I.8. The Proletarianisation of the Peasant

We have already pointed out in the second chapter that the destruction of peasant industry for the peasant’s own use compels those small peasants who produced at most just enough means of subsistence for themselves and their families, but no surplus of them, to look round for a by-employment. The small peasant also finds the necessary time for it, since his own farming claims his full labour-power only at certain times. He covers his need for money by selling not his surplus of products but his surplus of labour-power. On the commodity market he appears in the same guise as the propertyless proletarian. As a landowner, as a producer of means of subsistence on his own land, he works not for the commodity market but for his own household, with which, as we have already seen, his farming is most closely bound up.

But the laws of competition do not hold for the household. However superior the large household may be to the small, however much waste of labour the latter may involve, nowhere do we see even a trace of a tendency towards the centralisation of households, towards the replacement of the many small households by a few large ones.

The household, it is true, does not remain untouched by economic development either; but here development shows itself only in detaching one function of the household after another from it and turning them into independent branches of production. In this way the amount of work in the household is visibly reduced, and with it the number of workers in the household. In so far as any development is to be observed in its size, its direction is precisely the opposite of that of commodity production: from large-scale to small-scale enterprise.

The great peasant household communities we find in the Middle Ages, and still today among peoples whose agriculture is at the stage of the Middle Ages, for example among the southern and eastern Slavs.

If the small peasant’s farming is removed from the sphere of commodity production, if it forms merely a part of the household, then it also remains outside the sphere of the centralising tendencies of the modern mode of production. However irrational and wasteful his parcel farming may be, he clings to it, as his wife clings to her wretched household, which, even with the greatest expenditure of labour, achieves an infinitely meagre result, but which forms the only field in which she need not be subject to another’s will and is free from exploitation.

But the further economic and political development advances, the more the peasant’s need for money grows, and the claims of state and commune on his purse. The more important the earning of money becomes for the small peasant, the more he must let his by-employment come to the fore and neglect his farming. Just as the wage-labour of the woman in industry leads to the stunting, but not to the giving up, of her household, so does the wage-labour, or the domestic industry exploited by capital, of the small peasant. His farming becomes ever more irrational; but it also gradually becomes too large for him, and he finds himself compelled to reduce it.

He easily finds buyers for his surplus parcels.

Where a vigorous peasantry predominates, it regulates the population, and this quality, besides its conservative cast of mind and its military piety, is one of the most important among those that make it so valuable to bourgeois economists and politicians. It proves very suitable for producing and bringing up numerous offspring; where workers and soldiers are needed, that is invaluable. But it can also put a curb on the increase of population, and thereby gladdens the hearts of the Malthusians; where peasant farming alone prevails and there is no opportunity for other earnings outside it, the very limitation of the land compels a restriction in the number of offspring. With equal division of the inheritance this happens through the two-child system; with the handing over of the inheritance to one heir alone, through the impossibility for the other offspring of setting up on their own, founding a household of their own and producing legitimate offspring entitled to inherit.

It is quite otherwise where numerous opportunities develop for earnings outside one’s own farm. Along with the conditions of existence, the increase of population here becomes more proletarian in character; the opportunity of setting up on one’s own is greater, and in such circumstances every child brings its most important inheritance, its arms, into the world with it. The population grows rapidly, and with it the demand for land, not as a means of producing for sale, but as the basis of one’s own household. If the advance of by-employment on the one hand makes possible, and indeed enforces, the reduction in size of the individual farms, and thereby makes it possible for a larger number of smaller enterprises to arise side by side, it also produces a rapid growth of population, which calls for the multiplication of these enterprises.

Instead of centralisation, fragmentation here becomes a need. In such circumstances it can even come to the fragmentation of large enterprises.

We saw in the fifth chapter that the price of a piece of land that serves capitalist commodity production is determined by the amount of its ground-rent. The purchase price is, by and large, equal to the capitalised ground-rent. The capitalist entrepreneur cannot pay more for it if his profit is not to be pressed down below the rate customary in the country. Competition will in general not drive prices above this level. We leave aside here considerations of a non-economic nature, which in certain circumstances screw the price of landed estates up above the level of the capitalised ground-rent.

The peasant who, while he sells agricultural products, employs no wage-labourers or only a few, who is not a capitalist but a simple commodity producer, reckons differently. He is a worker; he lives not on the yield of his property but on that of his labour, and his standard of living is that of a wage-labourer. He needs the land as a means of gaining his livelihood by his labour, not in order to obtain a profit or ground-rent; if the proceeds of his products repay him a wage over and above his outlays, he can exist. He can do without profit and ground-rent. At the stage of simple commodity production, therefore, the countryman can pay higher prices for a given piece of land than, other things being equal, at the stage of capitalist production. This reckoning, it is true, can often put the peasant in a bad fix, namely when he keeps up the habit of simple commodity production of paying an excessive price for the land while he has in fact, if not formally, already passed beyond the stage of simple commodity production and arrived at that of capitalist production — not, it is true, as a capitalist entrepreneur, but as a worker exploited by capital. Where the peasant buys the land but does not pay for it, or not in full, where he leaves a mortgage standing on it, he must get not only a wage but also ground-rent out of his enterprise; and there too high a price for the land can be just as ruinous to him as to the capitalist entrepreneur. High land prices benefit the farmer only when he ceases to be a farmer, that is, when he sells his estate. They harm him when he begins his enterprise and while he carries it on, by increasing his burdens. Our agrarians, however, know only how to propose such means of rescuing distressed agriculture as are apt to raise land prices. These supposedly so patriarchal gentlemen reckon not as farmers but as speculators in land. We shall come back to this in another connection.

The matter stands quite otherwise again with those small farmers for whom farming is exclusively, or at least for the most part, merely a part of the household, whose need for money is satisfied wholly or mainly by work in another’s service. Here every relation of the price of land to commodity production, and so to the law of value, is extinguished, at least for the buyer. For the seller the capitalised ground-rent forms the minimum price of the land; for the buyer only his purchasing power and, above all, his need come into consideration. The more rapid the increase of population, the more difficult an outflow of the population, the greater the absolute necessity of obtaining a patch of land as the basis for eking out the bare necessities of life, or at least of social independence, the higher the prices (or rents) that are paid for a scrap of land. Like work in the household, work in agriculture for one’s own use is not reckoned as an expense; it costs nothing. Everything that the cultivation of the land contributes to the household appears as pure gain. A calculation of the money value of the yield and its division into wages, interest on capital and ground-rent is hardly possible, and is in any case not made, because money plays no part in this kind of economy.

That small estates are dearer than large ones is a well-known phenomenon. In his treatise on mortgage indebtedness in Prussia (Thiels landw. Jahrb. 1885), already mentioned above (p. 103), Meitzen remarks that the price of large landed property was 52 times the net yield assessed for the land tax, that of peasant farms 65 times, and that of small peasant holdings 78 times.

Some enthusiasts for small landed property have described this rise in land prices as proof that small-scale enterprise in agriculture is superior to large-scale enterprise. But even among the greatest admirers of small-scale enterprise no one who wishes to be taken seriously asserts the superiority of dwarf property over middle-sized property; and yet this superiority would have to exist if the higher price of land were a result of a higher yield of the land.

The higher price of land of small estates finds its analogue in the towns, where, as is well known, dwellings become the dearer in proportion to their cubic content the smaller they are. After Isidor Singer and others had already pointed this out, K. Bücher established this phenomenon in figures for Basel. There a cubic metre of living space costs, in dwellings

Both phenomena, the higher price of land as well as the higher price of dwellings, are partly to be traced back to the same cause, the great distress of those who need the parcel of land or the small dwelling, who are able to offer only slight resistance to the monopolists of the soil.

Whoever traces the higher price of land of small estates back to their higher yield would also have to trace the higher price of small dwellings back to the higher income of their occupants.

The higher price of land of small estates naturally forms a strong motive for breaking up the larger estates wherever conditions are favourable to the increase of population and to obtaining a by-employment outside one’s own farming. Estate-butchery and the fragmentation of landed property can there assume great dimensions.

The smaller the estates, the greater the pressure towards a by-employment; the more this comes to the fore, the smaller the estates can become, but the less they are able to cover the needs of the household. All the more so as with dwarf holdings of this kind the enterprise becomes a quite irrational one. The lack of sufficient draught cattle and implements does not permit a rational tillage of the soil, in particular not deeper ploughing; the needs of the household, not those of maintaining the fertility of the soil, determine the choice of the crops to be grown; the lack of livestock and of money also means a lack of stable manure and of artificial manure. And on top of all this comes the lack of human labour. The more the work of earning money comes to the fore and the work for the household becomes a secondary occupation, the more the former absorbs the best workers of the family, sometimes precisely at the times when they would be most necessary on their own farm, for example at harvest time. The work on the little holding of their own is left more and more to the wife, the smaller children and perhaps also invalid grandparents. The father and the bigger children have to “earn”. Just as the household of the proletarian means the production of the most wretched result through the greatest waste of labour and the toiling and moiling of the housewife, so does the farming of the dwarf enterprise that has become a mere appendage of the household.

Its increasing smallness, like its increasing poverty, makes it ever less able to cover all the needs of the household. The income from money earnings must now serve not only to pay the taxes and rates of state and commune and to buy products of industry and of foreign agriculture — coffee, tobacco and so on — but also to buy home-grown products of the soil, in particular corn. At a pinch their own enterprise still supplies potatoes, cabbage and greens, the milk of a few goats or, if things go well, of a cow, the meat of a pig, eggs from poultry, but corn only in inadequate measure.

The number of these enterprises is by no means small. According to the statistics of 1895 there were 5,558,317 agricultural enterprises in the German Empire. Of these, the following had an extent of

If we reckon in general that the farms of 2 to 5 hectares still produce as much corn as they themselves consume, while the smaller ones must buy in addition — and that is the general assumption — then in the German Empire only a quarter of the agricultural enterprises have an interest in the corn duties; far more than half of the agricultural enterprises, over three-quarters of the small enterprises, are dependent on buying corn, and so suffer direct harm from its being burdened. That is a weighty argument against the corn duties; but it also shows that the great majority of the agricultural population counts on the commodity market no longer as sellers of means of subsistence, but as sellers of labour-power and as buyers of means of subsistence. The small-scale enterprises cease to appear as competitors of large-scale enterprise; they promote and support it, as has already been emphasised above, by supplying it with wage-labourers and buying its products.

We have seen that in 1895 58 per cent of the agricultural enterprises of Germany were under 2 hectares in size, that is to say, in other words, as a rule too small to support their owners. It agrees with this that, according to the occupational census of 1895, in agriculture proper (without market gardening, stock-breeding, forestry and fishing, the last of which is lumped together with agriculture in a very curious way) the number of independents without a by-employment was 2,026,374, that of independents with a by-employment 504,164. Besides these, however, there were also 2,160,462 persons who carried on agriculture independently (that is, in their own enterprise, not as wage-labour) as a by-employment. The total number of persons who carried on independent agriculture in their own enterprise as their main or by-employment was 4,691,001 (that of agricultural enterprises in 1895, 5,556,900); that of the independent farmers who also followed another occupation as their main or by-employment was 2,664,626, or 56 per cent, and so the majority of the total. (Compare also the figures on p. 114.)

Noteworthy, too, is the rapid increase of those who carry on agriculture as their main occupation and another occupation besides, while in all other branches of occupation the number of gainfully employed persons with a secondary occupation has fallen.

Where the possibility of a by-employment outside one’s own farming increases strongly, the parcelling of estates can reach an incredibly high degree and completely overcome the opposing tendencies to centralisation, at least for a time.

The model of a development of this kind is given by Belgium. There the count was:

From 1846 to 1866 all size classes increased absolutely, but the smaller enterprises faster than the larger. From 1866 to 1880, on the other hand, all of them decreased, with the exception of the smallest, in which there can be no question of independent farming. Precisely in this class of enterprise the reduction of the average size can least of all be ascribed to an increasing intensification of the enterprise, and must chiefly be ascribed to the growing fragmentation of landed property and the increase of by-employment.

Almost four-fifths of the agricultural enterprises of Belgium are dwarf enterprises, whose owners depend on wage-labour or other by-employment and no longer count as producers of means of subsistence for the market. Their absolute number has almost doubled since 1846, while that of the larger enterprises (over 20 hectares) has decreased considerably since then. But have the admirers of the peasantry, of all people, any reason to be particularly delighted with this kind of development?

Development does not proceed everywhere in this direction. The excessive fragmentation of small-scale enterprises presupposes, after all, that opportunity for by-employment outside one’s own farming exists. Where only large-scale agricultural enterprise offers such by-employment, fragmentation finds its limit as soon as it begins to restrict large-scale enterprise itself. Moreover, as we have seen, the fragmentation of small landed property becomes a support of large-scale enterprise. So it can come about that the smallest enterprise and the large-scale enterprise grow simultaneously, not only as a result of the extension of the cultivated area, but also where this is not possible. There the parcelling takes place at the expense of the middle-sized enterprise.

This is in general the development in France. There, as the data given on p. 132 show, the area of the largest and of the smallest enterprises increases at the same time, while that of the middle-sized ones decreases. In Germany too this tendency was formerly very noticeable. In 1882 v. Miaskowski came “to the result that the great increase of movable capital, in connection with other factors, leads in our time on the one hand to the enlargement and rounding off, and on the other hand to the fragmentation and reduction, of landed property”. At first sight, it is true, these two tendencies appearing in its movement seem to exclude each other. On closer consideration, however, this apparent contradiction resolves itself into complete harmony, in that the opposing tendencies are either distributed over different times or over different parts of Germany, or, where they are found side by side in the same district and at the same time, grind down the middle-sized landed property.

“While, that is, the process of agglomeration takes place chiefly, though not exclusively, in the north and north-east of Germany, the fragmentation of estates is mostly confined to the south and south-west, although it also occurs sporadically in other districts.

“But both tendencies, opposed to each other and distributed over different districts, have this in common, that the enlargement of landed property in the one place and its reduction in the other take place chiefly at the expense of middle-sized landed property. It is this that is being squeezed from two sides.” (Das Erbrecht, etc., pp. 130, 131.)

How large and small property increase simultaneously at the expense of the middle-sized is shown by the following figures for Prussia, which we find put together by Sering (Die innere Kolonisation). They relate to the eastern provinces (Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Posen, Silesia) and to the provinces of Westphalia and Saxony.

In the period 1816–1859 the peasant holdings large enough to keep a team (spannfähige Bauerngüter)

For the period 1860–1864 there are no returns of the movement of land.

From 1865 to 1867 it took the following shape. There were gained (+) or lost (−) by

In addition, some thousands of morgen passed into urban ownership or were used for public works. Here too the middle peasantry had to foot the bill.

In the most recent period, it is true, the squeezing of middle-sized landed property by parcelling and rounding off has in general ceased in the German Empire. From 1882 to 1895 it was precisely the middle-sized peasant estates of 5 to 20 hectares that gained most (560,000 hectares), as the table given above (p. 132) shows. One would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that the opposite process has now set in and that the middle-sized peasant enterprise is driving back the dwarf enterprise and the large-scale enterprise. We get quite peculiar results if we separate those sizes of enterprise which show a decided movement from those which reveal no considerable changes. The count was:

We see, then, that the enterprises of 5 to 20 hectares have indeed increased strongly, but the largest and the smallest still more in percentage. The sizes of enterprise lying between them have hardly increased in number; in relation to the increased total they have gone back.

That the smallest, the largest and the middle-sized enterprises could increase at the same time is explained partly by the increase of the agricultural area, partly by the losses of land of the sizes of enterprise lying between them. The agricultural area (in hectares) comprised by

The decrease in the area occupied by the enterprises of 20 to 1,000 hectares, which is, moreover, more than compensated by the increase in the area of the enterprises of over 1,000 hectares, arises not from a decline of large-scale enterprise but from its intensification. Until well into the seventies the motto of the large landowners was: More land! Today it is: More capital! But that, as we already know, often means, except in the case of the latifundia, even a reduction in land. We saw above (p. 45) that the number of agricultural steam engines in Prussia increased fivefold from 1879 to 1897. On the other hand, the number of agricultural officials, such as only large-scale enterprise employs in Germany (estate managers, inspectors, overseers, book-keepers and so on), also rose considerably in the same period (1882–1895), from 47,465 to 76,978, or by 62 per cent. In passing, attention may be drawn here to the particularly rapid increase of women among the agricultural administrative and office staff. In 1882 there were 5,875 of them, 12 per cent of the total number of these officials; in 1895, on the other hand, 18,057, or 23.4 per cent.

All this shows clearly how much more intensive and capitalist large-scale agricultural enterprise has become since the beginning of the eighties.

The explanation of why the middle peasant enterprises in particular have gained so much land alongside it we shall find in the next chapter.

What interests us here is the fact that the proletarianisation of the country people is advancing in Germany just as elsewhere, although here the tendency to the parcelling of middle-sized estates has ceased to operate. From 1882 to 1895 the number of all agricultural enterprises increased by 281,000. Of this, however, by far the greatest part falls to the increase of the proletarian enterprises under 1 hectare. These increased by 206,000.

The movement of agriculture, as one sees, is a quite peculiar one, quite different from that of industrial and commercial capital. We pointed out in the previous chapter that in agriculture the tendency to the centralisation of enterprises does not lead to the complete abolition of small-scale enterprise, but that, where it is carried too far, it produces the opposite tendency; that the tendency to centralisation and that to fragmentation relieve each other. Now we see that the two tendencies can also work side by side. The number of small-scale enterprises grows whose owners appear on the commodity market as proletarians, as sellers of the commodity labour-power, and whose landed property makes itself felt only outside the sphere of commodity production, in the sphere of production for the household. These small farmers, as sellers of the commodity labour-power on the commodity market, have all their decisive interests in common with the industrial proletariat, without being brought into opposition to it by their property. His landed property does emancipate the parcel peasant more or less from the dealer in provisions, but not from exploitation by the capitalist entrepreneur, whether the latter be an industrial or an agricultural one.

Where this stage has been reached, the increase of small-scale enterprises in the country becomes merely a particular form of the increase of proletarian households, which goes hand in hand with the increase of capitalist large-scale enterprise.

The form of by-employment that lies nearest to hand for the small farmer is that of agricultural wage-labour. We find it already in feudal times, as soon as inequality in the village has developed so far that on the one side the holdings become too small to suffice for the support of their owners, and on the other side grow so large that the labour of the peasant family is not enough to cultivate them.

This modern work of the small peasants on the larger estates finds an analogue, too, in the feudal obligations that formerly compelled the peasant to do labour service for a certain number of days in the year on the lord’s estate.

Most desirable to the peasant, of course, is a by-employment at the time when agricultural work is at rest, in winter. He finds such by-employment most readily where there are large forests near by, which need numerous workers in winter for getting and carrying the timber. But there are not extensive forests everywhere, and the by-employment they offer is not always enough to satisfy the small peasants’ need for money. These must look round for agricultural work in the narrower sense. The need of agricultural enterprises for labour is, after all, a very variable one; at times, especially during the harvest, the permanent hands of a larger farm are not enough, and it needs additional workers. These times, at which the small peasant most readily finds an agricultural by-employment, are, however, precisely those at which he is most urgently needed on his own farm. The necessity of earning money compels him to neglect his own farm, which in any case, because of its small size and lack of means, is worked most irrationally. He must leave the agricultural work on his own holding to his wife, and possibly also to the children if they are big enough for it, and can at most still give it his work in the evenings and on Sundays.

One must not always imagine the enterprises that are dependent in this way on by-employment as quite dwarfish. Thus Kärger, for example, reports from Westphalia (the districts of Coesfeld, Borken, Recklinghausen, etc.):

“The land owned or rented (by the free day-labourers) varies between 1 and 5, mostly between 1 and 3 hectares. Whoever has over 5 hectares — according to one isolated statement even over 3 hectares — as a rule no longer goes out for day wages, but lives entirely from his farm. In one report, however, the extent of the holdings of such day-labourers is given as up to 6 hectares, in another as up to 8.”

This naturally depends on the productiveness of the land. (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, I, p. 126.)

The same writer reports from the administrative district of Osnabrück that the enterprise of a Heuerling there comprises as a rule:

A dwelling and farm building with stalls for three cows and several pigs and sheep; a garden of 10–15 ares, arable land of about 2 hectares, meadows of ½–1½ hectares, a share in the common pasture or pasture land of 1 hectare, and the right of cutting turf in the mark forest over an area of 1½–2 hectares (op. cit., p. 64).

A farm with three cows and several sheep and pigs can already be regarded as quite a considerable one. And yet its holder is compelled to do wage-labour!

But there are not larger estates everywhere near by to give opportunity for by-employment. Often such estates, far from being regarded as competitors, are positively longed for.

Thus it is reported from the Eisenach Oberland:

“The founding of a larger estate through the purchase of the necessary area, effected quite recently, as well as the projected establishment of a sugar factory near Wiesenthal, will not fail to exert a favourable influence on the peasant conditions there.… A number of day-labourers and small landowners will find remunerative employment.” (Bäuerliche Zustände, I, pp. 40, 57.)

From the Eisenach Unterland it is reported that the majority of the landowners there own less than 5 hectares. Their circumstances are said to be not very favourable.

“The larger property existing there, in knights’ estates, crown estates and freeholds, is not of such importance (12.5 per cent of the total area) as to provide the class of small landowners with sufficient employment, and accordingly earnings, through the use of their labour as day-labourers and other working personnel.” (Op. cit., p. 66.)

In the Grand Duchy of Hesse too the lack of large estates is given as one of the causes of the great distress in small peasant circles.

“In the places with inheritance in kind,” reports Dr. Kuno Frankenstein, “where, that is, the plots are cut into parts corresponding to the number of children, in so far as this is still at all possible given the smallness of the parcels, there is no real shortage of workers, because the many smaller owners, often with only 5–10 morgen of property and even less, may all offer themselves as workers.… But in such places with such small peasant holdings, especially if there is no larger estate, the need for workers is not very great, so that the owners of such small day-labourers’ holdings do not have opportunity enough to make use of their labour-power on their own farm or for wages either. The position of these owners of such dwarf farms is therefore mostly a very sad one.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, II, p. 232.)

If in the previous chapter we came to know small-scale enterprise as a support of large-scale enterprise, here we see large-scale enterprise appear as a support of small-scale enterprise.

Through constant underfeeding these Hessian small peasants become so enfeebled that in the end they are unable to make use even of the little opportunity for wage-labour that still exists.

“Because of their meagre nourishment at home, the people are quite unable to perform heavy work for any length of time. In some villages this has led the managers of larger estates to bring in outside workers, although the local workers in the place itself could not be fully employed.”

But a population so run down that it has become too weak for sustained work on the land is still good for the other by-employment that the small peasant gladly grasps where agricultural wage-labour is denied him: domestic industry.

Its beginnings too reach back into feudal times. We pointed out at the beginning of this work that the peasant was originally a farmer and an industrial producer at the same time. Only gradually did the development of urban industry drive him to devote himself almost exclusively to agriculture. But many manual skills long remained in use in the peasant family. Where agriculture begins to fail as the sole source of earnings, they come into their own again. But not in the form of handicraft working for the customer. The isolated peasant cannot compete with urban handicraft, which commands a larger market and all the resources of the town. Rural industry as commodity production can develop only as production for a capitalist, a merchant or putter-out, who establishes the connection with the wide market that the remote peasant cannot reach directly; and it can develop only in fields in which simple manual skills and tools suffice. A domestic industry of this kind is most likely to develop where the raw material for it lies near at hand — wood-carving near forests, the making of slates and slate pencils near slate quarries, basket-weaving in well-watered districts favourable to the growing of willows, the small iron industry near iron ores, and so on. But the presence of numerous cheap workers lying idle is often enough in itself to stir enterprising capitalists to exploit them in domestic industry; often they themselves supply the raw material, say cotton or silk yarn that is to be woven.

Rural domestic industry develops most in districts where the soil is poorest and where at the same time the technical preconditions for large-scale agricultural enterprise are least favourable; but especially where, in addition, political obstacles stand or stood in the way of large property. We find rural domestic industry in the mountainous districts that border Bohemia towards Silesia and Saxony, in Thuringia, in the Taunus, in the Black Forest; but we find it especially strongly developed in Switzerland — watchmaking in the west, silk-weaving in the centre, embroidery in the east.

In their beginnings these domestic industries were often hailed with rejoicing. Everyone who founded one was regarded as a benefactor of the poor peasants, to whom he offered the opportunity of using their idle hours, especially in winter, to advantage. Their increased earnings were bound to enable them to make their enterprises more rational and thereby in turn to increase their earnings. The alternation of industrial and rural work kept the population engaged in domestic industry healthy and vigorous, in contrast to the industrial workers of the towns; it made them prosperous and intelligent, in contrast to the mere peasant, who confined himself to working his farm and so left so many precious hours unused.

Schönberg, even now, in his Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie (3rd ed., II, p. 428), knows how to paint the advantages of domestic industry, wherever it is not hard pressed by the competition of the machine, in the rosiest colours. The whole family works together; “the father can direct the upbringing of his children and supervise their training, the women can look after their household and their children, the girls are under the control and protection of the family”. The working time depends only on the worker’s own will, the worker is free; “the whole life of the worker becomes more comfortable, more congenial and fuller. In rural domestic industry in particular, industrial activity alternates with healthy agricultural work, and the mass concentration of wage-labourers in one place, with its disadvantages for the workers and the communes, is avoided. Finally, domestic industry also permits the occasional employment of all the productive earning powers of the family, and thereby makes possible — without danger to persons or to family life — an increase of the family income”.

These “undeniable” advantages, it is true, are offset by disadvantages to which even Schönberg cannot close his eyes. But in the end he nevertheless comes to the conclusion:

“All these disadvantages, heavily as they weigh, are still not of such a kind that domestic industry does not appear, by its nature, as in itself the more favourable form of enterprise for the social conditions of the workers.”

Only where it has to compete with factory industry, he says, is it out of place.

Reality offers us another picture, even if we consider domestic industries that do not yet have to wage any struggle with the machine of large-scale industry, such as basket-weaving, the making of cigars or toys and the like.

Above all, no kind of rural by-employment promotes the fragmentation of the land as much as this one, because none is capable of such rapid expansion. The number of large agricultural enterprises is limited, and so is that of the mines; the number of factories in the country, too, cannot be increased at will. There the possibility of wage-labour finds its definite limits. Not so domestic industry. It finds its limit only in the number of workers available; it can be carried on in the smallest enterprise, with the most primitive means, without any or at least without any appreciable outlay of capital, and the capitalist risks nothing at all if he expands it as rapidly as possible when the state of the market is favourable; he has no fixed capital, no buildings and machines to acquire, which wear out uselessly if they are not employed productively; he has no ground-rent and other charges to pay, which run on whether business flourishes or not. All these burdens, the most important part of the capitalist risk, are to be borne by the exploited domestic workers. That makes every crisis more devastating for them than for the workers of large-scale industry, because the capitalist decides more easily to cut down his undertakings where domestic workers are concerned; but it also lets their number swell much more easily in more favourable times. The time of prosperity, however, becomes almost more ruinous to them than that of decline.

The number of marriages and of families founded grows, and with it the demand for small holdings, without which an independent household is impossible in the country. Land prices rise, the parcelling of the land increases, the individual holdings become smaller and smaller, but at the same time their cultivation becomes ever worse. This is so because of their increasing smallness, but also because a domestic industry that flourishes and brings money into the house harnesses all the workers of the family more and more and withdraws them from agriculture. If this lasts for some time, however, the physical capacity of the domestic workers for sustained agricultural activity also disappears as a result of their sedentary way of life. They can no longer cultivate their fields properly, and the smallness of their farms now becomes a physical necessity for them.

The holdings become so small that they no longer suffice to keep a cow. Milk disappears from the table, and chicory brew takes its place. With the cow there disappear the stable manure and the draught animal before the plough; the fields become ever less fertile and less suited to the production of corn. Moreover, corn must first be ground and baked before it can serve as food. Preference is given to plants that are less exacting, that on the same area yield larger crops, not of nutritive substances, it is true, but of weight — cabbage, turnips and above all potatoes, field crops that can also be used in the kitchen without more ado.

So the domestic worker’s diet is reduced to chicory brew and potatoes — means better suited to cheating the stomach than to supplying it with the substances for nourishing the body. The influence of the industrial activity is now reinforced by that of underfeeding; the bodily strength of the domestic worker decays to the minimum still required for the exercise of his manual dexterity.

His farming decays no less. For the small, badly worked, unmanured parcels must bear the same crop year in, year out. Agriculture reaches a stage that stands below that of the Germanic peoples at the end of the migration of the peoples.

Of five village communes in the High Taunus Schnapper-Arndt reports in his book of that name (p. 50):

“Only in Seelenberg are considerable remnants of the three-field system said to have survived; in the other villages, however, necessity often knows no law, and potatoes are demanded of numerous fields year in, year out, because a sensible rotation is simply not possible for the owners, who are poor both in land and in other means.”

In the five villages there were in all only 463 cows to 758 households or individual taxpayers. 486 households owned no cow at all, 117 only one each.

But the physical ruin of land and people goes hand in hand with economic decline. Technical progress is possible in domestic industry only to a slight degree. The domestic workers among themselves, like the capitalists who exploit them, can fight the competitive struggle only by greater exertion of labour-power and reduction of wages. This kind of competitive struggle is made easier still by the isolation of the individual domestic workers in their families, by their dispersal over wide stretches of country, which makes their organisation almost impossible, by the lack of other opportunities of earning in their districts, and by their being chained to the soil, which forbids them to escape from intense exploitation in order to exchange it for a milder degree of it in another district. The putter-out is sure of his domestic workers. Even the longest unemployment does not scare them away from him. Thus we find the longest and most exhausting working time, the most wretched payment for work done, the greatest extension of the labour of women and children, the most miserable conditions of workplaces and dwellings — in a word, the most revolting conditions that our mode of production can show at all — in domestic industry exploited by capital. It is the most infamous system of capitalist exploitation and the most degrading form of the proletarianisation of the peasantry. All attempts to help a small peasant population that can no longer eke out its existence by purely agricultural work, by naturalising a domestic industry among it, must after a short and very questionable upswing result in a plunge into the deepest and most hopeless misery. They are therefore to be combated most decidedly.

Fortunately domestic industry is only a transitional stage to large-scale industry. Sooner or later the hour strikes for every domestic industry when it is made technically superfluous by the machine; and this hour strikes the sooner, the more rapidly the domestic industry develops and specialises and the further it carries the division of labour.

This hour, however, is not yet the hour of deliverance for the domestic worker, but rather the beginning of the most agonising part of his way of the cross. For now the word is: strain labour-power still more beyond all measure, press down the necessaries of life still lower, work the family still harder, so as not to fall too far behind in the race with the machine. And how long this dreadful race often lasts, until at last the long-outdistanced runner collapses breathless!

That the domestic worker holds out so long in the hopeless race is to be ascribed to his farming.

Where agriculture serves not commodity production but the needs of the household, it is not subject to the driving force of competition; there it forms a conservative element that keeps up a semblance of life in everything outlived. It is this that prolongs the death-struggle of domestic industry without end, that still does not let the hand-loom weaver die, who could no longer live half a century ago.

“The reason why this branch (hand-loom weaving in northern Bohemia) has nevertheless maintained itself in undiminished numbers despite its incessant convulsions lies in no small part in the fact that the main part of the weaving population had some land, which served in times of better business to supplement the earnings from the trade, and in times of distress at least as a means of struggling through the hardships of the crisis after a fashion.” (A. Braf, Studien über nordböhmische Arbeiterverhältnisse, p. 128.)

Nevertheless rural domestic industry has lately been in rapid retreat wherever large-scale industry comes to the country, not to compete with the domestic worker, but to open new opportunities of earning to him.

Large-scale industry needs for its development great masses of propertyless, usable (skilled and disciplined) workers and the proximity of a large market. It finds these most readily in the great centres of commerce. Its development itself in turn attracts new masses of workers and promotes traffic to and from the places in which it flourishes. The tendency of capitalist large-scale industry is thus towards the progressive concentration of the mass of the population and of economic life in the great towns.

But a number of factors bring it about that the whole stream of growing large-scale industry does not pour itself into the towns, that some rivulets also fertilise the open country. These factors are partly of a natural, partly of a social kind.

To the former belongs above all the demand, growing with the expansion of large-scale industry, for raw and auxiliary materials that cannot be produced in the town but only in the open country, and that, in view of mass consumption, are produced in masses, in large-scale enterprises. To these belong above all the mines. The upswing of mining is a powerful means of revolutionising rural conditions.

On the other hand, it is an obvious step to process raw materials near the places where they are produced, especially those that have a high weight in relation to their value and will not bear long transport. So ironworks, brickworks, sugar factories, etc., arise in the country.

Finally, strong water power that is easily harnessed draws many an industry into valleys that are sometimes quite remote.

Besides these, however, social factors also come into play. In the towns the standard of living is higher than in the open country, and, with the same standard of living, the costs of maintaining labour-power are greater, because of the higher ground-rent of dwellings, the costs of transporting means of subsistence, and the absence of any farming of their own on the part of the individual workers. For this reason alone money wages must be higher in the town than in the open country.

To this is added, however, the concentration of the workers in masses in a narrow space. This makes it easier for them to come to an understanding and to organise. It makes their supervision more difficult, and likewise their effective victimisation. With the numerous opportunities of earning, a victimised man always has the prospect of finding a place. All this is different in the country; there the workers are less able to resist capital, they are more submissive and less exacting. This is a great temptation for the large industrialists to move their enterprises into the open country; and if they find suitable workers in the country, which to their regret is only sporadically the case, and all the other conditions of a successful enterprise are present, they do so all the more gladly the more the labour movement grows in the towns.

This transfer of a large industry to the open country will take place all the more readily the more the means of communication — canals, railways, telegraphs — develop. It becomes all the easier to remain in close touch with the great market. On the other hand, the rise of these large enterprises in the country is itself in turn a powerful motive for extending the modern means of communication. Their construction, maintenance and use, however, in turn supply a number of opportunities of earning for the rural population.

At first the consequences for the small farmers and their land are hardly more favourable than under the regime of domestic industry. The larger enterprises, which produce means of subsistence for sale, do gain, at least in so far as the market for their commodity is enormously widened and comes into their immediate neighbourhood. This advantage, it is true, is mostly more than offset by the shortage of labour that industry creates for them. But that belongs to another chapter.

But all farmers, large and small alike, suffer from the rise in land prices. Large-scale industry brings a rapid growth of population, not only, like domestic industry, in consequence of making marriage and the founding of households easier, but also by attracting workers from outside, since a large capitalist undertaking in the country seldom manages with the hands supplied by its immediate surroundings. The demand for dwellings and parcels of land rises, and with it their prices. But the higher the price of land, the smaller, other things being equal, the means that remain to the buyer of the land for working it, and the poorer its equipment. We shall come back to this in the next chapter.

To this is added, however, the fact that large-scale industry as a rule makes demands on the worker in quite a different way from domestic industry. The latter mostly allows the whole family to interrupt its industrial activity at times in order to devote itself to agriculture, for example at harvest time. This, it is true, is not always the case either. In many a domestic industry the season of the most urgent work coincides with the time of the most urgent work on the land.

“Precisely in the hot harvest time, when the countryman’s working day often lasts 20 hours and the restful night 4, the toymaker too is at his busiest and has not a minute left for the work needed on the land.” (E. Sax, Die Hausindustrie in Thüringen, I, p. 48.)

Where that is the case, domestic industry and agriculture separate; their union in one hand becomes impossible. But that is by no means the rule.

It is otherwise in the enterprises of large-scale industry. The mere great quantity of fixed capital they contain, which wears out without being turned to account if it is not used, drives the entrepreneur to avoid, as far as possible, all major interruptions of the labour process. Only a few undertakings of large-scale industry work only during a part of the year, and then during those seasons in which agricultural work is at rest or at least not pressing. Such undertakings are, for example, the sugar factories, whose “campaign” begins after the beet harvest in autumn and lasts through the winter, about four months. It is hurried on as much as possible, since the beets spoil easily towards spring.

Work in the sugar factories thus does not cut into the working time the agricultural labourer and the dwarf peasant need for farming.

Work in the coal mines, too, is compatible with work on the land in certain circumstances. In winter the demand for coal is greater and the output heavier; on the other hand, the institution of night shifts leaves part of the miners “free” for the day, which they ought indeed to use for rest, but not infrequently use for work on the land — out of high spirits, no doubt, in consequence of their splendid wages, and in order to get rid of the surplus strength that the all too short working time in the mine is not enough to use up.

Thus Kärger reports:

“An alternation between rural and non-rural work takes place in the district of Recklinghausen, in that the free day-labourers owning land there often work on the land from the beginning of the harvest to the end of November, and the rest of the time in the pits.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, I, p. 124.)

In the mining district of Gelsenkirchen, Bochum and Dortmund the agricultural labourers owning land have almost disappeared.

“Day-labourers without any share in the land are, it is true, sometimes employed, but these are mostly miners who, with the short working time in mining, find time enough to occupy themselves on the side for a few hours a day with agricultural work, especially when they are on the night shift; or who have taken lodgings with peasants on the undertaking to help them at harvest time; or who on the same undertaking have rented a piece of land for planting potatoes; or finally such as are no longer any good for mining because their strength has declined.… Quite isolated reports also speak of an income of the day-labourers from their own farm, by which, however, probably only miners who do rural work on the side are meant. Such men sometimes rent a cottage with a little garden land, keep one or two goats, and sometimes also receive permission to grow as many potatoes on the lessor’s land as they can manure.” (Op. cit., p. 132.)

Finally, one more example from the eastern coalfield, Silesia:

“In the coal and industrial districts it is a very common phenomenon for agricultural labourers to seek work for a time in the coal pits and in industry, especially in the building trade, or in factories, and to come back to the land for the harvest. This is especially the case with the owners of small holdings.” (Op. cit., III, p. 502.)

In certain circumstances mining work can there become a strong support of peasant farming.

“The effect of the intermixture of strips on peasant property,” says a report from Westphalia, “is very harmful wherever the owner has to live from his land. Where the peasantry, as is the case with 80 per cent of it in the district of Siegen, still has considerable earnings on the side from mining and smelting, the harm does not break out.” (Bäuerliche Zustände, II, p. 8.)

But even if seasonal work is offered, or at least possible, in particular branches of industry, in general work in large-scale industry claims the worker uninterruptedly throughout the year.

But it does not, like domestic industry, claim the whole worker’s family. The exploitation of children under 14 is already forbidden by law. The employment of the housewife in large-scale industry is more difficult than in domestic industry; for in the latter case she need not leave house and hearth, but in the former she must. Natural as it is for her to take part in the work of domestic industry, she brings herself only with difficulty to leave her children and her home in the lurch; and she brings herself to it with still more difficulty in the country than in the town, because the household plays a far more important part in the former, and its functions are not yet reduced by public kitchens, crèches, kindergartens and so on.

To these workers, who remain to the household, and so to the farming that serves it, under the regime of large-scale industry, are added the invalids of labour. Domestic industry can make use of every worker, even the weakest; large-scale industry works its workers so hard that as a rule it has use only for those in the prime of their years, and quickly wears them out. In the country the most obvious occupation for the numerous class of industrial invalids thus created is that in the family’s dwarf enterprise.

Like domestic industry, then, though in another way, large-scale industry too worsens the labour at the disposal of small farming, while at the same time it promotes the reduction in size, and with it the deterioration, of the enterprises.

On the other hand, we find that industrial capital on a large scale in the country, like the capital of domestic industry and for the same reasons, scarcely meets with any appreciable resistance from the workers, and drives their exploitation and degradation to the utmost.

A typical picture of a rural large-scale industry of this kind has been given us, for example, by Herkner in his excellent book on the cotton industry of Upper Alsace and its workers. Bad as the conditions he describes in Mülhausen are, they are surpassed in the textile factories that lie in the open country. “The working time is in general longer. Even K. Grad reports 13–14 hours.” Night work, including that of young workers, is frequent.

“The young women workers are exposed to the same assaults on their morals as in Mülhausen. The system of fines and deductions from wages likewise prevails everywhere. Often they are made even harsher by the increased dependence of the worker. In most of the villages of the industrial zone the factory there is simply the only opportunity for work.… To this is added the circumstance that the worker in the country usually appears chained to the soil by the possession of a small property (often also so-called Krüter), which is looked after by his wife or his parents. There is no question of the worker having any influence on the conditions of work.

“Wages are on average a third lower than those in Mülhausen, a difference that even exceeds that between the prices of articles of consumption, so that the standard of living in fact sinks still lower.… Potatoes dominate the diet, and meat is had on Sundays at best. The consumption of spirits has assumed much greater dimensions than in Mülhausen. There is said to be an industrial village in the Vosges in which 800 inhabitants consume 300 hectolitres a year.”

The prevailing truck system makes the position of the workers worse still.

“The lower standard of living is matched by a physical degeneration that goes even further.… The district medical officer (in the district of Thann) reports: ‘In factory villages, where everyone works in the factories from youth up, almost all those liable to military service were unfit, and we believe that if this goes on there will soon be no need to send a recruiting commission to these places any more.…’

“In spite of their small physical resources, the population is extremely industrious.… The old people who no longer work in the factory still occupy themselves with cultivating the little field, which, in view of the high and steep situation of the Krüter, involves great exertions” (pp. 349–352).

Gloomy as this picture is, it is nevertheless far more hopeful than that of domestic industry. The children remain excluded from factory work; the process of production goes on, if not in the fresh air, as in agriculture, at least outside the dwelling, in spacious premises which, whatever their defects, far surpass in hygiene the dens in which the domestic workers live. And precisely because the worker in the factory is not “free”, because he cannot begin and end his work when he likes, because it is regulated in the same way for all, it moves within narrower limits than domestic work, and is easier to control and to restrict by law. And the factory unites the scattered workers and makes it easier for them to come to an understanding with one another; it brings the factory village into closer intercourse with the outside world, for it develops the means of communication and brings intelligent workers from the town into the village. So it becomes a means of bringing a part of the rural population closer to the urban proletariat, of gradually awakening in it an interest in and understanding of the proletariat’s struggle for emancipation, and finally, in favourable circumstances, of inducing it to take an active part in that struggle.

The rural factory thus swells the ranks of the proletariat without expropriating the small farmers, without detaching them from the land. On the contrary, it supplies precisely the means for dwarf owners hastening towards bankruptcy to maintain themselves in their property, and furthermore supplies numerous propertyless people with the means of acquiring a small farm of their own, whether on their own or on rented land.

The three kinds of small peasant by-employment considered here do not exclude one another. They can exist side by side and are often to be found side by side. Thus it is reported, for example:

“For the inhabitants of the Eisenach Oberland, and in particular for the small peasants of the poorer villages with little property, the carrying on of a domestic industry as a by-employment is of special importance.… The following are to be described as domestic industries: the making of corks, the weaving of webbing and plush, whip-plaiting, shoemaking, the making of brushes and wood-carving (pipe bowls), industries that secure a supplementary income of 1 to 2 and 3 marks for a family and are in many cases still carried on by peasants who own some 8–9 hectares.… For the rest, timber and forest work, the carting of timber and the working of the basalt deposits, which are present in such abundance, give an adequate income, especially for the time when agricultural work is at rest.” (Bäuerliche Zustände, I, pp. 50, 51.)

As an example from the south, let us mention the report of A. Heitz on peasant conditions in the districts (Oberämter) of Stuttgart, Böblingen and Herrenberg: “It would be a mistake to suppose that agricultural work affords sufficient maintenance to the numerous rural population. Of essential influence, rather, especially for the two western districts, is the manifold opportunity for supplementary earnings. Here the forest would have to be named first, which … permanently employs a fair contingent of workers and many people temporarily.… It would be particularly instructive to ascertain the state of domestic industry”, weaving and embroidery. Alongside this a large-scale industry is arising.

“In the course of the last few years individual larger establishments have arisen, older ones have been extended, and the small entrepreneurs are multiplying, the latter being intent on snatching up the cheapest opportunity for work.… A further factor is the petty trade in milk, eggs, poultry and a few industrial products.… Finally, besides the villages immediately bordering on Stuttgart, there should be named as day-labourers’ villages Möhringen, Bonlanden, Plattenhardt, Vaihingen, Rohr, Musberg and Birkach, while from Ruith, Heumaden, Kemnath, Scharnhausen and even Plieningen a number of people walk daily to the spinning mills near Esslingen.”

But such numerous opportunities for by-employment do not exist everywhere, and they are not always enough to satisfy the small farmers’ need for money. If the by-employment does not seek out the peasant, nothing remains for him but to seek it out, to go after it, even if he must tear himself away from the soil for a time to do so. The more modern means of communication develop, the more the railway facilitates transport, and post and newspaper bring news of conditions elsewhere, the more easily the countryman decides to leave his village, at least for a time, and the further afield he ventures. A part of the small peasant family, naturally the part best able to work, migrates away or abroad periodically, in order to support itself and, beyond that, to earn money for the whole family. Only this kind of emigration and migration interests us here, not the permanent kind; for in the present connection we are examining not those forms of the proletarianisation of the peasant that are outwardly recognisable as such, but only the much more important ones in which the peasant keeps his former outward form while taking over the functions of the proletarian.

The occupation nearest to hand for the migrant peasant is, of course, agricultural work. And there is no lack of places in which the local population does not satisfy the demand for agricultural wage-labour. We have already pointed out in the previous chapter the shortage of labour in the districts of large-scale enterprise; we shall see that it does not spare the larger peasant enterprise either. In the most various parts of Germany migrant agricultural workers are sought, partly for the whole summer, partly only for the harvest; they find work not only east of the Elbe but also in the Rhineland, and in Bavaria and Württemberg as well as in Schleswig and Holstein.

As an example, let us cite the migrations that take place in Bavaria alone:

“There is frequently an exchange of workers between the corn-growing and the hop-growing districts, in that workers go from the hop-growing districts to the corn-growing districts for the time of the corn harvest, and vice versa. Apart from this, the following migrations of rural workers can be established in detail from the reports. Upper Bavaria draws workers during the summer months chiefly from the Bavarian Forest, but in turn gives up workers to Swabia from those districts where the harvest work is finished early. In Swabia there is an exchange between the upper and lower country; in addition, Tyrol sends herd-boys here in great numbers. Lower Bavaria supplies itself at times with workers from the Bavarian Forest and from Bohemia, and gives up workers from the district of Wilshofen to the Osterhofen area at harvest time for about six weeks, and from the district of Straubing to the hop districts for the hop harvest. From the Upper Palatinate male workers go from the district of Weiden to Upper and Lower Bavaria for the corn harvest, and female workers to the hop districts to pick hops; from the district of Neustadt a. Aisch workers go to the hop districts for the hop harvest; the districts of Neumarkt and Stadtamhof draw chiefly female workers, sometimes children too, for hop-picking and the potato harvest, from the eastern part of the Upper Palatinate, from the Bavarian Forest and from Bohemia. Upper Franconia sends workers, especially from the district of Bayreuth, to Thuringia and Saxony, and draws women and children here and there for the corn harvest from mountain districts where the corn ripens later. In Middle Franconia there is a great exchange of workers between the districts with corn-growing and with hop-growing; the district of Hersbruck draws male and female workers in great numbers for the hop harvest from the Upper Palatinate and from Bohemia. In Lower Franconia the Ochsenfurt and Schweinfurt areas supply themselves for the duration of the corn and potato harvests with male and female workers from the Rhön, the Spessart and the Odenwald; on large estates with sugar-beet cultivation Polish workers are brought in towards spring and employed until well into the autumn. In the Rhenish Palatinate the Sickinger Höhe draws chiefly female workers for the duration of the potato harvest from the northern part of the district of Homburg, the so-called musicians’ villages, but gives up workers at harvest time to the areas round Worms and Osthofen, and in autumn, for about six weeks, workers for threshing to communes of the district of Saarbrücken. Large estates have lately also been supplying themselves with East Prussian workers for the period from April to November.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, II, pp. 151, 152.)

This list could be extended without end for every part of Germany.

The migrant labour of those Italian workers who work in Europe in summer and, for the winter season, in which the summer of the southern hemisphere falls, take ship to Argentina to do field work there, has attained a grand extent. Still more gigantic is the migrant labour of the Chinese, who migrate, not for a season, it is true, but for several years, though never for life, to the United States, to Canada, Mexico, the West Indies, Australia and the Sunda Islands, who have already reached South Africa, and who already form the ideal of the German migrant worker in the eyes of our agrarians.

But migrant labour is not confined to agriculture. Besides agriculture, the development of large-scale industry, of the towns and of traffic offers more remunerative employment. In part they offer seasonal work just as agriculture does, and summer work too, unfortunately for the farmers — railway construction, canal works, quarries, urban building of all kinds, for example; in part they offer the incoming job-seekers employment of longer duration, as servant girls, day-labourers, carters, etc.

Some districts have developed quite peculiar specialities of migrant labour. Thus Kuno Frankenstein reports, for example, from the administrative district of Wiesbaden:

“The western Dill district and the rest of the second region, the Westerwald and the north-western part of the Oberlahn district bordering on the Westerwald, have a great superfluity of workers; hence many workers go from these districts to the industrial districts of the Rhineland and stay there from spring until well into the winter, while others go ‘into the country as dealers’. About this Landgängerei, which has gradually grown up on a large scale, a correspondent from the Unterwesterwald district makes the following noteworthy communications: ‘In spring the so-called Landgänger (hawkers) appear in the villages and recruit hawkers from among the grown-up male and female young people. In February they set off with them in various directions, to Holland, Switzerland, Poland, Saxony, etc. The recruits receive their wares at main centres, such as Leipzig, etc., which they may sell at fixed prices, and in due course hand over the proceeds to their master. As wages they receive, according to their skill in selling, 300 to 400 marks a year and an allowance for board. As a rule they return home towards Christmas with considerable sums in cash.

‘It has long been observed that in those places from which a number of such hawkers are recruited, better economic conditions gradually set in, since the earnings of the children are handed over to the parents for general use. They are used for putting the farm into better order, as well as for buying livestock, especially cows, for procuring artificial manures to increase the harvests, for enlarging the property, and also for deposit in savings banks.

In some places the number of those recruited is so large that only the most necessary workers remain at home. In financial respects the so-called Landgängerei brings advantages; in moral respects, especially among the female hawkers, it has its dark sides.’” (Op. cit., II, p. 27.)

The poor mountain villages of the Palatinate like to send their surplus workers abroad as musicians:

“The existing land, formed from Vosges sandstone, is not very productive; the farmers live in very poor circumstances even with a holding of 3 to 4 hectares, and are often compelled to procure the necessary income by supplementary earnings. In such communes the employer (?) is compelled to seek earnings in other districts, and he wanders far afield as a musician or bricklayer’s labourer, less often as a farm-hand. The musicians are in general thrifty, and mostly send home so much money that the family lives free from care and is able gradually to acquire a small peasant farm. Circumstances are less often so favourable in the case of the bricklayers too, and the servants far from home save least of all.” (Op. cit., II, p. 193.)

The seasonal workers regularly come home again and bring the proceeds of their wage-labour to their farms. Here too it is large-scale enterprise in town and country, in agriculture and industry, that brings new forces to small-scale enterprise. Others flow to it from the earnings of those who have gone away for a longer period. These, mostly unmarried people, do not all come back. Many settle down in their new sphere; but nevertheless a large part of them send their savings home to maintain the family, which cannot live from its farming. It is said of Ireland that the rents of its dwarf tenants are paid out of the savings of the Irish servant girls in America, and things are no better with the taxes of many a German peasant. And not a few do come back, despite the misery of the countryside, to the soil on which they were born; they come back to marry or to inherit, to take over the paternal holding, and they bring their savings with them, which help many a bankrupt farm back on its feet for a while, and enable many a dwarf enterprise to buy new land, to acquire a cow, to renew the tumbledown cottage.

For the districts to which they migrate, these workers form an obstacle to development. They come from economically more backward, poorer districts, and are therefore less exacting, and mostly also more ignorant and more submissive. Their lack of resistance is increased by the fact that they are in a strange place, without support among the population, which is only too ready to meet the intruders with hostility, and whose language they often do not understand at all. They supply the most willing wage-cutters and strike-breakers; they are the most difficult to bring into a trade organisation. But the same elements that hold back progress where they come to become most effective pioneers of progress where they came from and whither they return. For all their opposition to their new surroundings, they cannot entirely shut themselves off from its influences; they take on new needs, new ideas, which, however backward they may be for their new surroundings, are subversive, revolutionary, for their old ones. The same elements that appear here as the willing servants of exploitation and oppression become there agitators and stirrers-up of discontent and class hatred.

“The widening of the mental horizon,” complains Kärger, “the greater mobility and alertness that the Sachsengänger acquires abroad, often also brings with it at the same time a decided decline in respect for existing relations of authority. The people become cheeky, defiant, insolent, overbearing, and by their example contribute now and then to the loosening of the patriarchal relation which, in full harmony with the economic and social conditions there, still exists between master and workers on the majority of the estates of the East.” (Die Sachsengängerei, p. 180.)

Migrant labour thus works in the same way as the transfer of large-scale industry to the open country: it strengthens small landed property, this supposedly so conservative element, but at the same time it completely revolutionises the conditions of existence of the small landowners and fills them with needs and views that are anything but conservative.

Whoever believes that the bare figures of statistics exhaust the infinitely varied content of social life may draw from the figures of the statistics of enterprises the reassurance that, however development may proceed in the town, in the open country everything remains as it was, and no decided development in any direction is noticeable. Whoever looks beneath the cover of these figures, and does not stare as if hypnotised merely at the relation between small-scale and large-scale enterprise, will judge otherwise; he sees that the large-scale enterprises do not, it is true, change in number, and that the small-scale enterprises are not absorbed by the large, but that both, thanks to industrial development, are going through a complete revolution, and in a direction that brings small landed property into ever closer touch with the propertyless proletariat and makes the interests of both ever more alike.

But this does not yet exhaust the working of economic development. It produces a number of further factors that change from the ground up the nature of agriculture producing commodities, that is, a surplus for society.