I.9. The Growing Difficulties of Commodity-Producing Agriculture

We have seen that the capitalist mode of production, through the modern large-scale enterprise, has raised agriculture, which had sunk low at the close of the feudal era, to a considerable technical height. But we have also seen that the same mode of production generates tendencies that stand in the way of the development and extension of the large-scale enterprise, that work with the greatest force against its attaining sole dominion in agriculture under the existing order of society, and that therefore prevent agriculture from reaching the highest stage it could reach under the given technical conditions. Indeed, by promoting the parcelling of the land, these obstructing tendencies can in places even lead to technical retrogression in agriculture.

But it is not only through its restriction of the large-scale enterprise that the capitalist mode of production does harm to agriculture. No less injurious to it is ground-rent.

We have already pointed out more than once that the purchase price of land is essentially nothing but capitalised ground-rent. We speak here only of the price of the land, not of that of an estate. The prices of the buildings and of the live and dead stock are determined like those of all other commodities, in the last instance by the labour-time socially necessary for their production. An industrial capitalist, too, must pay ground-rent or buy land. But its price forms only a small part of the sum of money he advances in production.

It is otherwise in agriculture. The so-called landed capital, that is, the capitalised ground-rent, forms the preponderant part of the sum of money that a farmer, where farming is done on one’s own landed property, has to lay out in order to be able to set an estate going.

On middle-sized and larger farms in Central Europe, where arable farming with stall-feeding prevails, the working capital as a rule amounts to only 27–33 per cent of the landed capital, but it can fall as low as 15 per cent and rise as high as 40 per cent, according to the intensity of the cultivation. The average working capital in the Kingdom of Saxony is 410 marks per hectare, with an average purchase price of estates of 1,930 marks. (Krämer in Goltz’s Handbuch, I, pp. 277–279, and Krafft, Betriebslehre, pp. 58–60.)

Buchenberger gives the example of a big peasant in Baden whose farm has a value of 46,233 marks. Of this, 6,820 marks (14.72 per cent) falls to the stock, 5,480 marks (11.9 per cent) to the buildings, but 33,923 marks (73.4 per cent) to the land. (Bäuerliche Zustände, III, p. 249.)

Of the whole outlay of capital, only a quarter is real capital, functioning in the process of production.

The farmer can thus employ only a small part of his capital as real capital in his enterprise. By far the greater part, two-thirds to three-quarters, he must pay to the former landowner merely for permission to undertake the enterprise. His enterprise will therefore always have to be smaller, or less intensive, than would be possible with the amount of capital at his disposal.

But since practical farmers, in contrast to the theorists, prefer, within the limits already stressed above, a larger estate for the same investment of capital, even if it is encumbered with debt, to a smaller one free of debt, it very rarely happens that a farmer pays for an estate in cash. He regards almost the whole of the capital at his disposal as working capital and measures by it the size of the farm he seeks to acquire. The land he does not pay for, or pays for only in small part; he remains owing the price of the land, this is entered as a mortgage on the estate, that is to say, the buyer takes on the obligation to pay the ground-rent to the mortgagee, the real owner of the land.

In this way every change in the ownership of an estate becomes a source of its indebtedness. Though it is an exaggeration to suppose that changes of ownership are the sole source of the mortgage distress of landed property, and that the need for improvements does not come into consideration at all beside them, it is nevertheless certain that they are the most powerful cause of the growth of mortgage debt.

Where the tenancy system prevails, the agricultural entrepreneur can devote his capital exclusively to the enterprise; under this system agriculture can unfold its capitalist character most completely; tenant farming is the classical form in which capitalist agriculture appears.

Besides the full use of the entrepreneur’s capital, the tenancy system also offers the advantage that it allows the landowner to choose the ablest tenant, and the one best supplied with capital, from among the competing tenants, whereas under the system of cultivation by the landowner himself it is mostly chance, according to the right of inheritance, that determines the person of the farmer.

That does not matter very much in small-scale farming. The peasant’s economy is still a quite routine and simple one. And the peasant’s children must work in the enterprise from an early age and so acquire the necessary experience. Differences of ability between individual farmers will arise there too, but as a rule they will move within narrow limits and not influence the conduct of the enterprise too greatly.

It is otherwise in large-scale farming. This is a complicated structure, whose direction requires many-sided practical experience as well as a thorough scientific and commercial education. But in the course of capitalist development the large landowners become more and more a class with urban needs and inclinations, drawn to residence in the town, giving their children an urban upbringing. For the son of the large landowner it is by no means a matter of course, as it is for the peasant’s son, to grow up in agricultural work. But the education he acquires in the town is not a solid agronomic or commercial one. For that, large landed property, in spite of its urban character, is still too deeply sunk in its feudal traditions. Court and army are the schools of the younger generation of large landowners. Very often the accident of birth makes a farmer of a young man whose “studies” were carried on only on the racecourse and in fine restaurants and have made him at most a connoisseur of wine and horses. He is naturally not the right man to demonstrate in practice the superiority of large-scale over small-scale farming. But his landed property can keep him above water for a long time, especially with a rising ground-rent, before he goes bankrupt.

It is otherwise with the tenant. With him ground-rent cannot help to cover a deficit in the profit of enterprise. Nor can he help himself by running the landed property into debt; he must deliver his rent punctually every year. If on the one side the ablest tenant can be chosen, on the other the incapable one will soon go bankrupt. Competition makes itself felt there far more sharply than among those farmers who are at the same time landowners.

And since the tenant, moreover, has no outlays to meet for the acquisition of land, often none for buildings either, and applies his whole capital to the enterprise, so that with a given capital he is able to cultivate the largest possible estate most intensively, the tenancy system proves, under the capitalist mode of production, to be the one that yields the highest net returns.

But the tenancy system too has its dark sides. The tenant has the greatest interest in extracting the highest possible yield from the soil, and he also offers the best preconditions for doing so, but he has no interest in the permanence of the yields, the less so the shorter his lease. The more rapidly he exhausts the soil, the more profitable the farm is for him. He can, it is true, be prevented by the lease from a husbandry that impairs and exhausts the soil, and leases contain the most detailed provisions on this, but at best this leads to the farm’s remaining at the height it has reached. For progress beyond this height the tenancy system is little suited. The tenant has no interest in improvements or in the introduction of new methods of cultivation that at first cost a great deal of money and whose beneficial effects appear wholly or in part only after the expiry of his lease, and merely become a reason for screwing up his rent, which therefore raise not his profit of enterprise but the ground-rent. The tenant will take care not to undertake improvements unless he is sure of getting back the capital employed, together with interest, while his lease still runs.

The longer the leases, the more favourable the tenancy system to agricultural progress. But where ground-rent is rising, the landowners have every reason to keep the leases as short as possible, because this is the surest means of directing the whole amount of the rising ground-rent into their own pockets.

Thus under the tenancy system, just as under cultivation by the owner, ground-rent proves to be a powerful obstacle to rational agriculture.

An equally powerful obstacle is the law of inheritance.

The feudal fetters that constricted agriculture as well as industry could be broken, and the further development of agriculture made possible, only by the introduction of full private property in land and by the abolition of the privileges not merely of estate but also of birth. Bourgeois society demands not only the equality of all citizens before the law but also the equality of all children in the family, and therefore the division of the parents’ property among them in equal shares. But the same institutions that led to a rapid upswing of agriculture soon began in their turn to become further fetters.

With capital, too, the division of the parents’ property is a strong obstacle to the uniting of a mass of capitals in one hand. But the concentration of capital is a product not only of the centralisation of old capitals but also of the accumulation of new ones, and the latter is so powerful that the concentration of capital advances rapidly in spite of the continual divisions among heirs.

With landed property there can be no talk of a phenomenon corresponding to the accumulation of new capital, at least in old civilised countries, where all the land already has its owner. But we know that the centralisation of landed property, too, meets with far greater difficulties than the centralisation of capitals. Here division among heirs must favour in the highest degree the progressive fragmentation of landed property. But however deeply legal relations may influence economic life, in the last instance the latter always proves to be the decisive power. The fragmentation of landed property therefore becomes a reality only where economic conditions permit it, conditions such as we described in the previous chapter. But where that is the case, division among heirs proves a highly effective means of accelerating the development.

Where, on the other hand, an estate serves commodity production and not the household, and is therefore subject to competition, where the larger estate proves superior to the smaller and the fragmentation of landed property brings with it direct and obvious disadvantages, for example where grain production predominates and there is no opportunity for the farmer to earn a by-income, there the division of estates in kind on inheritance will establish itself only with difficulty and seldom for long. There, rather, the division will be carried out in such a way that one of the heirs takes over the estate undivided and pays the co-heirs their shares. But since he almost never possesses the necessary capital, this can as a rule be done only by his raising a mortgage on his estate. Here the paying-off of the co-heirs becomes merely a particular form of the purchase, mentioned above, of an estate acquired with insufficient capital. But in inheritance the transaction is an involuntary one, and one that repeats itself with the necessity of nature from generation to generation. Here the law of inheritance brings it about that the heir takes over his enterprise burdened with debt from the outset, and that he must use his surpluses for the payment of mortgage interest instead of for the accumulation of capital and the improvement of the enterprise. And even if he succeeds in paying off the debts, his successor finds himself in the same position as he did, indeed in still greater debt, if in the meantime the ground-rent has risen or the rate of interest on capital has fallen, or both have occurred, and the value of the estate has risen through one or both of these factors.

The rise in the prices of estates is an advantage for those who cease to be farmers, who sell their estates, not for those who become farmers, who buy estates or inherit them along with others. Nothing is more mistaken than to believe that it is in the interest of agriculture to drive up the prices of estates or to keep them artificially high. This is in the interest of the landowners of the moment, of the mortgage banks and of the speculators in estates, but not in the interest of agriculture, least of all in that of its future, the coming generation of farmers.

Fragmentation or a rising burden of debt on the estates: that is the alternative before which the bourgeois law of inheritance places the farmers.

In many districts, especially in France, the rural population seeks to escape this alternative by the two-child system. This is undoubtedly a means of avoiding the disadvantages of the existing law of inheritance that we have described, but a means that, like other means that seek to help the peasantry, works at the expense of society as a whole. Capitalist society needs for its development a strong increase of population. A state whose increase in labour-power proceeds too slowly falls behind in the competitive struggle of the capitalist nations. But it also runs the danger of losing its political power among the rival nations, because it cannot throw into the scale the necessary military power, which rests above all on the number of its men fit for service.

In France, where the two-child system is most generally prevalent, it leads not only to a reduction in the relative military power of the country — the population grew from 1872 to 1891 by only 2 millions, from 36 millions to 38, and since 1886 hardly at all, whereas in Germany in the same period it grew by 9 millions, from 41 to 50 millions — the two-child system also leads the capitalists to bring in from abroad the labour-power that the rural population does not supply them: Belgians, Italians, Germans, Swiss, etc. In 1851 France counted only 380,000 foreigners, 1 per cent of the population; in 1891, 1,130,000, 3 per cent. In the German Empire, on the other hand, there lived in 1890 only 518,510 persons born abroad, 1 per cent of the population. At best, then, the two-child system leads to relieving landed property of its burden at the expense of the military power and the industrial efficiency of the nation. Nor are the statesmen and economists of France at all edified by this method of saving agriculture.

France is the country in which the Revolution swept away the feudal economy and the feudal law of inheritance most thoroughly. In England and Germany, on the other hand, great landed property has retained considerable power even in bourgeois society, and this is expressed, among other things, in the particular form of the law of inheritance that it has preserved for itself, or at least for the most favoured of its members: the entail (Fideikommiß). Under it an estate passes from the free property of an individual into the bound property of a family, which falls to a single member of the family (usually the first-born of the testator) for his usufruct, but which he may not alienate or diminish. His brothers and sisters have only an equal claim with him on the movable property of the testator; from the landed property bound by entail they are excluded. Since the onset of the agrarian crisis the number of entails in Prussia has grown greatly. According to Conrad, entails were founded in the seven eastern provinces of Prussia:

Within 16 years, since 1871, more entails were founded than during the first 70 years of our century! And these foundations continue. At the moment when these lines are going to press, the news is going round the press that in Prussia 13 new entails were established in 1896 and 9 in 1897. That these foundations spring not from “care for agriculture” but from care for a few aristocratic families is clear.

A peasant variety of the entail is the single-heir law (Anerbenrecht), which does not bind landed property so strictly and leaves the owner for the time being greater freedom of movement, but which likewise abolishes division among heirs. In some districts of Germany and Austria where the big peasantry predominates, this right has survived, if not as law, then as custom. In the most recent times numerous legal provisions have been enacted that are meant to strengthen this custom and give it a juridical basis, for conservative politicians and economists see in it one of the most powerful means of preserving the peasantry, and with it the bulwark of private property.

For us there is no doubt that the single-heir law is capable of averting the dangers that threaten landed property from division among heirs, at least where it is carried through resolutely and not timidly. But there it means nothing other than the disinheriting of those otherwise called to be co-heirs; it means the rescue of the peasant economy at the expense of the majority of the peasant population; it means the rescue of private property by the confiscation of the right of inheritance of those entitled to inherit; it means raising a dam against the proletariat by increasing the proletariat.

With large landed property bound by entail, the disinheriting of the younger sons, as is customary, for example, in England, is of no great importance. Church, army and civil service have the task there of supplying enough well-endowed sinecures for the disinherited noble offspring. It is otherwise with the peasant. He has not enough influence on state and church to be able to exploit them as institutions for providing for his younger sons. The single-heir law means nothing other there than the condemnation of all his children, with the exception of a single one, to wage-slavery.

But the single-heir law promotes the proletarianisation of the rural population in yet another way, and the more so the closer it approaches the family entail, that is, the more powerfully it counteracts the fragmentation of the land and its indebtedness in consequence of division among heirs. It gives the tendencies towards the centralisation of the land a decided preponderance over the tendencies towards its fragmentation. It thereby furthers the possibility of extending the enterprise and organising it more rationally, but at the same time tears a mass of small landowners away from the soil that bound them to their home.

Neither in custom nor in law does the single-heir law apply to the small peasant; for him it would only be a fetter, and his welfare rests less and less on his landed property and more and more on his earnings in money outside it. The single-heir law is meant to protect the big peasant. In Austria it applies only to estates “of middle size”, in Mecklenburg to peasant holdings assessed at not less than 37½ Scheffel, in Bremen to estates of at least 50 hectares, in Westphalia and Brandenburg to estates with a net return for the land tax of at least 75 marks, and so on.

The big peasant’s single-heir law not only proletarianises his younger brothers and sisters and his younger children; it also has the tendency to proletarianise his smaller neighbours. But with this it also promotes the flight from the land to the town, the depopulation of the countryside, and so works against the development of a rational agriculture.

Thus it is said, for example, of “the localities with undivided inheritance” in Hesse:

“Here there have been almost universal complaints for years of a shortage of labour. From these places, too, the emigration of the young people and able-bodied men, who indeed call nothing their own, to the industrial districts is very considerable; only the women and children and older persons remain behind, and from these the farmers — peasants and large farmers — must then draw their labour force.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, II, p. 233.)

The same holds in increased measure of the entail. It is one of the most powerful means of forming and extending latifundia. It is, to be sure, quite wrong to assert that in landed property only the tendency to decentralisation prevails and that only artificial barriers could counteract it. Where commodity production predominates in agriculture, both tendencies appear, one after the other and side by side: that towards centralisation and that towards decentralisation. In the eastern provinces of Prussia there were, according to Conrad, at the end of the last decade 2,498 private owners of over 1,000 hectares, with a total landed property of 4,684,254 hectares. Of these, 308 were owners of entailed estates, with a property of 1,295,613 hectares, about a quarter of the area of the properties over 1,000 hectares. In France there are no entails. Nevertheless large-scale farming is growing there more strongly than in Germany, as the table printed on p. 132 proves. In Germany the enterprises over 50 hectares in 1895 took up 32.56 per cent of the agriculturally used area; in France in 1892 the enterprises of more than 40 hectares took up 43.05 per cent. Unfortunately, in the French statistics the enterprises of more than 40 hectares are distinguished by size-classes only in respect of their number, not of their area. It is significant, then, that precisely the largest enterprises have increased very greatly. There were counted:

This, to be sure, is only a statistic of enterprises, not of property. But it nevertheless indicates the general tendency. The statistics of property can only show a greater, certainly not a lesser, centralisation than the statistics of enterprises.

But if it is not true that the protection of the entail alone produces large landed property, it is nevertheless certain that this protection favours its origin and development in the highest degree; but with this it also creates the preconditions for the highest stage of agriculture that it can reach within the capitalist mode of production.

The great extent of the latifundia makes it easiest for them to give each of their individual enterprises the extent and shape of land best suited to its character; it allows various enterprises to be united into a systematically directed economic whole; on the other hand, the entail facilitates the accumulation of capital for the intensification of the enterprise, since it keeps from it the burdens that division among heirs brings with it. According to the inquiry into indebtedness of 1883 in 42 Prussian district-court areas, the land-register debts there per thaler of net return for the land tax (without deduction of the value of the mortgaged buildings) were:

The security of possession that is peculiar to the entail encourages far-sighted improvements, but it also promotes the development of the tenancy relation, which thrives best where the tenant is sure of not having his rights curtailed by a change of ownership or the insolvency of the owner.

It is therefore no accident that the system of latifundia protected by entails has produced the two highest forms of capitalist agriculture: in England the capitalist tenancy system, in Austria the giant enterprise of a union of domains.

But if this form of latifundium affords, more than any other form of landed property, the possibility of the most perfect capitalist enterprise, it is precisely the latifundium protected by entail that is relieved, more than any other form of landed property, of the necessity of the most rational possible husbandry.

It is relieved of this necessity above all by the fact that its owner is freed from the task of defending his property in the competitive struggle. We are not among those who identify the competitive struggle on the market with the struggle for existence and declare it a necessity of nature. A certain emulation among the members of society, and the selection of the ablest, is indeed an indispensable precondition of every advance of society, indeed of its maintaining itself at the height once reached. But people are very much mistaken when they declare that the nature of a socialist society is incompatible with this emulation and this selection. The abolition of class distinctions, the equalising of the standard of living of the individual classes of society, by no means signifies the abolition of all other social distinctions that could act as a spur on the individual. Do we not see even today, for example, within a trade union, among whose members there is no class distinction, no difference in the standard of life, differences nevertheless in the esteem, the power and the kind of activity of the individuals, and correspondingly also emulation and selection in the choice of those called to represent and administer the whole body? And these differences would be bound to increase within so complicated a structure as a modern socialist society. Far from equality in the standard of living suppressing emulation and making impossible the selection of the ablest for the most eminent, most responsible and most difficult posts, it forms rather the foundation of them. A race between horses that start running from different points on the course is an absurdity, and so too is emulation among people who are unequally placed from the outset. And the selection of the ablest, too, can take place only among those equally placed.

This emulation and this selection are not competition in the sense of bourgeois economics. Today they take place within the capitalist enterprise, where it is not competition in the economists’ sense that prevails but planned co-operation. The regime of competition as the regulator of economic life begins where planned co-operation ceases. The relation of the individual independent enterprises of commodity production to one another is determined by competition. Within the individual enterprise production is regulated according to plan with the greatest possible economy; production within society is planless, and is prevented from becoming completely chaotic only by the fact that those products that are produced in excess lose value, and those on which too little social labour-time is spent, which do not cover the demand, are paid for above their value — the most wasteful and clumsy procedure that can be imagined.

The planlessness of commodity production has its counterpart in the manner in which the owners and directors of the individual enterprises are selected. Under the rule of private property in the means of production it is the accident of birth that in the first place provides for this selection. Only afterwards does selection by competition come into action; but it works less by raising up the ablest than by weeding out the least able, and that not by removing the incapable director from his enterprise but by ruining the whole enterprise — a method that can indeed measure itself in cruelty and waste against the struggle for existence of individual organisms in nature, however little else it may have in common with it.

But however brutal and wasteful this method may be, under the rule of commodity production and of private property in the means of production it is the only one possible for enforcing the greatest possible economy and the most rational possible organisation of production within the individual enterprise.

For the entail this compulsion is abolished — without the abolition of the private property in the means of production that makes it necessary. The owner of an estate protected by entail may manage it as badly as he likes; he can thereby only reduce his income, but he never endangers his property.

It would be an absurdity to try to secure an industrial or commercial capital by entail. This capital is far too mobile and changeable to endure such fettering. Capital is engaged in a constant metabolism; today it exists in the form of money, tomorrow in that of means of production, the day after in that of commodities; it is subject to the most manifold contractions and expansions, to the alternation of crisis and prosperity, and so on. Land, on the other hand, however often it may be equated with capital, is subject to quite different laws. It is not a value created by labour and is subject to no process of circulation. Even on its material side it is totally different from the means of production that represent capital. These wear out — the soil is indestructible. They are constantly made superfluous by new inventions; it remains without interruption the natural basis of all production. Competition among capitals grows with their accumulation, that is, with the growth of industry and population; in the same measure land takes on more and more the character of a monopoly.

However senseless it would therefore be for a family to try to secure its possession of capital by tying up a factory or a bank in entail, such a tying-up corresponds all the more to the family interest in the case of landed property, although the entail, less than any other form of landed property, compels the most rational husbandry. The owner of the moment can, by bad husbandry, injure only himself through a momentary reduction of the ground-rent; he cannot destroy the foundation of the family income. That outlasts the generations.

That landed property held in entail is badly managed is, moreover, likely from the outset. A modern entail presupposes that the power of the state feels a strong interest in individual landowning families, for it is the state that permits and protects the entail. It is the families of the court nobility that are privileged in this way, families whose occupation keeps them away from agriculture and makes them unfit to be farmers. If the entailed latifundia nevertheless do not count among the worst-managed, and sometimes even contain model farms, they owe this either to the capitalist tenancy system, which finds on these estates the best opportunity to unfold, or to the modern system of agricultural schools, which produces a more than sufficient number of the ablest estate officials, who are at the disposal of the gentlemen owners of latifundia for a modest sum and find on their estates the best opportunity to apply their knowledge and their talents.

But a negligent or incapable landowner will also easily make serious mistakes in the choice of his tenants or estate managers. In any case the good husbandry on not a few latifundia proves not the excellence of the system of entail but the superiority of large-scale farming, which comes to light even under unfavourable circumstances.

In yet another way than by securing the landowner in his possession, the entail works against the most rational organisation of agriculture. It is either a latifundium from the outset or at any rate leads, as we have seen, to the formation of one, since it abolishes the tendencies to the decentralisation of landed property and lets only the centralising tendencies work. But the larger the landed property, the greater the mass of ground-rent it yields, the greater the luxury of the landowner. And the luxury that lies nearest to hand for him is luxury with land; especially for entailed landed property, in which the traditions of the feudal era are still strong. The larger the landed property, and the better managed one part of it, the greater the ground-rent, the greater the endeavour to devote the remaining part of the property to mere purposes of pleasure, to country seats, ornamental gardens, parks, game preserves, and the smaller, therefore, that part of the property which serves the production of food.

The development of capitalist exploitation in the towns, moreover, works in the same direction. The more this grows, and the mass of surplus-value with it, the greater too the luxury of the bourgeoisie, which shows itself among other things in the acquisition and building of country seats — from the splendid château of the financial king down to the simple little country house of the small merchant or manufacturer — country seats that serve mainly for pleasure, in which agriculture is only a secondary matter. The more the means of communication develop, the easier the connection between town and country, the farther these country seats push forward and drive peasants from their holdings.

But the growth in the mass of surplus-value and the easier connection between town and country show themselves not only in the building of country seats but also in the increase of hunting, which ceases to be a feudal privilege and becomes a bourgeois pleasure as well. On the one side this leads to an extension of the forests at the expense of peasant landed property, on the other to an excessive preservation and increase of game even without any extension of the woods. For it is not the woods alone that supply food for the game; in the fields and meadows it finds much better nourishment.

Like the increase of the woods, the increase of game ruins the peasant economy. Nevertheless the spread of the sport of hunting may in some circumstances be welcome to the peasant. The sport of hunting is increasing so greatly that for many peasant communes that lease their shooting the demand exceeds the supply and drives up the rents. The single hare then comes very dear, and it can become more advantageous for the peasant to feed hares and partridges with the products of his soil rather than cows and human beings. There are peasant communes that draw a very considerable profit from leasing their shooting. But the rational conduct of agriculture is always hindered by the spread of the sport of hunting.

Thus even the increase of surplus-value in the towns generates tendencies harmful to agriculture, just as the growth of ground-rent and the law of inheritance do. As far as the latter is concerned, its harmful effects are acknowledged by the economists the more readily the closer they stand to agriculture. But as representatives of the interests of bourgeois society they do not in general go so far as to want to abolish the right of inheritance in land and to demand common property in it. Theoretically, common property in land is indeed not incompatible with bourgeois society, but the bourgeoisie feels instinctively only too well that the individual spheres of bourgeois society are most closely bound up with one another and act on one another, and therefore it resists most decidedly common property in land, although this is compatible with capitalist production and although it would free agriculture from some of its most oppressive burdens, burdens that grow from generation to generation.

Bourgeois economics prefers to doctor the symptoms, for instance to ease the indebtedness arising from inheritance by the spinning-out of special forms of credit. Mostly it declares both systems of the law of inheritance, equal division among heirs and the monopolising of the inheritance by one member of the family, to be equally harmful, and infers from this — the necessity of both; the one is to serve as an antidote to the other. If in England a kind of entail prevails, and in France equal division among heirs, Germany is the promised land where we find both systems of inheritance at work side by side. That German agriculture is better off on that account than English or French we cannot find.

But the number of factors harmful to agriculture that the capitalist mode of production generates or heightens to a particular effect is not yet exhausted with those mentioned.

We have seen how ground-rent and the indebtedness of the farmers grow. Only a part of the ground-rents and of the interest on debts remains in the country, to be consumed or accumulated there; the greatest part flows into the town, and this part grows more and more.

So long as conditions are still backward, the peasant is obliged to look in his immediate surroundings for people who will lend him money. His creditors are not only village Jews, corn- and cattle-dealers, shopkeepers and innkeepers, but also very Christian big peasants, who understand cutthroat dealing just as well as they. But in the course of development, the more debt ceases to be an accidental act, caused by bad husbandry or extraordinary misfortunes, an act that is settled as secretly as possible, since it always points to a state of distress; the more it becomes a necessary part of the process of production itself; and the more commodity exchange between town and country develops, the more is primitive, secret usury displaced by special institutions in which credit operations take place openly and represent a normal act, not an act of despair, and which therefore demand not extortionate interest but normal interest. But these institutions are either urban from the outset, banks, many co-operatives, etc., or they borrow the capital they need from urban capitalists. This transformation of the credit system is a necessary development. But however useful it may be to the individual peasant, taken as a whole it appears as a growth in the country’s obligation to pay tribute to the town; an ever-growing part of the values created in the country flows into the town without being replaced by an equivalent.

But the same is the case with ground-rents. The further capitalist development advances, the greater becomes the difference in culture between town and country, the more the latter falls behind the former, and the greater too the means of enjoyment and diversion that the town offers in contrast to the countryside. And at the same time the ease of communication between town and country grows. No wonder that all those whose estates are large enough to have them managed by tenants or hirelings, and whose ground-rents are high enough, prefer to spend a longer or shorter part of the year in the great city and to consume their rents there, which in especially extreme cases leads to absenteeism, to the owner’s staying away from his estate altogether, as for example in Ireland or Sicily, where centuries of mismanagement by an unbounded system of latifundia have created a barbarism that does not make even a passing stay on his property a pleasure for the owner of the latifundium — and this sort of landowner knows no other purpose in life. The Irish and the Sicilian economies show the ruinous consequences of the system of latifundia protected by entail where the modern capitalist large-scale enterprise has not developed and is not able to overcome these consequences.

Even where the extreme of absenteeism does not prevail, the temporary absence of the large landowner from his estate becomes the rule, and with it the flowing-off of a part of his ground-rent from the country into the town. And while in the countryside his luxury leads to harm to agriculture through hunting, country seats, etc., to a reduction of the cultivated area and to the setting free of peasant labour-power, in the town it leads to the promotion of industry and trade, to an increase of employment, to the attraction of labour-power and to the accumulation of capital.

But the money taxes, which grow ever larger and weigh most heavily on the peasantry, work in the same direction. In the towns production is from the outset predominantly commodity production, and money taxes grew out of its development. In the countryside production, especially that of the smaller enterprises, is even today still predominantly production for one’s own use. Urban development forces on the countryside money taxes that do not spring from its form of production but originally stand in contradiction to it, and thereby become a powerful factor in the revolutionising of this form of production.

In the countryside money taxes are one of the driving forces of the development from production for one’s own use to commodity production; but the money taxes and the other money needs of the peasant as a rule grow far more rapidly than rural commodity production and the institutions of trade and credit corresponding to it. Even today this is in many places a cause of the peasant’s constant shortage of money and of his dependence on the middleman and the usurer.

But the same money taxes that press so hard on the peasant serve to promote the development not of the countryside but of the town, especially of the great city. Only a minute part of the state taxes is spent in the countryside; in the towns are the barracks, in the towns the cannon and rifle factories, in the towns the ministries, the courts, and consequently there too the lawyers whom the peasant has to pay when he goes to law; in the towns are the secondary and higher schools maintained by the state, the museums, the state-subsidised theatres, and so on and so forth. The peasant, just like the townsman, must make his contribution to meeting the needs of culture, but he remains as good as completely excluded from culture. No wonder that he does not understand it, that he sets himself in hostility against it, since it merely lays burdens on him, to the delight of reactionary demagogy, which, out of an alleged consideration for the people’s purse, demands the curtailment of all expenditure for the purposes of culture instead of striving to carry culture out into the countryside and to abolish the cultural antagonism between town and country. This will be one of the most important tasks of the society of the future.

It is not hostility to agriculture but economic driving forces, which prove stronger than the pleasure of governments, that lead to the concentration of the whole life of the state in the towns. Present-day governments are all, on the contrary, very great friends of agriculture, and it is well known how vigorously they lend it a helping hand in every possible way, by duties on foodstuffs, love-gifts and bounties of every kind.

But however tremendous the shifts in the distribution of wealth that they thereby cause, the flowing-off of commodity values from the countryside into the town without return is neither stopped nor even checked in its growth. For all these supports in the last resort benefit only landed property; they are means of raising ground-rent. But this, as we know, constitutes a burden on agriculture, which comes clearly to light under the tenancy system, and under the mortgage system takes effect indirectly and in concealment, but no less strongly for that. Under the tenancy system these supports enable the tenant to pay a higher rent. Where landowner and farmer are one person, the farmer apparently gains along with the landowner; but the rise of ground-rent leads to a rise in the price of his estate; this can lead even the owner of the moment to increase the burden of debt on his estate; it certainly increases the burden on his successor, be he buyer or heir. After a short interval the supports of agriculture become in this case too merely supports of the actual landowners, the mortgagees.

But these for the most part live in the town; the large landowners, too, consume the greater part of their rents there; the raising of ground-rent by duties, subsidies, etc., therefore signifies not a taxation of the town in favour of the countryside, not a flowing-back of values from the former to the latter; this raising of ground-rent signifies, rather, that besides agriculture the masses of urban consumers too are laid under contribution in favour of a few landowners, living for the most part in the towns, and of their urban creditors.

To the ever-rising outflow of so many values into the towns, which no return flow of equivalents makes good, there corresponds an ever-rising outflow of nutritive substances in the form of corn, meat, milk, etc., which the farmer must sell in order to pay taxes, interest on debts and rents. At the same time, however, in consequence of the progressive decline of the domestic industry of the rural population for its own use and of the growing need for industrial products from the town, there grows the outflow from the country into the town of such values as are matched by a return flow of equivalents. But little as this outflow signifies, from the standpoint of the law of value, an exploitation of agriculture, it nevertheless in fact leads, like the other factors just mentioned, to its material exploitation, to an impoverishment of the soil in nutritive substances. The progress of the technique of cultivation, far from making good this loss, is rather nothing other than a progressive improvement of the methods of exhausting the soil and of increasing the mass of the nutritive substances that are withdrawn from it every year to flow off into the town.

Against this proposition it has been objected that modern agronomy in particular lays the chief weight on the statics of cultivation and demands that the nutritive substances withdrawn from the soil be restored to it by corresponding manuring. But this by no means overturns the above proposition. The fact of the growing exhaustion of the soil is established. With the present relation of town and country and with the present means of cultivating the soil this would lead within a short time to the complete decay of agriculture, were it not for the auxiliary manures. These make it possible to forestall the decline in the fertility of the soil, but the necessity of applying them in increasing measure signifies only one more among the many burdens on agriculture that are not necessities of nature but spring from the existing social relations. With the abolition of the antagonism between town and country, or at least between the densely populated great city and the desolate countryside, the substances withdrawn from the soil could flow back to it again and again in full, and the auxiliary manures would then at most have the task of enriching the soil in certain substances, not that of counteracting its impoverishment. Every advance in the technique of cultivating the soil would then signify, even without the supply of artificial manures, an increase in the content of soluble nutritive substances in the soil.

It is significant that in spite of all the advances of agronomy the wheat yields in England declined from the sixties to the eighties, whereas until then they had risen. The annual harvest per acre averaged

This fall has ceased since the eighties, which is, however, to be ascribed not to an increase in the fertility of the soil but to the fact that, in consequence of overseas competition, the soils less suited to the growing of wheat are being turned into pasture, so that only the most fertile remain under cultivation. The area under wheat has fallen from the sixties to the present from 3,800,000 acres to 1,900,000, that is, to exactly half.

In this connection mention must also be made of the diseases of livestock and plants that, as capitalist civilisation advances, visit agriculture more and more and lay heavy burdens on it.

Some of these epidemics have in recent decades assumed such dimensions that they threatened to bring agricultural activity in whole countries to a complete standstill; one recalls the devastations of the phylloxera and the Colorado beetle, of foot-and-mouth disease, swine erysipelas and swine fever, and so on.

“The damage by phylloxera (in France) for which a remission of taxes was granted was valued in 1884 at 125.9, in 1885 at 165.6, in 1886 at 175.3, in 1887 at 185.1, in 1888 at 61.5 million francs … According to the latest reports the devastations of the phylloxera are continuing. Since its first appearance (1880) the dangerous insect has already spread to 63 departments (1890) and laid waste hundreds of thousands of hectares of vineyard.” (Juraschek, Uebersichten der Weltwirthschaft, p. 328.)

Foot-and-mouth disease struck in Germany

From 1892 there was a temporary decline in the disease, but in 1896 it again visited 68,874 farmsteads with a stock of 1,548,429 head.

These are frightening figures.

The chief cause of this rapid increase in the danger of epidemics we seek in the displacement of the original domestic animals and cultivated plants by “improved” breeds, that is, the products of artificial selection. Natural selection leads to the selection and propagation of the individuals fittest for the preservation of the species; artificial selection in capitalist society leaves this factor entirely aside; what matters to it is the selection and propagation of individuals that can be turned to the highest possible account, that cause the least possible cost, that mature early, and in which the useful parts are as large as possible and the organs that cannot be turned to account as stunted as possible. Such “improved” breeds bring a far higher profit than the original breeds, but their endurance and power of resistance are extraordinarily slight.

But while the power of resistance of the improved breeds diminishes, their spread increases. The “noble” animals and plants, which thrive only with the most careful and intelligent tending, today find their way into the small peasant’s economy as well, thanks to the efforts to preserve him and to improve his husbandry. At the same time, however, the character of the husbandry also changes, which comes strikingly to light especially in the keeping of livestock. Summer pasturing, which refreshed and strengthened the cattle, ceases, but for lack of money the peasant’s byre is not improved or enlarged. In this peasant byre, in whose cramped space and dirt the sturdy medieval cattle could just about endure the winter, the delicate modern cattle are shut up for life. Even in England, which stands at a high level precisely in the matter of keeping livestock, the byres are mostly inadequate.

“Mr. Wilson Fox states in his report from Lancashire that unhealthy and badly built cattle-sheds with insufficient space and access of air contribute much to the spread of tuberculosis (in cattle). Instead of 600 cubic feet, a cow in some cases gets only 260 cubic feet of air space, and no arrangements are made for isolating diseased animals. One witness pointed out that if the Cowsheds Act really came into force in the Chorley district, seven-tenths of the buildings would have to be pulled down.” (Der Bericht der englischen Agrarenquete von 1897, p. 363.)

One of the causes that favour the devastations of plant pests is the disappearance of the insect-eating birds, which is brought about not only by their persecution but still more by the reduction of their nesting-places, a consequence of advancing cultivation. In forestry it is the modern large-scale enterprise, the displacement of selection felling by clear felling, and the displacement of the slowly growing broad-leaved trees by the rapidly growing conifers, which can be turned to account sooner, that favour the devastation of the woods by forest pests.

If the modern manner of selection and of husbandry reduces the power of resistance of plants and livestock against the small organisms that threaten them, the development of modern communications sees to it that these pests spread rapidly and lay waste whole tracts of country. The pampering of the soil’s products goes hand in hand with the stunting of the soil itself. To the costs of manuring are added those of fighting epidemics, and where these costs are shunned or cannot be borne, the failed harvests multiply, and diseases of livestock and plants complete the ruin of the farmer.

The growth of the great cities and the flourishing of industry, which, as we have seen, leads to an increasing exhaustion of the soil and, in the growing costs of the manuring that has to counteract this exhaustion, lays ever-growing burdens on agriculture, does not stop there. It also robs agriculture of its labour-power.

We saw in the seventh chapter how the growth of the large agricultural enterprises drives the small peasants, and with them the reservoir of rural labour-power, from the land. But this process finds its limits.

On the other side, in the previous chapter we became acquainted with the temporary emigration and migration that spring from the small peasant’s need for a by-income. This too often leads to withdrawing from agriculture labour-power that is indispensable to its rational conduct; but on the other hand it brings to agriculture, from industry and from the town, new capital that furthers its rational organisation.

Quite differently, however, works the flight of the rural population from the land that is generated by the power of attraction of the great cities and the industrial districts.

In the towns wage-labourers find quite other opportunities of employment than in the countryside, far more opportunity of setting up an independent household, more freedom and more culture. The larger the town, the more developed these advantages, the greater its power of attraction.

In the countryside the founding of an independent household, of a family, is possible only through the acquisition (by purchase or lease) of an agricultural enterprise of one’s own. This is particularly difficult where large-scale farming develops, and in its districts it is therefore a particularly strong motive for the flight from the land. But even in districts with a strong parcelling of the land the founding of a household meets with obstacles. For the farm servants, the menservants and maidservants, it is completely ruled out in the absence of sufficient savings. They are condemned to remain all their lives not only propertyless but also dependent, appendages of another’s household, excluded from marriage and family. There is only one way open to them in certain circumstances to attain to independence and freedom, to marriage and family, which the protector of family and marriage, the pious big peasant or Junker, refuses them: flight to the town, to the immoral Social Democrats, who break up marriage and the family.

How strong this motive is among the rural population in service may be shown by a few passages from the little book of a peasant who lives and feels with the farm servants. It runs:

“But even now in no other respect does the freedom and dignity of man suffer so much damage as in the condition, in this regard, of the servants, or of the propertyless agricultural labourers in general. Since it is in any case generally known with what difficulties their marrying is beset, it is surely not necessary to discuss this subject further, and we pass straight on to the consequences that spring from these causes. Since it is not possible for by far the greatest number of normally constituted human beings to suppress the sexual impulse entirely, while on the other hand present social conditions are not so constituted that it can develop within regulated limits, it is not to be expected otherwise than that the barriers drawn for the maintenance of the present order should be constantly broken through. Sexual intercourse outside marriage is an unconditional consequence arising from this predicament, and it has gradually become so much at home in the ranks of the rural servants too that it will be the vain labour of all the teachers of morals, manners and religion to eradicate this fact from the face of present-day society. Present-day marriage is for the most part unattainable for these classes, for which reason they must fall back on lower forms of sexual intercourse … That in these circumstances the life of a servant, or of a labourer in general, contains great humiliations, and is indeed bound up with a mass of secrecy, deception, shame, compulsion and all kinds and forms of indignity, is plain to see. Moreover, public opinion in the country is still a strict judge of morals, for which reason so many prefer to escape sharp-eyed Rumour in the throng of a great city.

“A huge part of those who flee from the country to the town are driven only by the lack of love, or by the restrictions bound up with it, to these stages of vice, there, with the exception of a few favoured by fortune, to fall from generation to generation ever more into misery and complete degeneration. And what a life of bliss awaits the offspring of the rural proletariat in their home can be told in a few words. In spite of the urgent need for such human wares, their existence is at best felt only as a burden by their begetters, who can seldom concern themselves with their upbringing and therefore attain no conception of true parental joys; and in the great majority of cases there blooms for them the certainly not too great honour of being recorded among the burdens of the commune. Their entry into life begins with want and shame for their begetters, defective upbringing is its continuation, the hardest wage-slavery forms the crown of their thorn-strewn life, which as a rule reaches a loveless end.” (Johann M. Filzer, Anschauungen über die Entwicklung der menschlichen Gesellschaft … mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Bauernstandes, pp. 161, 162.)

But one’s own household signifies not merely the possibility of an ordered marriage and family; it also signifies the possibility of being active as a citizen outside one’s work, of combining with those of like mind — a combination that in the large-scale industry of the towns is also favoured by the concentration of the masses of workers in a small space — and of winning better conditions of work and life by the strength of organisation and by taking part in the life of the commune and the state.

That too must draw the agricultural labourer into the town. Other factors are added to this. The more intensive agricultural production becomes, the more uneven the employment it offers its labourers. While some machines considerably reduce the number of labourers employed, for example the threshing-machine, which makes superfluous a large part of the labour-power previously employed in winter, others actually require a greater expenditure of labour, for example the drill. Crop rotation, too, brings with it the necessity of growing plants, the so-called root crops, potatoes, beets, etc., that must be worked repeatedly by human hands during their period of growth, by weeding, hoeing, earthing up, and so on. More intensive farming therefore in general has the tendency to reduce the number of hands it needs in winter, but in summer to require more labourers in proportion to the cultivated area. On the one side this leads to the greatest possible reduction of the farm servants and of the day-labourers under fixed engagement, who must be maintained throughout the whole year; but at the same time it brings about an ever greater irregularity in the employment of the free day-labourers. In districts where agriculture is the only source of earnings, this growing insecurity of existence must drive the agricultural labourers into the town, where there is indeed no regularity of employment either, but at least a greater prospect, if nothing is to be found in one occupation, of finding a place in another.

The process of migration to industrial districts and towns goes on the more readily, the more developed the means of communication, the easier the connection between town and country, the more the agricultural labourer learns of conditions in the town and the more easily he can get there.

But the improvement of communication between town and country, between the place of production and the market, is also an indispensable condition for the prosperity of intensive commodity production in agriculture. All farmers must eagerly strive to obtain improvements and extensions of the railway and postal services; but the same post that brings them market and crop reports and business letters brings the agricultural labourer letters from a relative in the town who is glad to have escaped rural slavery; it even brings newspapers, only “well-disposed” ones, to be sure, but the better disposed they make themselves out to be, the more they rail against the high living and the presumption of the urban workers and make the stunted agricultural labourer’s mouth water for it. And the same railway that brings the farmer machines and artificial manure and carries his grain, his cattle, his butter to the urban buyer also carries off from him those who create all his products.

Militarism works in the same direction, drawing the young men from the country into the town and acquainting them there with urban life. Whoever goes into the army is easily lost to agriculture, not merely for two years but for ever. Strangely enough, it is precisely the large landowners and big peasants, who suffer most from this, who are the most energetic supporters of the military state.

The flight from the land seizes most easily on the propertyless labourers, and among these most readily on the unmarried. But the more the burden on agriculture of taxes, debts and the exhaustion of the soil grows, the sharper the competition of the peasant enterprise with the large-scale enterprise (and with overseas production, of which we shall have more to say), the more the peasant enterprise can carry on the competitive struggle only by overwork and by renouncing all the needs of culture, sometimes even necessary means of subsistence, by voluntary degradation to the deepest barbarism, the more the peasant’s plot too loses the power to bind its owner to the soil, and the more the flight from the country to the town spreads in small-peasant circles as well.

This flight already exceeds in extent the natural increase of population and leads to an absolute decrease of the agricultural population. From 1882 to 1895 the number of agricultural enterprises in the German Empire grew from 5,276,344 to 5,558,317, and the agriculturally used area grew from 31,868,972 hectares to 32,517,941 hectares. But the population that lived from agriculture fell in the same period from 19,225,455 to 18,501,307, that is, by no less than 724,148 persons. And this decrease affects the small-peasant districts just as much as the big-peasant districts and those of the latifundia; it is found in all the provinces of the Prussian state and in all the larger federal states — with the exception of Brunswick, which shows an increase from 120,062 to 125,411.

The number of wage-labourers in Germany was

The same phenomenon shows itself in France. There the ratio of the agricultural to the non-agricultural population shifted in the following way:

Here too we find an absolute decrease of the rural population, and here too this decrease is due to the reduction in the number of labourers. The persons gainfully occupied in French agriculture were counted as follows:

The reduction in the number of wage-labourers was still greater than in Germany.

The decrease of agricultural labourers appears most glaringly in England, the land of the most developed large-scale agriculture and of the most great cities. There the wage-labourers in agriculture numbered 1,163,227 in 1861, 996,642 in 1871, 890,174 in 1881 and 798,912 in 1891. Their number fell in thirty years by 364,315, by 31.3 per cent, almost a third.

But these figures do not yet bring to light in full the loss that agriculture suffers. We have already pointed out that it is chiefly the younger, independent people who migrate. Children and old people remain behind. That holds for periodic as well as for permanent migration. But this means nothing other than that, while the rural population decreases in number, its capacity for work diminishes too.

An illustration of this fact is supplied by the latest occupational statistics. In the German Empire in 1895 there were counted 8,292,692 persons gainfully occupied in agriculture and 8,281,220 in industry. The two branches of occupation are almost equal in number. But how different is their distribution among the individual age-groups!

Thus precisely in the age-groups strongest for work, from the 14th to the 40th year, agriculture shows a minus of a million hands as against industry; in the less efficient age-groups a plus just as large.

Still more drastic is the language of a table that we take from C. Ballod’s work Die Lebensfähigkeit der städtischen und ländlichen Bevölkerung (p. 66). In Prussia, of every 1,000 persons on 1 December 1890 there were, in the

Let us also mention here some figures that we find in J. Goldstein’s book Berufsgliederung und Reichthum (pp. 28 and 59). Goldstein has investigated how large the percentage of the population aged 15–45 is in the various counties of England. So as not to be too long-winded, we give only the most extreme figures, for the eight most and the eight least agricultural counties.

The differences between the industrial and the rural stratification by age-groups are striking enough. They cannot be explained by migration alone. The greater tenacity of life of the agricultural population no doubt also contributes to this distribution of the age-groups. But in any case this table shows clearly that, with an equal number of workers, industry has at its disposal the greater number of vigorous elements.

But it is not merely the physically strongest but also the most energetic and intelligent elements that flee the country most, because they most readily find the strength and courage to do so, and feel soonest and most the contradiction between the growing culture of the town and the growing barbarism of the countryside. In vain do large landowners and peasants seek, by depressing school education, to prevent the rural population from becoming conscious of this antagonism. The economic relations between town and country are too close for it to be possible to preserve the rural population from the “seductions” of the town. And however hard the landowners may strive to raise a Chinese wall round their people, militarism, which they so greatly revere, tears this wall down and leads the peasant lads into the towns. The stunting of school education, the obstruction of every opportunity of educating oneself through newspapers and books, leads only to this: that the country people’s notions of the town are not always the clearest, but on the other hand that the intelligent people in the country are made all the more sharply conscious of the barbarism of their surroundings, and flee into the town all the sooner.

This side of the flight from the land cannot be documented statistically. But it is well known that the farmers complain less of a decrease of labour-power in general than of a decrease of intelligent labour-power.

The intellectual gulf between the countryside and the town, which the enormous favouring of the latter in respect of the means of education and intellectual stimulus has produced, is thereby deepened still further.

But to the decrease of population and the intellectual desolation of the countryside there is not seldom added physical degeneration as well. This is not confined to the factory districts. Under-nourishment, dwellings that mock all the requirements of hygiene, overwork, dirt and ignorance, unhealthy by-occupations (domestic industry) in many places make the rural population too decline physically.

Recently statistical figures have even been put forward that are supposed to indicate that in general the industrial population is already fitter for military service, and so physically better developed, than the agricultural. However, the evidential force of these figures is still very much disputed, and we therefore refrain from using them here.

But even if it is not yet justified to speak in general of a physical inferiority of the agricultural population, it is certainly losing its superiority. Even in a peasant country like Switzerland it no longer distinguishes itself physically. Of 241,076 men liable to military service in the years 1884–1891, 107,607 were agricultural labourers and peasants. There were counted among

The percentage of those fit was thus somewhat smaller among the peasants than the average.

Not only economically, numerically and intellectually, but physically too the rural population is being depressed more and more.

Thus capitalist development leads not only to an ever-growing additional burden on agriculture but also to the sapping of “the original sources of all wealth”, the soil and the labourer. (Compare Marx’s Capital, Volume I, Chapter 13, section 10, Modern Industry and Agriculture, where the line of thought set out above has already found its classical expression.)

The agricultural enterprise naturally does not remain untouched by these changes. Above all it is the labour question, in another sense than in the towns, that causes it embarrassment: not the question of what to do with the labourers, but of where to get them.

We already pointed out in the seventh chapter that large landed property, where it has stripped the land too bare of small-scale enterprises, seeks to create them again artificially. The more strongly the pull towards the town makes itself felt, the more it seeks to bind to the soil the labour-power it needs. But where industry has acquired a greater power of attraction, the mere creation of small peasant holdings is not enough; there legal compulsion must be added, to fetter the labourers and hold them to wage-labour for the large landowner; there new small holdings are created, which the lord of the manor leases out in return for the obligation to perform certain labour services. A new feudalism arises. But not for long. The advance of industry puts an end to it. These new leases with the obligation to perform certain labour services have proved their worth only where there is no industry near by. Where industry comes, even the most tempting offer cannot move the labourers to bind themselves. They prefer to keep the free disposal of their labour-power, so as to be able to use every opportunity of selling it to advantage.

Kärger declares to be an “irrefutable” result of the inquiry into the conditions of the agricultural labourers in north-west Germany the fact

“that the best labour relations, equally favourable to labourers and employers, prevail where the greater part of the agricultural work, apart from that done by the farm servants, is performed by the Heuerlinge. Here the employers always have enough labour-power at their disposal to get all agricultural work done in proper fashion, and here the labourers are both materially in a very good position, which in most cases allows them to put by savings, and in spirit in a thoroughly contented frame of mind.”

In spite of this abundance of contentment there are numerous districts in which the labourers are perverse enough to be dissatisfied with it. There are two factors that stand in the way of the general extension of the Heuerling relation:

“First, a defiant, independent spirit of the population, which abhors as servitude the undertaking of any obligation extending over a longer period, for which reason the introduction of the Heuerling system has in many cases proved impossible in the Westphalian districts of Paderborn, Büren, Warburg and Höxter. Secondly, the immediate proximity of a strong industrial activity, which, particularly in the coalfield of Berg and the Mark, and then also in the neighbourhood of Hamburg-Harburg, has made the old Heuerling relations disappear and has not let new ones arise.

“The causes of this lie chiefly in the high wage that mining and industry can pay, and that therefore makes it seem unadvisable to every rural labourer to shut himself off for too long a time, by entering into a lease and labour contract, from the possibility of profiting, when the demand for industrial labourers rises, by offering his own labour-power to them.”

Industry thus sees to it that the future does not belong to Herr Kärger’s feudal ideal.

More generally applicable is the bringing in of outside labourers from elsewhere, partly as permanent, partly as periodic migrant labourers. If the increasing proletarianisation of the peasantry favours an increase in the supply of such labour-power, the outflow of rural labour-power into the industrial districts generates the rapidly growing demand for it. In numerous districts agriculture could no longer exist without outside labourers. But however important outside labour has become, it can at most serve to distribute the burdens that the shortage of labour lays on agriculture more evenly over the whole country, or, if foreigners are called in to help, over several countries; it cannot bring new labour-power to agriculture as a whole. What the labour coming in from outside gives here, it takes there; it brings labour-power to the West in order to take it from the East, spreads the shortage of labour even where the influence of industry has not yet made itself directly felt, and with temporary migration prepares the ground for permanent migration. Almost never will the outside labourers be able to offer a full replacement for the natives who have gone off to the town. It is, as already remarked, precisely the most energetic and intelligent labourers who most readily turn their backs on the country. The newly arriving labourers, on the other hand, come from economically backward districts, districts in which popular education is worse, but mostly also agriculture stands lower. The consequence is not merely a decline in the efficiency of the class of agricultural labourers in general but very often also a decline in the methods of agriculture.

“The peculiar feature of the whole labour situation,” Kärger reports, for example, from the mining districts of Westphalia, “is the circumstance that a native class of rural labourers hardly exists at all, and that the children of all labourers, too, devote themselves almost without exception to mining immediately after confirmation. Almost all the labourers employed in agriculture therefore come from elsewhere. For farm servants people are brought from East and West Prussia, Hesse, Hanover, Waldeck and Holland, but this must always be done afresh, since most of them do not endure agriculture longer than one or two years once they have learned with how much less toil higher earnings can be obtained in mining. At harvest-time migrant labourers come of their own accord, chiefly from the administrative district of Minden, the so-called Bielefeld reapers. Whoever can avoid it, to be sure, prefers not to engage these highly paid migrant labourers and tries to manage with the farm servants. These harvest labourers therefore come far more seldom to Schwelm and Hagen, where the properties are on average smaller, and most seldom of all to the district of Schwelm, where small property altogether predominates.

“According to some reports there is, it is true, no real shortage of labourers for agriculture in these districts, especially not when the course of industry is bad, but there is a complete absence of permanent agricultural labourers and a great shortage of good ones. According to most reports, however, it is hard to obtain any labourers at all, and one general reporter asserts that the shortage of labourers, especially of the better ones, is so great that most farmers are thoroughly sickened of carrying on agriculture at all.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, I, p. 133.)

From the Grand Duchy of Hesse (Upper Hesse) a reporter communicates:

“Formerly there was a real class of day-labourers, who went out to work by profession year in, year out, and in the performance of the work itself showed that they were professionally trained and experienced, and on whom one could rely. But it has disappeared; the many threshing-machines took away the work on the farms in winter-time, in the industrial districts such work was to be found all the year round, and so in the middle of the seventies there began the emigration to the Siegen country, to Westphalia, Belgium, Paris, but then above all to America, Australia, Argentina, to ‘try their luck’ there. And frankly, not a few have found it there too. These then induced the good elements known to them to follow. Their place has been taken by the so-called married farm-hands, a hotchpotch from every country under the sun: Swiss, East and West Prussians, Poles, Upper Silesians, even Swedes and others; partly sent for and imported, partly come of their own accord, they represent on average a completely degenerate, rough gang, living in concubinage with the dregs of the female migrant labourers, given to drink, and, without professional skill, intelligence or loyalty, always finding service at high wages as grooms on the tenant farms or as so-called Swiss (cattle-feeders and milkers). … Moreover, these labourers settled here are not sufficient on the farms with heavy beet cultivation, and so from early spring numerous male and female migrant labourers come in addition from the Rhön, from the Eichsfeld, from Bavaria, the Black Forest, from Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, who must be kept until late autumn at great expense, precisely because the native Upper Hessians no longer care to go to work on the tenant farms for any length of time.” (Zustände der Landarbeiter, II, pp. 230, 231.)

Finally, let a third example be given to illustrate the degradation of agriculture by the progress of industry.

Dr. Rud. Meyer, in an article (Neue Zeit, XI, 2, p. 284), quotes some communications from the manager of a domain in Bohemia of a couple of thousand hectares with sugar-beet and grain cultivation. He says, among other things:

“Formerly we hoed the drilled grain several times with the horse-hoe, but we no longer do so, since an untrained labourer who guides the hoe damages the grain. But we have hardly any capable labourers left as farm servants with the teams, and the few who are any good change quickly. When the young men have got to know the world in the army, they no longer want to work long and hard with us for low wages, and go off somewhere else. So of the resident population we keep old men, children and women, and hire farm-hands from the Czech district of Tábor. They are very uneducated and rough and cannot do work with machines. That is why we have let the horse-hoes rust in the store.”

These communications already show us how difficult it is to apply in present-day agriculture the remedy against the labour shortage that seems the most obvious in the age of steam and electricity: the machine. The farmer does not everywhere find labour-power fit for using the machine, and such labour-power is more and more being lost to agriculture. Nevertheless the machine is making considerable progress in the country even today, but by no means in the measure that would be necessary if it were to counteract the labour shortage. We have found only quite isolated statements that farmers have been able to help themselves by introducing machines. We leave entirely aside here the fact that agricultural machines, while always labour-saving in relation to the quantity of produce, are not always so in relation to the cultivated area. A number of machines on the land require more labourers on the same area than the simple tools.

“In some cases it is precisely the use of more or better machines that increases rather than reduces the need for human hands. The drill requires more labour for sowing the same area than the broadcast sowing-machine or sowing by hand, and so on.” (Th. v. d. Goltz, Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse, p. 168.)

Finally, a fourth means has been recommended for counteracting the labour shortage: a substantial rise in wages, better treatment, housing and feeding of the labourers. This means is certainly the most effective of the four named, but it too seems insufficient to secure the necessary labour-power for agriculture. The higher wage is not the only factor that draws the agricultural labourer into the town; the easier prospect of finding work in winter, the greater independence, the greater ease of founding a family, and the cultural superiority of the town in general — these are factors that could at most be paralysed by an enormous rise in wages.

“Of the shortage of female servants,” writes F. Grossmann (Zustände der Landarbeiter, II, p. 419), “there is much complaint in the Elbe marshes, chiefly because of the drift to the towns. The reporter finds this phenomenon all the more striking because those who entered service in the neighbouring small towns earned (only?) a good half as much as in the country. Even in Hamburg, he says, the wage is on average not higher, but the expenses are.”

Nor can better treatment bind the agricultural labourers for long:

“How many cases there are,” a reporter exclaims, “in which the masters hardly regard and respect their servants as human beings; how often must the servants make do with a very middling, sometimes badly prepared meal. Often there is not at their disposal a reasonably comfortable, properly heated room in which the servants can spend their free hours, and sometimes they must make their way through all kinds of lumber to a sort of bedroom situated in a remote part of the house, which is scarcely provided with a floor or the necessary seats, not to speak of a table. If, on the other hand, one regards one’s servants in a certain respect as belonging to the family, talks with them about one’s own business affairs and about their own affairs, eats with them at one table, which in this district is the custom in very many cases, if they are allowed to spend their free hours in the family’s living-room, or another comfortable, suitable, well-heated room or bedroom is at their disposal, if the newspapers, etc., are passed on to them to read, then decent servants too will be content with their lot. Yet even in such cases the servants in general aspire to be employed as postmen, railway officials, seamstresses, housemaids and so on, or else to obtain a situation in the larger towns; because life there is far more agreeable than in a quiet, remote, simple village, often not even provided with a public house. Decent servants, with the present high wages, provided they do not marry too early, as is unfortunately the case here to a high degree, can very easily earn so much that at a good 30 years of age they are able to buy themselves a small holding, especially with the purchase prices so reduced as they now are, on which four cows with some sheep can be kept.” (Op. cit., p. 423.)

Neither high wages nor good treatment nor the prospect of independent property can keep the mass of agricultural labourers from the flight from the land.

And then, by what road can the agricultural labourers obtain higher wages and better treatment? There is no class of employers that agrees to a rise in wages of its own free will; it must be compelled to. But the rural wage-labourers are still too weak today to be able to compel it by the strength of their organisations. A rise in wages in the country is only the consequence of a growing shortage of labourers. High wages and an abundant supply of labourers are two phenomena that, so far at least, exclude each other in the countryside.

However good the advice may be, then, a rise in wages that would be capable of checking the flight from the land is not to be expected. The flight continues, without letting itself be stopped by any obstacle.

Anderson Graham says of it in his work The Rural Exodus (quoted in Goldstein, Berufsgliederung, p. 39):

“If they have low wages, as in Wiltshire, they emigrate; and if they have high wages, as in Northumberland, they run away too. If the farms are small, as in the Sleaford district (Lincoln), they are up and off; and in Norfolk, where as a rule the farms are larger, the flight from the land is still increasing. The countryman seems to be filled with the despairing thought that there can be no happy future for him on the land any more; without more ado he lays aside spade and hoe and goes off.”

Since self-help fails, state compulsion is to help. Stricter servants’ ordinances, punishment of breach of contract, obstacles to marriage are to secure the farmer his servants; the abolition or restriction of freedom of movement by bans on migration, the prevention of newcomers from settling in the towns, the raising of railway fares and the like are to keep those who migrate or emigrate at home.

But measures of the first kind would only help to make life in the countryside still more unbearable for the farm servants and contract labourers in general; they would be bound to increase their flight from the land. The abolition of freedom of movement, on the other hand, even if the industrial population put up with it and if it were practicable, would no doubt help some farmers, but not agriculture as a whole. It would rob numerous small peasants of their only possibility of a by-income and plunge them into the deepest misery; but it would also make impossible every kind of agriculture carried on with wage-labourers in the industrial districts, for there, as we have seen, it cannot manage without labourers from elsewhere. It would postpone the bankruptcy of agriculture in the economically backward districts, but hasten it in the economically advanced ones.

Against the labour shortage of agriculture there is no remedy in capitalist society. Where feudal agriculture was at the end of the eighteenth century, there capitalist agriculture is at the end of the nineteenth: in a blind alley, out of which it cannot get by its own strength on the given social foundation.

One thinks one is hearing a description from the last century when one reads:

“There is a shortage of labourers, and it makes itself felt especially on the large estates and the larger peasant farms. The consequence is that larger estates, and even peasant holdings, are leased out piecemeal; this brings the disadvantage that improvements are not made and a kind of robber husbandry is carried on, too few cattle being kept and only night-soil and auxiliary manures being used. This naturally impairs the lasting productive capacity of the soil. It even happens already that sandy fields that were formerly cultivated with advantage lie fallow and have not been cultivated for years, often those of the labourers themselves, who with the high wages earn more by paid work than if they cultivate their fields.” (Zustände der Landarbeiter, II, 206.)

So it is reported from Hesse; and from Bavaria:

“As is communicated in the general reports, the shortage of labourers in some districts of Bavaria is said to have led not only to the disturbance of a regular course of husbandry but also to a lower intensity of cultivation in general.” (Op. cit., p. 190.)

Compare with this, too, the passages quoted above on the effects of employing labourers from elsewhere. In spite of all technical progress a decline of agriculture has already set in in places; of that there can be no doubt. If the shortage of labourers continues, it will become general.

“A reduction of labour-power must necessarily have the consequence that the arable area cultivated each year decreases and the area of pasture increases.” (Goltz, Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse, p. 176.)

All the enterprises that employ wage-labourers are struck by the depressing consequences of the labour shortage, but the smaller more than the larger. The smaller have least at their command the means that can, if not remove the labour shortage, at least mitigate it in places. They have no land that they could lend to wage-labourers in return for fixed labour obligations; their need for labourers is too small for it to pay to have labourers come specially from far away; they must make do with those they find near by; machines they cannot use at all, and they are the most likely to lack the means for a substantial rise in wages.

But on the other hand these smaller enterprises employing wage-labourers are precisely those that most employ the class of labourers that most easily migrates: the unmarried labourers, menservants and maidservants.

Least affected by the flight from the land, among the enterprises that serve commodity production and not exclusively or almost exclusively the household, are those that employ few wage-labourers, that can if need be manage with the labour-power of the family, and that are nevertheless large enough to bind their owner to the soil. These are, by and large, the enterprises of between 5 and 20 hectares. They also benefit from the fact that the tendency to the fragmentation of the land, which threatens precisely these enterprises most, diminishes the more the flight from the land seizes the agricultural population. The demand for land thereby decreases, and the disproportionately high prices of the small estates come down. The parcelling of the land ceases to be profitable, the butchering of estates comes to an end. It is no wonder, then, that precisely these enterprises are the only ones that have noticeably gained ground in Germany. The agriculturally used area increased from 1882 to 1895 by 648,969 hectares, that of the enterprises with 5–20 hectares alone by 563,477 hectares; that of the enterprises with 1–2 hectares diminished by 50,177 hectares, that of those with 20–50 hectares by 62,898 hectares.

Of 1,000 hectares of agriculturally used area there fell to enterprises with

Only the middle-peasant enterprises with 5–20 hectares have gained significantly in ground; the big-peasant enterprises with 20–100 hectares have lost most (cf. p. 173).

These figures gladden the hearts of all good citizens who see in the peasantry the firmest bulwark of the existing order. It does not move after all, agriculture, that is, they cry enthusiastically; for it the Marxist dogma does not hold. In these figures the decentralising and the centralising tendencies, which were to be observed everywhere in agriculture during our century up into the eighties, do indeed appear to be extinguished. A new flowering of the peasantry seems to be dawning, which must put to shame all the socialist tendencies of industry.

But this flowering is rooted in the swamp. It grows not out of the prosperity of the peasantry but out of the distress of agriculture as a whole. It springs from the same causes that lead to machines already introduced and proved in agriculture being given up again, to feudal forms of the labour contract reviving, to arable land being displaced by pasture, to some fields beginning to lie fallow. On the day on which it proved possible to solve satisfactorily the particular “labour question” of agriculture, and so to lead it towards a renewed upswing, the tendencies favourable to the middle-sized enterprise would at once turn again into their opposite. The prosperity of agriculture and the survival of the peasant mode of husbandry are two notions that exclude each other where the capitalist mode of production is developed. The experience not only of Europe but also of the eastern states of the Union speaks for this. (Cf. p. 134.)

But neither may one expect that the decline of agriculture now setting in will, if it lasts long, lead to the displacement of the large-scale enterprise and of the dwarf enterprise, and bring to dominion in agriculture the class of contented middle peasants that Sismondi at the beginning of our century still described with such enthusiasm, and enable it to oppose to the whole development of society a “Thus far and no farther”.

Though the class of middle peasants is, of all the commodity-producing classes of the agricultural population, the one least struck by the shortage of wage-labourers, it is on the other hand precisely this class that suffers most from the other burdens that accrue to modern agriculture! The middle peasant is the chief object of exploitation by usurers and middlemen, money taxes and military service strike him hardest, his soil is the most exposed to impoverishment and exhaustion. And since these enterprises are among the most irrational of those producing commodities, they are the ones that most carry on the competitive struggle by superhuman labour and a subhuman way of life. Let us recall the saying that the small peasants are relatively well off so long as they do not yet keep a team; “it is only with one’s own team that the meagre life begins”.

These peasants are still bound to the soil by their relatively considerable property. But only they, no longer their children. Like the wage-labourers and the dwarf peasants, the children of the middle peasants too are beginning to be seized by the flight from the land, and the more so the nearer industry comes to them. From one of the provinces in which the peasantry has kept itself healthiest and most vigorous, from Schleswig-Holstein, it is reported:

“Those farm-hands, and likewise the sons of the peasants, who worked on their fathers’ farms until they entered the army, seldom return permanently to the country after completing their military service, unless they learn a trade, but go into the towns, because life in the countryside no longer suits them.” (Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, II, p. 426.)

But the sooner the children of the middle peasant grow tired of being his worst-kept and mostly most overworked wage-labourers, the more they strive to escape peasant barbarism, the more the families of the middle peasants shrink, the less they suffice to carry on the enterprise even in makeshift fashion, the greater the part that wage-labourers play here too, and the more the labour question, alongside the other injuries, makes itself felt in this class of enterprises as well.

Even today the middle peasants are anything but truly conservative, that is, content with what exists. On the contrary, they are just as eager to overturn what exists as the most radical Social Democrats, though in a quite different direction from them. They will nevertheless not overthrow the state, however wildly they often carry on, but they are ceasing to be a support of what exists. The agrarian crisis extends to all the commodity-producing classes of agriculture; it does not stop short of the middle peasants.