the precondition of large-scale enterprise in agriculture.

Where small landed property alone prevails today, large landed property will be able to form only with difficulty, however decayed the small property may be and however superior large-scale enterprise.

But even where large and small property adjoin, the former will not always easily be able to enlarge itself at the expense of the latter, for the plots of the small-scale enterprises that come up for sale, from need or for other reasons, are not always just the ones needed to “round off” and enlarge the estate.

The farmer whose estate has become too small for him, and who has acquired the means to work a larger one, as a rule prefers to the tedious process of buying out his neighbours, which depends on chance, the much simpler and clearer procedure of selling his estate and buying a larger one. It is chiefly in this form that the enlargement of the enterprise of individual entrepreneurs in agriculture takes place, and this is one of the reasons for the great mobilisation of landed property, for the many purchases and sales of landed estates in the age of capitalism. That those eager to buy always find others eager to sell is seen to by the law of inheritance and by indebtedness, of which we shall have more to say.

Here we wish only to establish that, under the rule of private property, the peculiar nature of the land is in all countries of small landed property an enormous obstacle to the development of large-scale enterprise in agriculture, however superior this may be, an obstacle that industry does not know.

To this is added yet another difference between industry and agriculture. In the former the larger enterprise is, in normal circumstances, always superior to the smaller. Of course in industry too every enterprise has, under given circumstances, a limit beyond which it cannot go if it is not to become unprofitable. The size of the market, of the available capital, of the number of available workers, the supply of raw material, the level reached by technique, set every enterprise its limits. But among the enterprises that keep within these limits the larger will be superior to the smaller.

In agriculture that holds only up to a certain point. This difference arises from the fact that in industry every enlargement of the enterprise also represents an increasing concentration of productive forces, with all the advantages proper to it: saving of time, costs and material, easier supervision and so on. In agriculture, on the other hand, every enlargement of the enterprise, other things being equal, and in particular with the same method of cultivation, also means a greater spatial extension of the enterprise, and so an increase in the losses of material and in the expenditure of forces, means and time that the transport of workers and material entails. These weigh all the more heavily in agriculture because it is a matter there of moving materials of very low value in relation to their weight or volume — manure, hay, straw, corn, potatoes — and the methods of moving them are very primitive compared with industry. The more extensive the estate, the more difficult too is the supervision of the individual workers, which is a very important consideration under the wage system.

How these losses grow with the increasing extent of the estate is vividly illustrated by a table drawn up by Thünen, which we reproduce here, converted into metric measure and with the figures rounded off. Thünen calculated the ground-rent per hectare of various plots lying at various distances from the farmstead, with a yield of rye of:

From this it might indeed seem that agriculture is the more profitable the smaller the estate. That is of course not the case. The advantages of large-scale enterprise are so enormous that they more than outweigh the disadvantages of the greater distance; but only up to a certain extent of area. From that limit on, the advantages of large-scale enterprise grow in smaller measure than the disadvantages of distance, so that from this point on every further extension of the area of the estate diminishes its profitability.

It is impossible to determine exactly, in general terms, the limit from which this sets in. It differs for different technical conditions and conditions of soil, and for different kinds of enterprise. Some tendencies of development go towards pushing this limit further out; this is the effect, for example, of the introduction of steam or electricity as motive power, or of field railways; others, on the contrary, go towards narrowing it more and more. The more people and draught animals are employed in proportion to the area, the more loads are moved — manure, harvest products, machines and heavy implements — the more perceptible the influence of great distances will become. One can say that in general the maximum extent of an estate, beyond which its profitability declines, is the smaller the more intensive the farming, the more capital is put into the same area of land; but that this law is broken through from time to time by technical development.

In a similar direction works the law that the more intensively an estate is farmed, the smaller, with a given amount of capital, its area must be. An intensively farmed small estate can be a larger enterprise than an extensive, extensively farmed one. Statistics, which inform us only of the area of an enterprise, leave us completely in the dark as to whether any reduction of its extent rests on an actual reduction of the enterprise or on an intensification of its farming.

Forestry and pasture farming are capable of the greatest extension. The former needs no centre at all, no farmstead round which it is grouped. In its most extensive form the harvest, the felling and carrying away of the timber, is the only labour it requires. Timber is insensitive to the influences of the weather; it need not be gathered into barns. It is left lying where it was felled until time and opportunity are favourable for carrying it to market. In the timber-slide, in the river, it moves forward of itself.

No more than the timber in the forest do the cattle on the pasture need, at least in a favourable climate, to have food brought to them by man or to be housed in buildings; and in the living state they are far more easily transported even than timber.

Where the necessary market developed, forestry and pasture farming were accordingly the first forms of capitalist large-scale enterprise in the exploitation of the land, as we have already seen (p. 18 ff.). They needed no machines, no scientifically trained managerial staff, no accumulated capital. They needed only the power of individual lords to monopolise the forest and pasture lands for themselves and to rob the peasants of their property in them. And where conditions favoured it, this was amply done.

In the colonies too, where labour is scarce and land plentiful, the exploitation of the forests, and pasture farming in particular, forms the first form of capitalist large-scale enterprise in agriculture, as in the United States, in Argentina, in Uruguay and Australia. The individual pasture districts there sometimes reach the extent of German principalities. In Australia the case has occurred of 200,000 sheep being shorn on a single station in one year.

The enterprises of arable farming are much more limited in their extent than those of forestry and pasture farming. But here too the maximum and average sizes of extensive enterprises exceed those of intensive ones.

The greatest extent among the former has been attained by the North American wheat farms, in which a peculiar mixture of considerable extensiveness of the enterprise with the application of a highly developed technique is to be found.

American agriculture has hitherto been predominantly a robber economy. As long as virgin soil was available in abundance that had not yet become anyone’s property, the farmer could pick out the most fertile soil, coax harvest after harvest from it, and, as soon as he had exhausted it, abandon his farm and move on. This nomadic agriculture had at its command the most excellent tools and machines of a highly developed industry, and since the farmer did not need to buy the land, he could use almost his whole capital to buy these technical aids.

This kind of agriculture needed no manure; it did not need to keep much livestock, and where the climate allowed it could do without stall-feeding. Nor did it need any rotation of crops. Year in, year out it grew the same product, usually wheat; it was a pure wheat factory. All its implements, machines and labour served this one purpose. The enterprise was simple and easy to survey. Under these conditions individual farms could assume an immense extent. The great bonanza farms of Messrs. Dalrymple, Glenn and others, which reached an extent of 10,000 hectares and more, are well known.

In England, on the other hand, with its intensive cultivation, which requires heavy stocking with cattle, rotation of crops and heavy manuring, farms of over 500 hectares are a rarity, 1,000 hectares the maximum.

Just as the capitalist large-scale enterprises in America are superior in extent of area to the European ones, so are the small peasant enterprises. In Germany a peasant who owns 20–100 hectares of land is in general already a big peasant. In the German Empire in 1895, among 5½ million agricultural enterprises, there were counted:

In the United States in 1890, on the other hand, among 4½ million:

The majority of peasant farms in America, then, have the extent of German knights’ estates.

The foundations of this extensive agriculture vanish as soon as all the land has passed into private property and fertile soil is no longer available in abundance. In place of the alternation between arable and fallow the farmer must put the rotation of crops, in place of robber cultivation manuring, and so heavy stocking with cattle and stall-keeping. The farmer must now apply more labour and capital to the same area. If he cannot find this labour and capital in the necessary quantity, then he must reduce his enterprise; the maximum size of the large-scale enterprises is restricted, and the bonanza farms cease to pay. That is the picture drawn for us of the present development in America. And the tendencies driving in this direction undoubtedly exist, even if not to the high degree in which they have often been represented in recent years. There can be no talk of the “approaching end” of large-scale agricultural enterprise in America; the census figures given above show that already.

Nevertheless, we will not declare it out of the question that American agriculture, if it wholly adopts the European mode of farming, will thereby also adopt the European dimensions of the area farmed. The bonanza farms may then well disappear, the large-scale enterprises not go beyond an extent of 1,000 hectares, the peasant enterprises sink to the German average — unless technical development, for example the introduction of electricity into agriculture, creates new conditions that extend the maximum limits of large-scale enterprise even with intensive farming. In any case, however, this decline in extent of area would indicate not a victory of the smaller over the larger enterprise, but only a greater concentration of the enterprise on a smaller area, which can go hand in hand, and indeed mostly must go hand in hand, with an increase in the sum of capital invested in it, often also with an increase in the number of persons employed in it, and so with an actual enlargement of the enterprise.

Just like the transition from simple robber cultivation to a regulated agriculture aimed at the lasting maintenance of the fertility of the soil, so too the displacement of extensive pasture farming by arable farming must produce the tendency towards a reduction in the average size of estates — with the size of enterprise remaining the same or even growing. But the replacement of corn-growing by intensive stock-keeping, which is now taking place to a wide extent precisely in the old countries of cultivation, works in turn in the same direction.

In England in 1880 the average size of stock farms was 52.3 acres, that of corn farms 74.2 acres. Of the area of land the individual size categories occupied:

It is clear that if in England, as is now the case, corn-growing is declining more and more and intensive stock-keeping is taking its place, this must produce the tendency towards a reduction in the size of farms; but it would be to judge very superficially to conclude from this that large-scale enterprise is declining.

For the rest, the more recent figures nevertheless show no reduction of the area of farms on the average. The average size of agricultural enterprises of more than 1 acre in extent (only their area was recorded in 1895) was 61 acres in Great Britain in 1885, and 62 acres in 1895; it has thus increased somewhat.

East of the Elbe too the transition to more intensive farming is pressing towards the narrowing of the farmed area of the larger estates.

“Most of our large estates,” says Sering in his book on Internal Colonisation in Eastern Germany, already mentioned, “are at present far too extensive to allow of a sufficiently intensive cultivation over the whole farmed area. They arose and grew at a time when the general economic conditions did not require that concentration of capital and labour on the individual parcel of arable which is at present a necessity both for the private and for the national economy.… So it comes about that the outlying fields — often a fifth to a quarter of the whole area — are today almost without exception farmed quite extensively, for example by growing lupins or as perennial fodder fields.… On intensively farmed estates in New Western Pomerania with heavy soil it is reckoned that arable lands more than two kilometres away from the main farmstead can no longer be tilled profitably at all.… The widespread lack of sufficient working capital is in part also due to the excessive extent of the estates. —

“The reduction of the area of the estate (by the sale or lease of its outlying parts to small peasant colonists) will thus increase the produce of the soil in two directions. As colonisation covers the former area of the estate with a greater number of farming centres, the fields hitherto inadequately tilled because of their unfavourable situation in relation to the manor farm will also be brought into full cultivation. For the residual estates retained, on the other hand, an increased sum of labour and capital will be available, and their owners, with a reduced burden of interest, will soon obtain the same or a higher net return than before from the undivided area of the estate.” (Pp. 92, 93.)

Hence the large estates east of the Elbe are being reduced, and small peasant farms created alongside them, not because small-scale enterprise is superior to large, but because the former areas of the estates were adapted to the needs of extensive farming.

Two things follow from all this. First, the fact that the bare figures of the statistics of the area of enterprises prove very little. Secondly, that the process of the centralisation of land for the extension of a landed estate, which is in itself much more difficult than that of the accumulation and centralisation of capital, also finds, under given conditions, its definite limits for the individual enterprise.

Only where the tenancy system prevails, therefore, do the large landowners strive to extend the individual estates without end. There the enterprise does not coincide with the property. The individual landowner does not have his whole estate, if it is too large, farmed by a single entrepreneur. He divides it into several farms to be let, whose size he measures so that they bring him the greatest advantage. In this, considerations of the most rational cultivation of the leasehold farm are not alone decisive, but also considerations of the capital resources of the tenants who offer themselves.

Where the system of farming the estate by the owner, or by his officials, prevails, where property and enterprise coincide, the tendency to centralisation, once a large-scale enterprise has been rounded off and provided with sufficient land, expresses itself no longer in the striving to extend it still further, but in the acquisition of a second one besides it.

And this tendency makes itself felt quite strongly in certain circumstances. An excellent illustration of it is given us by Dr. Rudolf Meyer in his interesting book on the fall of ground-rent. He followed the development of large landed property in Pomerania in the greatest detail, and found that, of the rich noble landed property there, 62 owners possessed 229 estates in 1855, but in 1891 485 estates with an area of 261,795 hectares. The families to which these 62 owners belonged, and which numbered 125 members in 1891, possessed 339 estates in 1855 and 609 in 1891, with 334,771 hectares. Further, 62 well-to-do noble estate-owners possessed 118 estates in 1855 and 203 in 1891, with 147,139 hectares; and finally 35 rich bourgeois estate-owners possessed 25 estates in 1855 and 94 in 1891, with 54,000 hectares, while their families taken together, with 47 members, possessed 30 in 1855 and 110 in 1891. In addition Dr. Rudolf Meyer cites 76 noble owners with 182 estates of together 109,950 hectares, and 119 bourgeois estate-owners with 295 estates (131,198 hectares), whose earlier holdings cannot be ascertained.

These figures show a very vigorous tendency to centralisation, which finds a particularly strong expression in the case of individual owners.

Among these we find:

Professor J. Conrad has published in his Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik a series of valuable studies, “Agrarstatistische Untersuchungen” (Studies in agrarian statistics), which throw light in particular on the present extent of the Prussian latifundia. He found holders of 5,000 hectares and more:

The 46 owners of latifundia recorded in Silesia in 1887 possessed together no fewer than 843 estates. Among them:

These are data that by no means point to an “approaching end” of large landed property.

On the extent of Austrian great properties comprising several estates G. Krafft gives the following figures in his Betriebslehre:

This kind of centralisation of land, the union of various estates in one hand, leaves the size of the individual enterprises unchanged, just like centralisation through the mortgage banks. But it differs from the latter in that the centralisation of property is accompanied by a centralisation of management, and with this a new form of enterprise arises, the latifundium. This, and not the unmeasured extension of the individual estate farm, is the form in which the modern giant enterprise in agriculture develops; and this form, no more than the centralisation of capital, knows any limits whatever.

This paves the way for the highest mode of production of which modern agriculture is capable. The union of several enterprises in one hand leads sooner or later to their fusion into one whole organism, to a planned division of labour and co-operation among the individual enterprises.

Some passages from the Betriebslehre (p. 167 ff.) of G. Krafft, who knows the Austrian latifundia from his own observation, may illustrate this.

“Large landed property (so Krafft calls the latifundium) is formed by the union of several large estates or domains, improperly also called lordships. In the case of very extensive large landed properties the domains are combined in groups, the domain districts.”

The administrative organism of a latifundium is articulated roughly in the following way. At the head stands the owner, who either conducts the general management himself or, as is probably mostly the case, leaves it to a central office. “The supervision of a group of domains or a domain district is entrusted to an estate councillor (or farming inspector)” — in view of the high development of the latifundian system in Austria, Krafft uses the designations customary there.

“The activity of the estate councillor extends to supervising the organisation plans of the individual domains which are being carried out, having been approved on the report of the central office.… He presides over the annual conferences of all the heads of domains, in order to regulate the relations between the individual domains; he gives his opinion on the statements of the results of the past year of administration submitted by the heads of domains, which may have to be justified, as well as on the proposals for economic improvements and alterations that the heads submit with the estimates for the coming year, and forwards them to the central office for the owner’s approval.

“For a group of domains, moreover, certain organising work is advantageously centralised in one hand. Thus one frequently finds that the laying down of the principles of breeding and the whole direction of stock-breeding, divided according to the individual kinds of animals, is entrusted to an expert specialist (inspector of sheep-farming, etc.). By such an organisation undoubtedly more considerable successes are achieved than when the determination of the direction of stock-breeding is frittered away among a number of hands, to whom, after all, the immediate carrying out of breeding whose aims have been laid down is still left.

“In the same way, for those components of the domains which are of greater extent, a central organ is created for a group of domains or for the whole of the large landed property. For example, on large landed properties where many new buildings of sugar factories, breweries, etc., and many extensive works of agricultural engineering are carried out, there is a building directorate for all the domains, whose task is both to draw up the plans and estimates of costs for larger buildings and to give its opinion on the plans and estimates sent in by the domain architects, and besides this to supervise the execution of the buildings. Similarly one often finds a forest inspectorate for the forestry of all the domains, headed by a chief forester; for all the mining, a mining inspectorate,” etc.…

“The most important factor in the organisation of the domain (large estate) is the determination of the co-operation of the individual branches of administration of the domain for the lasting attainment of the greatest possible net return.… Besides the organisation of the domain, it is an obvious step to turn the differences of local situation and of the social, climatic and soil conditions of the individual domains to account, in the interest of the yield, by combining them into an organic whole — through the organisation of the whole large landed property. This extends chiefly to making possible cheaper production and better disposal of the products obtained, to achieving a simplification of the administration and, in connection with this, a better use of the auxiliary forces available.

“Cheaper production can be aimed at through the cheaper procurement of means of production, especially of capital, by way of the credit more readily granted to the large landowner; through the use of labour-saving machines whose employment is possible only with a great extent of the field of work, such as steam ploughs in agriculture, the modern means of conveyance (wire-rope slides, railways, forest railways, etc.) in forestry, up-to-date machinery in the various trades, etc.; and through division of labour, in the sense that the different conditions of growth of the domains are turned to account in the interest of plant production. This is done by combining several domains to supply raw material for a technical industry that can be carried on more advantageously on a larger scale, with the fullest possible use of machine power; by setting up seed nurseries and clover and grass seed nurseries on those domains and home farms which produce particularly heavy and fine seed and which therefore take on the task of growing, with particular care, this seed, which the other home farms are to take from them as seed-corn in order to achieve a suitable change of seed. In cases of need the special wealth of meadow and straw of one group of domains can be drawn upon to relieve groups of domains poor in meadow and straw, by the use of portable presses, which bring hay and straw and even stable manure into a transportable condition.

“It may be in the interest of cheaper production to organise the breeding of useful animals on a common plan. The breeding of horses for one’s own needs will have to be confined to a remote domain suited to it. In cattle-breeding some domains or home farms can be assigned to rear the stock needed by the others. Fattening can be concentrated in central fattening stations favourably situated on a railway and near a technical industry, which are supplied from more remote domains with animals unfattened or else — for the better use of fodder that is available but not sufficient for full fattening — half fattened. For the disposal of the milk it may be advantageous to set up, for several home farms, a few dairy factories at suitable points, with a view to reducing the costs of administration through enterprise on a larger scale and with the use of milk centrifuges. At the same time the separation of rearing from the keeping of dairy cattle proper would then have to be carried out, to save costs of administration. In sheep-farming, likewise, a separation according to the individual purposes of use can be carried out. The need for breeding rams is then to be met from suitable nursery flocks.

“The common disposal of the products obtained on a number of domains can be arranged through processing them oneself or through sale to others: through processing in one’s own large corn and oil mills, sugar factories, breweries, saw-mills, etc., or through sale in one’s own markets.

“In the interest of a better disposal of products, the establishment of the most various kinds of means of transport, such as branch railways and horse railways to connect with a main line of railway, wire-rope railways, roads, timber-floating works, canals, etc., is to be substantially promoted, at one’s own cost or by supporting outside entrepreneurs.

“A simplification of the administration can be achieved by using the extent of the property and the neighbouring situation of the individual domains to bring about a division of labour.…

“Finally, an important factor in the organisation of large landed property is the increase in the efficiency of the auxiliary forces employed, through making their proper employment possible. If a person shows special skill in one or another line of production, he is to be put in the place where he can develop the greatest efficiency. Care is, moreover, to be taken by occasionally changing the administrative officers that farming does not degenerate into routine. In smaller administrative bodies these principles cannot always be complied with.

“The greatest difficulties in organising large landed property in the sense indicated above arise when its individual components, the domains, lie very far apart. On the other hand, the successes of such an organisation will stand out most strikingly where the individual domains are not separated in space.

“In all cases the organisation of large landed property — a side of agricultural enterprise that has so far received little or no attention — deserves the most thorough cultivation, because in its progressive development, supported by the advancing elaboration of agriculture as a science, it seems destined to form the factor through which large-scale farming will attain its highest successes.”

It is in giant enterprises of this kind, and not in the dwarf peasant enterprise, that one of the foremost living authorities on agriculture, an old “practical man”, but one armed, to be sure, with the wide view and the knowledge of the theorist, sees the future of modern, rational agriculture.

But this giant enterprise too meets a barrier that hinders large-scale industry in its development only in exceptional cases: shortage of workers.

The extension of the market, the possession of means in money, the presence of the necessary technical preconditions — all this alone does not suffice for the formation of a capitalist large-scale enterprise. The main thing is the workers. All the other conditions may be present, but where the propertyless workers are lacking who must sell themselves to the capitalist, a capitalist enterprise is impossible.

Urban industry in old countries of civilisation, however, does not suffer from a shortage of workers. The proletariat itself multiplies and supplies growing capital with numerous new workers.

But besides this, urban wage-labour is also the chief resort of the offspring of the petty bourgeois and small peasants who find it impossible to set up on their own, as well as of the mass of those former petty bourgeois and small peasants who have been hurled into the proletariat. And large-scale industry can use them all, whether they come from the town or from the country.

Quite otherwise with agriculture. Urban labour today goes on under conditions that make the worker unfit for work on the land. Whoever grows up in the town, or turns to it in his youth, is lost to agriculture. Under present conditions agriculture cannot make up its need for workers from the urban, industrial proletariat.

But under present conditions large-scale agricultural enterprise is also not able itself to produce and to retain the necessary new generation of wage-labourers.

We look for the reason for this phenomenon in a peculiarity that sharply divides agriculture from modern industry. In the latter, in contrast to medieval industry, the economic enterprise is completely separated from the household. In medieval handicraft — and to this day in what is left of it — the two are united. In the time of the guilds the workers in a handicraft enterprise belonged to the household, to the family, of the master. A worker could not arrive at a household of his own, at marriage and a family, without beginning an independent enterprise, without becoming a master.

In modern industry, on the other hand, household and enterprise are separated. Here the worker has the possibility of founding a household of his own without becoming independent as a worker, and we know that he makes ample use of this possibility and so multiplies the wage proletariat, which now becomes a special class. But it is also the separation of the household from the enterprise that first makes the proletarian a free man outside his work, and enables him to acquire those qualities that will make him capable of conquering and holding power in the state.

There were wage-labourers before, but they had no possibility of bringing up children of their own, since they lacked a household of their own, a family of their own. They were the children of master craftsmen or small peasants, and only as masters could they in turn bring up children of their own. Like the students, the journeymen of the crafts, precisely because they were not burdened with wife and child, were a combative race in face of the authorities and the masters; but no more than the students could they think of conquering political power in the state and transforming society in accordance with their class interests. That idea could first come only to the modern wage proletarian with a household of his own, with children condemned to remain proletarians.

But what has been overcome for industry still persists for agriculture. Agriculture is firmly bound up with the household. There is no agricultural enterprise without a household of its own, but neither is there any permanent, settled household in the country without some agriculture.

This may be partly due to the dispersal of the population — in contrast to its concentration in the town. The building of tenement barracks is not practicable there, while small-scale enterprise in exploiting the need for dwellings does not pay, except as a by-employment.

Above all, however, there is the close economic connection between household and agriculture to be considered, especially in small-scale enterprise. Agriculture produces in great part for the direct consumption of the household. On the other hand, the household supplies manure and fodder for the livestock in its refuse; the tending of livestock requires the constant presence on the farmstead of the persons entrusted with it, and so their belonging to the household, and so on.

In these circumstances the position of the wage-labourer in the country assumes a quite different character from that in the town. The completely propertyless wage-labourer living in a household of his own is an exception there. The wage-labourers of a large agricultural enterprise are partly members of its household — farm-hands and maids; in so far as they keep a household of their own, they are as a rule also independent farmers on land of their own or rented land, who devote only part of their working time to wage-labour, and another part to work in their own enterprise.

A peculiar intermediate position is taken by the so-called Deputanten, who receive a fixed yearly wage, besides definite payments in kind and a piece of land, as well as a dwelling on the estate; and besides them by the Instleute, who play an important part as workers on the large estates east of the Elbe. They live on the estate, but in dwellings of their own, and as remuneration for their services they receive partly, like the Deputanten, definite quantities in kind and in land, which they have to cultivate themselves, and partly a wage, but not a yearly wage, as the Deputanten do, but a day wage or piece wage (a share of the threshed corn).

“No completely propertyless worker can enter into the relation of an Instmann. For one thing, the dwelling provided is regularly unfurnished; further, the Instmann has to provide the necessary working tools, in particular scythe and flail. Above all, however, taking up a place as Instmann — just like taking up a place as a married farm-hand — generally presupposes the possession of a cow, or at least of one or more goats, unless the lord of the estate advances the means for procuring them. Finally, the Instmann must be in a position to procure, for the tillage of the land allotted to him, the necessary seed as well, apart from the manure that he produces together with his livestock.” (Dr. Max Weber in the Enquete über die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in Deutschland, III, p. 13.)

The Instmann, who is mostly subject to the Servants’ Ordinance, is something between a farm-hand and a tenant, a survival from feudal times, when the lord knew no better way of turning his land to account than to grant it out in return for the obligation to perform definite services. He is incompatible with modern capitalist agriculture and high ground-rent. In the Province of Saxony, for example, the cultivation of sugar-beet has put an end to the system of Instleute.

Very close to the position of the Instmann in the north-east of Germany comes that of the Heuermann in the north-west.

“Heuerleute are rural labouring families who rent a dwelling and a piece of land from the employer at a low rent, usually cheaper by half than the normal sums customary in the locality, and in return are obliged to place their labour-power at his disposal for a definite number of days, varying in different districts and even on different estates, for a low day wage, usually cheaper by half than the normal sums customary in the locality.” (Dr. K. Kärger in Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, etc., I, p. 3.)

This survival from feudal times too, like the relation of the Instleute, is in process of disappearing.

Besides these categories of workers there are also “free” propertyless day-labourers, who take lodgings with peasants — “Einlieger”, “Losleute”, “Heuerlinge” — and sell their labour-power wherever they happen to find a buyer. They come closest to the urban wage proletarian, but they still differ from him essentially. They form the appendage of another’s household, and “living under another’s roof is always, in the peasant order too, the basis of economic dependence”. (Weber, op. cit., p. 38.)

These conditions are not favourable to the propagation of the propertyless workers in the country. Farm servants are in most cases excluded from the outset from marriage, from the founding of an independent household (as such), and the bringing up of offspring is thereby made distasteful and difficult for them. The sexual instinct is not, of course, to be influenced by this, but it is often forced into unnatural paths so as not to let offspring come into being. If nature proves stronger than all artificial precautions, the unhappy mother sometimes resorts to crime to rid herself of the fruit of her womb. She knows only too well why, for no happy future beckons either to her or to her child. The illegitimate children are exposed to the most unfavourable conditions; a large part of them die early, and another, not small, part later people the penitentiaries.

Where patriarchal conditions of natural economy still prevail, as on many large peasant farms of the Alpine lands, the maid’s child does, it is true, count as a member of the household just as she herself does. It grows up as the playmate of the peasant’s children, eats with them at one table, and notices the social difference only when it comes to work; then it simply belongs to the servants, as its mother does.

But where commodity production and the pure wage relation prevail, the maid’s child is an unwelcome burden, of which one would best be rid as well as one can.

How the centralisation of landed property affects the frequency of illegitimate births is shown by the inquiries that L. Fick made in his book Die bäuerliche Erbfolge im rechtsrheinischen Bayern into the frequency of illegitimate births among the Bavarian rural population.

“If we group the district offices,” he says on p. 307, “according to the number of illegitimate births occurring in them, we obtain the following result, which is of interest for judging the connection between the distribution of landed property and illegitimate births:

Not much better conditions for bringing up offspring are offered by the free day-labourers without a household of their own, the Einlieger.

It is the owners (or tenants) of the small enterprises, who combine an independent household with independent farming, among whom the best conditions are found in the country for the bringing up of a numerous new generation fit for work. They supply not only enough workers for themselves, but a surplus besides. Either by working themselves as day-labourers in the large-scale enterprise, as cottagers whose farming does not take up their whole time; or else — and this they all do, cottagers and peasants alike — by supplying in their children a surplus of workers who find no room in the family farm and are at the disposal of the large-scale enterprise as farm servants or day-labourers.

These places of production of new labour-power diminish more and more where large-scale enterprise advances and displaces small-scale enterprise. By clearing out the peasants large-scale enterprise increases its land, but diminishes the people who are to cultivate it. That alone ensures that, for all its technical superiority, it can never come to rule alone in a country. Large landed property may drive out all the free peasants; a part of them will always rise again as small tenants. Even the sole rule of large landed property cannot lead to the sole rule of large-scale enterprise.

Even in Great Britain in 1895, out of 520,106 farms no fewer than 117,968 were under 5 acres, 149,818 comprised 5–20 and 185,663 20–50 acres. The great majority, then, small-scale enterprises.

Where small-scale enterprise has been pushed back too far, large-scale enterprise becomes less and less profitable and begins to decline. A phenomenon of this kind is making itself felt in many places today; it is already causing a number of eminent agricultural theorists to proclaim “the approaching end of large-scale agricultural enterprise”. That, however, is to throw out the baby with the bath water. In many circumstances the shortage of labour will certainly lead to the decline of large-scale enterprise and the increase of small-scale enterprises, either in such a way that the large landowner or big peasant parcels out a part of his property in order to sell or lease the individual pieces to small farmers, or in such a way that whole large properties are voluntarily sold or sold up by compulsory auction and broken up into small properties.

But like the displacement of small-scale enterprise by large-scale, the reverse process too sets its own limits. In the measure in which the number of small farmers alongside the large ones grows, the number of workers at the disposal of large-scale enterprise also increases, and with it grow the vitality of the latter and its superiority over small-scale enterprise. Where much small-scale enterprise has formed alongside large-scale enterprise, the tendency towards the advance of large-scale enterprise must arise again — naturally, in so far as disturbing factors, for example the transplanting of a large industry to the open country, do not exert a counter-effect. In the capitalist mode of production we have no more to expect the end of large-scale agricultural enterprise than the end of small-scale enterprise.

This in no way contradicts the “Marxian dogma”. Marx, on the contrary, recognised it early. In the fourth number of the Revue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1850) he reviewed a work of Émile de Girardin, Le Socialisme et l’impôt, in which the latter proposed a tax on capital that would, among other things,

“draw capital from little-remunerative land to more remunerative industry, bring down the price of land, and transplant to France the concentration of landed property, large-scale English cultivation and with it the whole developed English industry”.

Marx points out against this that

“it was not by withdrawing capital from agriculture, but on the contrary by throwing industrial capital on to the land, that English concentration and English agriculture came into being”,

and continues:

“The concentration of landed property in England has, moreover, completely swept away whole generations of the population. The same concentration, to which the tax on capital must indeed contribute by ruining the peasants more quickly, would in France drive this great mass of peasants into the towns and make the revolution all the more inevitable. And finally, if in France the turn from parcelling to concentration has already begun, in England great landed property is advancing with giant strides towards its renewed break-up, and proves irrefutably how agriculture must constantly move in this cycle of concentration and fragmentation of the land, as long as bourgeois relations continue to exist at all.”

This cycle, it is true, by no means shows itself as rapidly and as sharply as Marx represented it in 1850, when he was still reckoning with the energy and pace of a rapid revolutionary development; the advance of technique and of science has let the tendency to the enlargement of enterprises in England work longer than Marx expected; only recently has it come to a standstill. On the other hand, counter-tendencies have developed, which we shall come to know later, and which work against the concentration of fragmented landed property.

But the tendency that Marx pointed to here exists, and makes itself felt wherever concentration or fragmentation exceeds a certain measure.

To the majority of bourgeois economists, accordingly, a mixture of large and small enterprises in agriculture appears the most desirable state of things. Only a few petty-bourgeois democrats and socialists grow enthusiastic for the complete displacement of large-scale enterprise by small.

“Friedrich List already, and after him v. Schütz, v. Rumohr, Bernhardi, Hanssen, Roscher and many others, declared that the ideal distribution of landed property under the given conditions — the rule of private property and the system of free competition — consists in a right mixture of large, middle-sized and small estates, so that the large estates form, as it were, the apex of the pyramid and the small ones its base.” (A. v. Miaskowski, Das Erbrecht und die Grundeigenthumsvertheilung im Deutschen Reich, p. 108. Buchenberger has expressed himself to the same effect only recently, in his latest work, Grundzüge der Agrarpolitik.)

Large landed property, all these economists say, is indispensable as the bearer of technical progress and rational cultivation of the soil. The big peasant appears desirable chiefly for political reasons — he, and not the small peasant, is the firm stronghold of private property; besides, his enterprise is far superior to that of the small peasant. The latter, however, is needed as the best supplier of labour-power. Everywhere that large-scale enterprise displaces the small enterprises too much, far-sighted conservative politicians and large landowners are now themselves striving to increase the latter again by measures of the state and of private persons.

“In all European countries with strongly developed large landed property,” writes Sering in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (first supplementary volume), “a strong movement has lately made itself felt, under the pressure of the industrial upheavals, of the excessive migration of agricultural labourers to the industrial districts, of the agricultural crisis and the distress of debt, which seeks to increase the rural middle class by the planned founding of new peasant holdings and the enlargement of old ones that are too small, and to settle the agricultural labourers by granting them possession of land. Germany, England and Russia have passed corresponding laws almost simultaneously; in Italy and Hungary something similar is in prospect.”

For Prussia the laws to be considered here are those of 1886 on the promotion of German settlements in Posen and West Prussia, and those of 1890 and 1891 on the formation of rent-charge holdings (Rentengüter) with the help of state credit and state power.

“It may be assumed,” says Sering of the results of this legislation, “that through the formation of rent-charge holdings as large an area has already reverted to the peasantry as it lost to large landed property in the course of this century through the free traffic in estates (in the six eastern provinces, roughly 100,000 hectares).”

This artificial new creation of small-scale enterprises did not have to be forced on large landed property against its will. No, it is the work of a government and a parliament that have nothing more at heart than the welfare of the Junkers.

“The large landowner obtains the highest gross as well as net returns,” says v. d. Goltz, “when he has smaller and middle-sized landowners, who supply him with labour and are sure customers for the products he produces in abundance, living in great numbers beside and around him.” (Handbuch der Landwirthschaft, I, p. 649.)

From all this it follows that there is no thinking that small landed property will disappear in present-day society and be completely displaced by large property. We have seen that where the concentration of landed property has gone too far, the tendency to fragmentation sets in, and that the state and the large landowners themselves lend a hand when this meets with too great obstacles.

But precisely these efforts of large landed property show us that nothing is more mistaken than the view that the preservation of small-scale enterprise is a consequence of its ability to compete with large-scale enterprise. It is rather a consequence of the fact that it ceases to be a competitor of the latter, that it ceases to count as a seller of the agricultural products that large-scale enterprise produces alongside it. It ceases to play this part where capitalist large-scale enterprise develops alongside it. There it is transformed from a seller into a buyer of the products that large-scale enterprise “produces in abundance”; but the commodity that it itself produces in abundance is precisely the means of production that large-scale enterprise urgently needs, the commodity labour-power.

Where things have gone so far, large-scale and small-scale enterprise in agriculture do not exclude each other; they condition each other, like capitalist and proletarian; but there the small farmer, too, takes on more and more the character of the latter.