II.1. Does Social Democracy Need an Agrarian Programme?

If anything emerges clearly from the development set out in the first part, it is the fact that industry is becoming the determining factor for society as a whole, that agriculture is relatively losing more and more in importance, is surrendering more and more of its spheres to industry, and in the spheres that remain to it is becoming more and more dependent on industry. And Social Democracy may draw its confidence of victory not only from the growing power of the proletariat but also from the growing power of industry in society.

But it would be throwing out the baby with the bath water to conclude from this that Social Democracy, or, if one prefers, the proletariat struggling for its emancipation, need not concern itself with agriculture at all. The proletariat is the heir of present-day society; it has every interest in its inheritance turning out as rich as possible; but whatever the relation between industry and agriculture may be, the land always remains the foundation of all human existence; its productive power will always be a decisive factor in determining the expenditure of labour that is necessary in society for its maintenance; its character will always be a decisive factor in determining the physical and mental character of its population.

But it is not only regard for the society of the future that makes it necessary for the proletariat to turn its interest to the conditions of agriculture. This is required far more urgently still by the needs of the present. It is by no means a matter of indifference to the proletariat whether the prices of food rise or fall, for wages do not follow these fluctuations as exactly as was supposed according to the doctrine of the iron law of wages. But it is also by no means a matter of indifference for the tempo of the proletarian class struggle whether the standard of living of the rural population is low, whether this population is an ignorant, stupid mass or not.

And even if Social Democracy wished to concern itself one-sidedly with industrial affairs alone, an interest in agriculture is forced upon it by the growing importance that agrarian questions are acquiring for the whole life of the state in all modern countries. It is a remarkable phenomenon that agriculture, in the same measure in which it loses economic importance as against industry, gains in political importance, not only in the regions of the Junkers but also in those of the peasantry; not only east of the Elbe but also in Bavaria; not only in the regions of absolutism but also in those of democracy; not only in Russia, Austria and Germany but also in France and Switzerland. This apparent contradiction between economic and political importance becomes explicable when we remember that everywhere private property in land comes into insoluble contradiction with the existing mode of production much earlier than private property in the other means of production, and much earlier produces untenable and intolerable conditions. But the classes affected by this are precisely those that have hitherto formed the firmest supports of the existing order of state and society, and in part they themselves belong to the ruling classes, in part they are preserved by these in their own most particular interest. No wonder that agrarian questions occupy most keenly precisely the politically most authoritative sections of the civilised states. What matters to them here is not the rescue of agriculture but that of the “classes that uphold the state”, whose conditions of existence have become incompatible with the modern conditions of production. This rescue, to be sure, means reconciling the irreconcilable, and it acquires no more rational character from the fact that precisely in agriculture the intellectual and economic conditions of a higher mode of production are far less developed than in industry.

In view of all this it is no wonder that the agrarian movement, in the same measure as it grows, gives birth to ever crazier quackeries, which are taken ever more seriously by the ruling classes. It is not easy, if one wants to bring practical help to the rural population, to stand firm against this agrarian witches’ sabbath; it takes great clarity and strength of conviction. This alone makes it necessary for Social Democracy to take a decided position on agrarian questions. To remain indifferent to them would mean abandoning the masses of the proletarian strata in the countryside to the agrarian conjurers and mountebanks.

This explains why the Social Democratic parties of all civilised countries have in recent years turned their full attention to agrarian questions. But here too the peculiar immaturity of agricultural conditions made its influence felt. It was at first not considerations of principle but practical considerations, considerations of electoral agitation, that pushed Social Democracy into dealing with agrarian questions and made it desirable for it to “offer something” to the country people, to put forward practical demands by which they could be interested in the socialist movement. Everywhere people sought to draw up Social Democratic agrarian programmes before they had come to clarity on the principles of a Social Democratic agrarian policy. But so long as there is no agreement on the latter, the search for the former must always remain an uncertain groping, in which even the greatest acumen cannot bring to light lasting, reliable results.

The necessity for Social Democracy to settle its agrarian policy decisively is generally felt in its ranks. On the necessity of an agrarian programme, on the other hand, there is by no means unanimity among them.

A special agrarian programme is as a rule regarded as a programme of measures in the interest of the peasantry. Standing up for the interests of the rural wage-labourer requires no special programme. The existing Social Democratic programme already includes it everywhere. If, on the other hand, one wants to make the representation of the particular interests of the peasant a Social Democratic concern, a special agrarian programme does indeed become necessary.

As is well known, deep-going differences of opinion have arisen over this in the bosom of Social Democracy.

Protection of the peasant was declared necessary as a complement to the protection of labour. The proletarian in the countryside, it was said, is the peasant; but Social Democracy is the party of the class struggle of the proletarians against capital, and it is not its final aims but its immediate demands that are the roots of its strength. Just as it defends the urban proletarian against his capitalist exploiter, the employer, so it must protect the rural proletarian against his capitalist exploiter, the usurer; as it counteracts the immiseration of the urban wage-labourer, so it must counteract the immiseration of the peasant with all its strength and by all appropriate means.

This argument shall occupy us first.

It is undeniable that the peasant’s standard of living has in many cases become a proletarian one, indeed, one might sometimes say, a sub-proletarian one. But this by no means yet says that his class interests have become proletarian.

The characteristic mark of the modern proletariat is by no means its misery. There have been poor people, not, indeed, from time immemorial, but for many thousands of years; the Social Democratic proletarian movement, on the other hand, is a particular product of the last century, the product of a proletariat such as the world had not seen before, at least as a mass phenomenon.

One distinguishing mark of the modern proletarian is the important role he plays in the modern process of production. On him rests the mode of production that is decisive today, the capitalist. In this he differs as heaven from earth from the lumpenproletarian of ancient and modern times.

But neither is he by any means as completely propertyless as the latter. The lumpenproletarian lacks everything, but what he feels most painfully is the lack of means of subsistence and enjoyment. The lack of means of production troubles him less. He is, after all, excluded from the sphere of production, and often he has no desire to be admitted to it. But if he will not work, he nevertheless wants to live; and that he can do only if the propertied share their means of consumption with him. So far, therefore, as the lumpenproletarian rises to social aspirations at all, his ideal will be a communism of the means of consumption, not of the means of production, a communism of sharing out, not of uniting; an aim that in reality leads, where social conditions permit acts of violence, to plunder; where acts of violence are impossible, to begging.

The propertylessness that marks the modern wage-proletarian, on the other hand, is only the lack of means of production. The lack of means of consumption may, but need not, be bound up with it. The modern wage-labourer remains a proletarian so long as he is not in possession of his means of production, however satisfactory his position as a consumer may become, even if as such he becomes propertied and comes into possession of jewellery, furniture, indeed even of a little house to live in. Indeed, the improvement of his position as a consumer, far from making him unfit for the proletarian class struggle, often enables him to wage it all the more vigorously. This struggle is not the product of his misery but the product of the antagonism between him and the owner of his means of production. Not the overcoming of misery, even if it were possible, but only the overcoming of this antagonism can establish social peace. But that is possible only by the working class coming once more into possession of its means of production.

Here we come upon a further characteristic of the modern wage-proletarian. He is a worker not with individual but with social means of production, with means of production of such dimensions that not the individual worker but only a society of workers can make use of them. Two kinds of ownership of means of production of this sort are possible: ownership by an individual, who then necessarily exploits the workers whom he employs with his means of production; that is capitalist ownership. Or co-operative ownership. But under the rule of private property in the means of production, co-operative ownership of them can never become the general form of their ownership; all attempts in this direction, so far as they succeed, always take the capitalist direction sooner or later. Only in the form of social, that is, socialist, property in the means of production can their co-operative ownership become general. There are still other factors that press towards the socialisation of the means of production. But here we have to do only with those that spring from the class interests of the proletariat and that bring it about that the class struggle of the proletariat takes a socialist direction with the necessity of nature.

Finally, we have still to mention a fourth characteristic of the modern wage-proletarian, to which we have already pointed in this work: his separation from the household of his employer. The wage-labourers of earlier times as a rule formed an appendage of the household of their employer, belonged to his family, not only as workers but also as human beings; they were dependent on him in all their activities, outside work as well. The modern wage-proletarian belongs to himself outside work. He becomes all the more a free man, who faces his capitalist as an equal outside work, the more the capitalist mode of production develops and removes the feudal survivals.

These are the factors that have made the modern proletariat the powerful driving force of the socialist movement.

In the peasant these characteristic marks are by no means all to be found. People point to the mortgagee, who is said to be the actual owner of his farm. But he stands to the peasant in fact, as we have shown, not in the relation of capitalist to wage-labourer but in that of landowner to entrepreneur. The peasant no more becomes a proletarian through his mortgages than a manufacturer becomes a proletarian because he carries on his enterprise in a rented instead of a purchased building. The peasant still remains the owner of means of production, owner of his tools and implements, of his cattle, in short, of his stock. This too, it is true, may be in debt, but he nevertheless has to perform the functions of an entrepreneur, and as such he therefore remains in antagonism to the proletariat, just as a manufacturer who produces only with borrowed capital, to whom not one of his means of production belongs, nevertheless functions as an industrial capitalist and as such stands in hostility to the proletariat.

Among the peasants this antagonism must express itself most sharply in those who depend on the exploitation of wage-labourers, the big peasants.

So long, to be sure, as the movements of the workers remain confined to the towns and are directed only against the urban capitalists, the large farmers sometimes look on at them quite sympathetically. It was first English, then Prussian large landowners who adopted a benevolent attitude to the beginnings of the socialist movement and preached the alliance of wages with ground-rent against the profit of capital. But that changes as soon as the socialist movement threatens to seize the agricultural labourers too, indeed as soon as the mere rise of industrial wages draws the agricultural labourers into the towns and makes those who remain behind more demanding. Today the Prussian Junkers are more embittered opponents of Social Democracy than even the “Manchester men”; today they follow the banner not of Wagener but of Stumm. And the big peasants do not lag behind them.

If there should still be districts in Germany in which big peasants do not confront the labour movement with hostility but believe in a certain community of interests between the two, this would be proof not that these strata too can be won for Social Democracy if only one knows how to go about it properly, but only that in those districts the labour movement is still too weak to influence the conditions of the agricultural labourers favourably. It would be only a proof of backwardness, not a sign of beginning progress.

Less sharp than between big peasants and proletarians is the antagonism between the latter and the middle peasants, who employ no wage-labourers, or at least no considerable number, who keep their enterprise going essentially with the labour-power of the family, but who nevertheless live from the production of food for the market. Here, of course, the antagonism between exploiter and exploited falls away; but here too there nevertheless remains the antagonism that exists between the wage-proletariat and all producers of food for the market: the antagonism between buyer and seller.

A harmony of interests between the two classes has, it is true, been discovered, by pointing out that the worker is the best customer for rural products. The higher his wage, the more of them he can consume. The peasants, therefore, are said to have every interest in high wages; their interests are identical with those of the proletariat.

Arguments of this kind are not new; they have been used repeatedly to discover harmonies of interest. From the side of the friends of labour the manufacturers were urged to raise wages after all; that was the best means of extending the home market and avoiding stagnation of sales. Against this, again, from the manufacturers’ side it was explained to the workers what fools they were to want to compel the manufacturers to raise wages. Either the prices of food would thereby be raised, so that the workers would lose on the one side what they gained on the other, or profits would be reduced. But the higher the profit, the more capital was accumulated, the more rapidly the demand for labour grew, that most powerful means of raising wages. The workers therefore had good reason to avoid everything that could lead to a curtailment of profit, such as strikes and the like. They had the same interest as the manufacturers in high profits; the interests of the two were identical.

So much is correct in these arguments, that capitalist society too, like every other, is a unitary organism, in which every injury to one part is not without some unpleasant repercussion on the other parts. This fact, however, does not abolish class antagonisms and does not relieve any class of the necessity of safeguarding its interests in struggle against the opposing classes and by injuring their interests. The contradiction between the harmony of interests of the different classes, which in the last resort undeniably exists to a certain degree, and the far more decided antagonism of class interests merely proves what an imperfect organism capitalist society is, how many means and forces it must squander in order to fulfil its tasks.

What determines the position of the individual classes towards one another, and what moves capitalist society, is not, or at least only to a small degree, the very indirect harmony of their interests; it is in the first place the immediate class antagonisms.

That holds also for the relation between the sellers and the buyers of food. Their antagonism is too immediate to be effaced by the far more remote interest of the seller in the purchasing power of the buyer.

The countryman wants to sell his products as dear as possible, the worker wants to buy them as cheap as possible. And what use to the former is the rise in the latter’s wages if it only leads to an increased consumption of margarine, American bacon, Australian meat and preserves of every kind! He strives to remove the competition on the market that is so welcome to the worker, and to screw up the prices of his products artificially.

This antagonism of interests cannot be bridged by preaching a harmony of interests, however ingeniously thought out, but by no means tangible.

Not whether a farmer is starving, not whether he is in debt, but whether he appears on the market as a seller of his labour-power or as a seller of food: that decides whether he is fit to be received into the ranks of the fighting proletariat. Hunger and debt do not in themselves create a community of interests with the proletariat as a whole; they can even sharpen an antagonism to it, as soon as hunger can be stilled, and the debts paid, only if the prices of food rise and the enjoyment of cheap food is made impossible for the workers.

Besides these antagonistic interests there are, it is true, also interests that the peasantry has in common with the proletariat; we shall come to know these later. The community of interests can at times become stronger than the antagonism of interests and bring about a political co-operation of peasants and proletarians. But however often they may strike together, they will as a rule have to march separately, and the ally of today can become the opponent of tomorrow.

But must not the antagonism between the sellers of food and the sellers of labour-power become ruinous for the latter? Is it not to be feared that in these circumstances the game of 1848 will be repeated, and that one day the hobnailed boots of the peasants and peasants’ sons will turn against the proletariat and trample it down?

Let us look a little more closely at this hobnailed bogey. Perhaps, like many another bogey, it will lose its terrors as soon as one comes to grips with it.

The memory of the year 1848 is conjured up. Fifty years of capitalist rule have passed since then. Can they have remained without effect?

At that time the agricultural population in Germany amounted to about three-quarters of the total population; today it amounts to only a little over a third, more exactly 35.7 per cent, 18,500,000 out of a population of 51,800,000. As late as 1882 it was 700,000 persons stronger and amounted to over two-fifths, 42.51 per cent of the population, 19,225,000 out of 45,222,000.

In the Kingdom of Saxony it does not amount even to a full 14 per cent (in 1882 still 19 per cent), in the government district of Zwickau to only 10 per cent (in 1882 still 14 per cent) of the population. It is strongest in North Germany in Posen (58 per cent, against 64 per cent in 1882), in South Germany in Lower Bavaria, the German Vendée, the only larger district of the German Empire in which it has not decreased in percentage since 1882, or at least hardly noticeably. It amounted in 1882 to 61.5, in 1895 to 61 per cent of the total population of the government district.

The agricultural population is stronger in France, but there too it fell from 1876 to 1891 from 51.4 to 45.5 per cent of the total population (cf. p. 218).

We are hastening towards the conditions of England, where in 1890 the number of those occupied in agriculture amounted to only ten per cent of all those gainfully occupied!

In the United States, too, a decrease, if not absolute then relative, has set in among those gainfully occupied in agriculture, who there, unfortunately, are counted together with those in fisheries and in the mining industry. Were they recorded separately, their decrease would certainly appear still more strongly. Of all those gainfully occupied they formed 50.25 per cent (7,405,000) in 1880, 44.28 per cent (8,334,000) in 1890. In the North Atlantic States they comprised in 1890 only 22.6 per cent of all those gainfully occupied, in the Southern States, it is true, over 60 per cent.

But not all those gainfully occupied in agriculture are sellers of food. Beside them we also find a considerable number of sellers of labour-power. In 1895 there were counted in the agriculture of the German Empire:

The population living from wage-labour is thus just as strong in agriculture as that of the independent with their dependants.

But not all these independent persons, either, live exclusively from the sale of their agricultural products. Of the 2,530,539 independent persons in agriculture proper (apart from market gardening, forestry, etc.), 504,165 had a by-occupation.

Things are no better with the independent farmers if we take up the statistics of enterprises instead of the occupational statistics. We find there that of 5,558,317 holders of agricultural enterprises only 2,499,130 are independent farmers; 717,037 are dependent farmers; the rest belong to other occupations, among them no fewer than 1,495,240 to industry. We thus find on the one side 2½ million independent farmers, faced by almost 6 million agricultural wage-labourers; on the other side, beside 2½ million independent farmers, 3 million holders of agricultural enterprises whose chief interests are other than agricultural.

The peasants no longer form the majority even in the countryside, and beneath them stands a strong stratum of rural labourers, which balances them and whose interests are in all essential points identical with those of the industrial wage-labourers.

In some districts, of course, the independent peasantry is far stronger than the above average figures indicate. Thus, for example, of the 20 German administrative districts with the strongest middle-peasant property (5–20 hectares), 13 are in Bavaria alone. While in the German Empire only 30 of every 100 hectares of agriculturally used area fall to the middle-peasant enterprise, we find in these districts 60–70 per cent of the total area occupied by middle peasants. No doubt in such districts the hobnailed boots of the peasants can still now and then tread quite heavily on the proletariat’s corns. But they are far from being able to trample it down or even seriously to endanger it, once it marches up in full strength, united under one banner. The proletariat has on its side not only all the advantages of the higher intelligence that town life confers, of the better organisation and training of its forces and of the economic preponderance of industry over agriculture, but already today the preponderance of numbers as well.

The proletariat is already the strongest class in the German Empire. Leaving aside the army, the officials of the state, etc., and those without occupation, there were counted in the German Empire in 1895 20,674,239 persons gainfully occupied and in service, and of these there belonged to the proletariat:

Of the remaining 8,155,719 gainfully occupied persons many still fall within the sphere of the proletariat, both of the 2 million family members at work and of the 600,000 salaried employees; and of the 5,500,000 independent persons, too, many a one is only formally independent, and in fact a wage-labourer of capital, as for example in domestic industry.

In view of these figures, which are rapidly shifting still further in favour of the proletariat, it is an anachronism to conjure up the memory of the year 1848. Once Social Democracy has “got hold of” the whole mass of the proletariat, and with it all those apparently independent farmers and industrialists who are in fact only wage-labourers of capital, there will be no power left that could resist it. To win this mass, to organise it politically and economically, to raise it intellectually and morally, to bring it so far that it is able to enter on the inheritance of the capitalist mode of production: that is and remains the chief task of Social Democracy.

This “getting hold”, to be sure, is no such simple matter, especially in the countryside. It is not to be supposed that the development of the proletariat, the growth of its political and economic power, its intellectual and moral elevation, can ever go forward as rapidly in the countryside as in the industrial centres.

The factors that work in this direction there are already well known from the Communist Manifesto; we need not dwell on them long. Even pre-capitalist commodity production crowded great masses of propertyless wage-labourers together in individual towns. With the power and the intelligence of the towns their power and their intelligence grew too. But the journeymen of the crafts were still half-unfree people; they belonged to the master’s household, and work and household alike isolated them from one another. Only the sociability of holidays brought them together. The capitalist mode of production, on the other hand, unites the wage-labourers in great masses not only in individual towns, which far surpass the feudal towns in extent, but also within the towns in individual giant workshops: it itself organises and disciplines the wage-labourers. But these no longer belong to the employer’s household. Outside the workshop they are economically completely independent free men with households of their own.

Capitalist development works otherwise in the countryside than in the towns. Here it does not bring people together but scatters them. It leads not only to a relative, but, from a certain height of its development onwards, even to an absolute depopulation of the countryside. And it is precisely the ablest, most energetic and most intelligent elements that it carries off from the country. It is the weakest and most helpless who remain behind. Hand in hand with depopulation goes the intellectual desolation of the countryside.

The improvement of school teaching, which in the countryside is a very problematic one, and the progress of communications, which brings books and newspapers into the country, do little to counteract this. More is indeed read today by the rural population, especially in winter, than formerly; but the newspapers that come into the countryman’s hands are mostly of the most reactionary kind, which judge modern society by the patterns of times long past and may do violence to the facts that do not fit these patterns the more brazenly, the more naive and ignorant the public they address. And the books, beside the Bible, the product of past millennia, are colportage novels of the worst kind, which achieve incredible things in the gross distortion of reality.

Literature of this kind is not only unsuited to clarify insight into reality, into the nature of modern society; it can rather create complete confusion. The effects of isolation are often not diminished but rather strengthened by it.

This alone makes it very difficult to organise the rural proletariat and to impart to it understanding of and interest in the aspirations of the urban proletariat. But to these more external obstacles are added still more powerful ones, which go far deeper.

However much the rural proletarians share the same interests as the industrial proletarian on all decisive points, by no means all the characteristics of the modern proletarian given above fit them. Above all they do not fit the farm servants, but neither do they fit the Instleute, Heuerleute and Einlieger.

All these categories of rural wage-labourers still live in feudal relations, as components, or at any rate appendages, of another’s household. Even outside work they stand under the “discipline” of the master; their amusements, their reading, and above all their associations are subject to his control. They possess no right of combination, even where it is not withheld from them by law; they may not read any newspaper that is disagreeable to the master; if possible they are told how they are to vote. Not even by the possibility of one day becoming independent, if they have saved enough, are the servants distinguished from the serfs and slaves of earlier times, for these too had the possibility of buying their freedom.

A class of this kind, when treated excessively badly, is inclined to outbursts of despair and revolts; but its situation is not favourable to the conduct of an organised, tenacious, lasting class struggle.

Things are better in this respect with the agricultural labourers who own property. Their own enterprise does not raise them above the proletariat, for this enterprise is only an appendage of the household, and we have seen that it is not the lack of means of one’s own consumption but the lack of means of production for the commodity market that marks the modern proletarian. Just as, say, the miner remains a proletarian even if he acquires a little house, a little patch of potato land and a cow, so too does the rural dwarf farmer, so long as his own enterprise serves only his household.

But if his own farm does not prevent him from being a proletarian, it nevertheless makes it very difficult for him to feel himself one. His past, his present and his future offer him numerous inducements to range himself beside the independent farmers. Tradition alone, which has far greater power in the country than in the town, brings the inherited peasant class-consciousness closer to the cottager and cow-peasant than the newly emerging proletarian one. But the former also draws nourishment from the present.

In theory, to be sure, the small farmer as such is a producer for his own use; his need for money is satisfied by the sale of his labour-power, not by that of his agricultural products. But if this is correct by and large, and so for theory, life nevertheless does not make such sharp distinctions as we must make for scientific purposes. There are countless transitions, which the theorist may and must neglect if he wants to investigate the laws underlying the phenomena, but which he may not overlook if he wants to derive applications of these laws to practical life. Even the small farmer whose enterprise just suffices to supply his household with the necessary food, indeed even the one whose enterprise is not quite sufficient for this, as a rule sells part of his products; he fattens pigs or geese, sells eggs, milk, vegetables, if there is a market — a town or a factory — near by; and to that extent the prices of food are by no means a matter of indifference to him, and high prices for the products he sells are very welcome.

Where payment in kind prevails, the agricultural labourers are interested in high food prices as recipients of wages too. If they receive, say, part of their wages in rye, which they sell, they have an interest in a high price of rye, and so also in the duty on rye. They appear on the market not merely as sellers of labour-power but also as sellers of food.

But besides the tradition of the past and the interests of the present, it is also the interest of the future, perhaps the most powerful of all, that fills the dwarf peasant with peasant feeling and thinking. Man lives in the present, no doubt, but he works for the future, and how tremendously this can influence his thought and action is best known in Social Democracy, the party of the future.

The industrial wage-labourer is a different man where he still believes in the future of handicraft, where the journeyman feels himself the master of the future, from what he is where he has given up the hope of ever becoming independent within the present mode of production. So too the dwarf peasant is a different man where he has given up the hope of ever attaining independence and getting on in the world as a farmer in his own enterprise, from what he is where he hopes not to remain a dwarf peasant for ever, where he expects, by savings, perhaps from his wages, to succeed in acquiring so much land that he becomes a completely independent peasant. If today he is still a cottager who has to buy food in addition, he nevertheless feels himself then a future peasant who will sell food.

To nourish this hope and keep it awake therefore seems to the bourgeois economists an important task; for this hope is the most powerful bond that ties the strongest of the working classes in the countryside to landed property and separates it from the proletariat; and so they also implore the great landowners not to buy up all the land in blind greed for land, but to leave over as much as suffices — not, say, to make all agricultural labourers peasants, for where would one then get the wage-labourers from? — but as much as suffices to lull all agricultural labourers into the hope of one day becoming independent peasants. It is precisely this hope that makes them all the more zealous, willing and submissive.

One of those who most zealously advise the large landowners to give their labourers the opportunity of acquiring landed property is v. d. Goltz. But, he says,

“my view is by no means that one should strive to make all agricultural labourers landowners; at least this is an aim that need not for the present be contemplated for the eastern provinces … The prospect of one day becoming landowners makes the Instleute industrious, thrifty, economical, preserves them from excesses, and this also benefits the employer.” (Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse und der preußische Staat, p. 215; cf. pp. 257–58.)

So too said old Roscher:

“The existence of small farms is useful especially because in this way the gap between the day-labourer and the big peasant is filled by an unbroken ladder of steps. The prospect of advancement thereby offered, if one is industrious, skilful and thrifty, has as much to spur one on as to set one’s mind at rest.” (Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 76.)

Two souls dwell in the breast of the dwarf farmer: a peasant soul and a proletarian one. The conservative parties have every reason to strengthen the peasant soul; the interest of the proletariat goes in the opposite direction — and so, just as much, do the interest of social development and that of the dwarf farmers themselves. If we recall the numerous examples of peasant under-consumption and overwork that we came to know in the first part; how we saw that the rural wage-labourer is better off than the independent small farmer, that misery begins with “one’s own team”; then there can be no doubt that we must not seek the raising of the dwarf farmers as human beings, their social elevation from barbarism to civilisation, by way of lifting them out of the body of wage-labourers into the peasantry, and that nothing can be more dangerous and more cruel than to awaken in them illusions about the future of small-scale peasant farming.

But that is what happens through an agrarian programme that promises effective protection of the peasant. Such a programme must strike dead the proletarian soul in the dwarf peasant and make the peasant soul sole ruler in his breast. It must cut the bond that ties him to the industrial proletariat and bring to life in him all those factors that separate him from the mass of the proletariat as a whole. A proletarian agitation in the countryside of this kind must achieve the exact opposite of what it is meant to achieve. For the sake of quickly passing momentary successes it undermines the foundations on which a real proletarian class struggle in the countryside — not mere electoral agitation — would have to rest.

Social Democracy is the party of the proletariat fighting its class struggle; but it is not that alone; it is at the same time also a party of social development; it strives for the development of the whole social body beyond its present, capitalist stage to a higher form.

The union of these two sides into a firm unity forms the characteristic mark of Social Democracy; to have founded it is the immortal historical merit of Marx and Engels. It is well known, and we ourselves have already set it out elsewhere, that the labour movement and utopianism originally developed independently of each other, indeed not seldom in hostility to each other. Their union had, to be sure, already been accomplished in places before Marx and Engels, as in the socialist wing of Chartism, in French egalitarian communism, in the sect of Weitling. Never yet in any great social new formation has theory hurried ahead of practice. Theory was able only, in the isolated, uncertain attempts that had not yet freed themselves intellectually from the ground of inherited tradition, to discover the basic lines of the new formation and to recognise its general necessity. That too is what Marx and Engels did for the union of the labour movement and socialism. In place of empirical groping and sentimental longing they put the clear recognition that the highest form of the labour movement is the socialist one and that socialism can be realised only through the labour movement; that the labour movement must by natural necessity strive beyond capitalist society, and that the only class that has the strength to win by struggle a higher social stage beyond the capitalist stage is the body of wage-labourers.

They established unshakeably in their works the inseparability of socialism and the proletarian class struggle, and it is a sign not of theoretical progress beyond our masters but of retrogression behind them when the questions emerge once again today whether the final goal is more important or the movement, whether practice is of more significance than theory, and so on; questions that are in fact nothing but more or less unclear variations of the question that was already solved half a century ago in the Communist Manifesto.

Goal and movement belong together in Social Democracy; they are not to be separated from each other. But if goal and movement once come into conflict with each other, it is the latter that must give way. In other words: social development stands higher than the interests of the proletariat, and Social Democracy cannot protect proletarian interests that stand in the way of social development.

In general, of course, this does not happen. The theoretical basis of Social Democracy is formed precisely by the recognition that the interests of social development and those of the proletariat coincide, and that the proletariat is therefore the appointed driving force of social development.

But where people pay too much homage to the principle that the shirt is nearer than the coat, where they are inclined to forget what lies further off over what lies nearest, there no small particular interests of individual strata of proletarians come to light that set themselves against social development.

Within the proletariat the most various stratifications are to be found. The proletarian elite, if it is not united with the mass of the proletariat as a whole by the struggle for great aims, only too easily feels an antagonism of interests to it. But technical and economic development has the tendency to revolutionise the existing conditions of the individual proletarian strata too, and thereby most seriously threatens the individual aristocracies of labour; it introduces machines, replaces men by women, skilled by unskilled workers, makes whole categories of workers completely superfluous, draws backward workers from the country into the town, from abroad into the country, and so on. The Social Democratic method of fighting against this is the exercise of the solidarity of the whole proletariat, the organisation of the women, of the unskilled workers, of the foreigners, the introduction of a legal normal working day for all, and the like. The guild method, modelled on the bourgeois conception, consists in the exclusion of the other workers from work and in holding up economic development. The aristocrats of labour construct for themselves an acquired right to their privileged positions and fight against the introduction of new machines, against women’s labour, etc.; they fight fruitlessly, as experience shows; economic development is mightier than they; they must retreat step by step, but not without having suffered heavy losses.

The former method is that of Social Democracy, the latter that of those labour movements that are guided by no higher aim, no “theory”, that are purely practical movements. Can there be any doubt which method deserves preference?

Social Democracy is indeed aware that every economic advance in the capitalist mode of production at first becomes a source of degradation and stunting for the strata of the population affected by it; but it also knows that the obstruction of progress brings in its train far worse consequences still, and that this progress not only degrades the working population but also creates the foundations of its later elevation and liberation. The advance of machinery has, to be sure, brought nameless misery to the working population; its general condition has become worse than it was in the heyday of handicraft. But if we compare the branches of industry in which the machine rules with those in which production is still carried on in handicraft fashion, we find in the former on average shorter working hours, higher wages and better observance of the hygienic conditions of work.

In this section we have so far spoken only of proletarians, because in their case the relation of class struggle and social development can be illustrated most clearly. The application of what has been developed here to the protection of the peasant follows of itself.

It is clear that Social Democracy cannot grant to the peasants what it must refuse to the proletarians: the protection of their occupational position. The protection of labour that Social Democracy demands aims not at preserving the occupational work of the individual workers but at preserving their power to work and to live; it protects their humanity and not their particular occupation. The proletariat does not demand this protection as a privilege for itself; it is to be given to everyone who needs it, and if the peasants demand the extension of the protection of labour to their own enterprises and their own persons, they will find nowhere more zealous help than from Social Democracy. But that, as is well known, is not what they are after; against that they would defend themselves most desperately. What they demand is the protection of their particular mode of production against the advance of economic development, and that Social Democracy cannot grant them.

It is pointed out that conditions in agriculture are different from those in industry, that in the former economic development leads not to the overcoming of small-scale enterprise by a higher mode of production but merely to the decay, the immiseration, of the peasantry. Protection of the peasant, it is said, would therefore mean not the prevention of economic progress but merely the prevention of the physical degeneration of the rural population, and would thus aim at bottom at the same thing as the protection of labour, if by other means.

To this the reply must be: protection of the peasant means in the first place not protection of the peasant’s person but protection of the peasant’s property. But it is precisely this that is the chief cause of the peasant’s immiseration. We have seen that the wage-labourers in the countryside are already in many cases better off today than the propertied small peasants, and that the propertyless wage-labourer escapes from the misery at home far sooner than the peasant whom his property binds to the soil. Protection of the peasant is thus not protection against the immiseration of the peasant; it is protection of the fetters that chain the peasant to his misery. But protection of the peasant also means protection and promotion of the sale of the peasant’s commodities. The commodities that the peasant sells are foodstuffs. The more of them he sells, the less he consumes himself. The promotion of the sale of milk, eggs and meat in the town means the reduction of their consumption in the country, their replacement by potatoes, spirits and coffee slops. The peasant’s money income is thereby raised, his own and his children’s strength undermined. He buys the improvement of his position as a peasant with his stunting as a human being.

Ruled out from the outset, indeed to be fought most decidedly, are of course all attempts to counteract the immiseration of the peasantry by shifting its burdens on to industry or the proletariat.

On the one side, protection of the peasant, regarded from this standpoint, means duties on foodstuffs; on the other, the single-heir law, the fettering of the labourers to the land, stricter servants’ ordinances, payment of the peasants’ interest on debts and insurance premiums by the state, and the like. Every attempt to counteract the immiseration of the peasantry in this way must either remain completely without effect or else, before it has even reached its goal, and without reaching it completely, lead to the immiseration of industry and of the proletariat. But industry is the decisive mode of production in a capitalist commonwealth; the prosperity of the population as a whole depends far more on its state than on that of agriculture. A capitalist commonwealth can sacrifice agriculture to industry without injury to its prosperity — vide England. The reverse procedure leads to the decay of industry and agriculture alike. Nowhere are the country people worse off than in modern agrarian states without a developed industry; one need only look at Galicia, Italy, Spain, the Balkan countries, if one wants to know what an undeveloped industry means for the peasantry too.

On the other hand, it is not the peasantry but the proletariat that is the bearer of modern social development; raising the peasantry at the expense of the proletariat means obstructing social progress.

Furthermore, however, it is not quite correct that agriculture shows no progress. That holds, to be sure, of pure agriculture; it ends in a blind alley; but we have seen that industry does not remain confined to the towns, that it goes out into the countryside and revolutionises its relations of production in the most manifold ways. Agriculture that is dependent on industry and bound up with it enters, just like industry itself, a stage of uninterrupted upheavals, which create ever new forms. This process of the revolutionising of agriculture is only in its beginnings, but it is advancing rapidly. Protection of the peasant, the attempt to protect the old independent peasant agriculture, can only act as a brake on this development. It will not prevent the revolutionising of agriculture; it will prove just as powerless as the protection of handicraft in industry; but it is bound to increase the sufferings and sacrifices of the development and, through its final bankruptcy, to deal a deep wound to the moral standing of the parties that propagate it.

A Social Democratic agrarian programme in the sense of protection of the peasant would thus be not merely pointless, but worse than that: it would injure Social Democracy most deeply. For it would stand in contradiction to its character as a proletarian party and as an evolutionary, or, if one will, a revolutionary party. It would have to pay for very problematic momentary successes with a shaking of its inner structure, a reduction of its power of attack and the loss of its standing as the most far-sighted party.

But one can demand a Social Democratic agrarian programme in yet another sense than that of the protection of the peasant. It has been said: agriculture shows a far slower development than industry. It is becoming a drag on our progress. We therefore need measures that hasten its development, and in this sense we need an agrarian programme.

This standpoint is a perfectly correct one. Human society is a unitary organism, but — and this is one of its most important differences from the animal organism — it is not an organism whose parts all develop at the same tempo. Some of its parts lag behind in development, are overtaken by others, and must, in the interest of unity, be driven forward by these artificially, by external influences, so that they adapt themselves to the whole. This holds both for individual regions and for individual classes. Nothing is more mistaken than the idea that the recognition of the principle of social development excludes all leaps and all artificial, that is, conscious, intervention in social processes. It excludes only all arbitrary intervention, every intervention that stands in contradiction to the tendencies of social development, every intervention that is guided merely by our wishes and needs and not by social insight.

The civilised countries of Europe became ripe for capitalism long before feudalism had outlived itself in all their branches of production and all their regions — for we still find many remnants of it today. So too modern society will become ripe for socialism long before the last handicraftsman and the last peasant have disappeared, and before the whole proletariat is politically mature and economically organised: these are all preconditions that will probably never be fulfilled in capitalist society. And it will be one of the chief tasks of the victorious proletariat to raise the strata of the people that have been left behind and to grant them the means of a higher mode of production and a higher culture. Among these, measures for raising the peasantry, in the sense that the transition to socialist production is commended to it and made as easy as possible, will certainly play an outstanding part. In this sense Social Democracy will certainly need an agrarian programme.

The only question is whether the time for one has already come, whether a Social Democratic agrarian programme is possible that, on the ground of present-day society, promotes the development of agriculture in the direction of socialism.

In capitalist society the chief driving force of economic development is the interest of the capitalists, profit. To promote economic development there means, in the first place, to promote profit.

But to the particular capitalist end there also correspond particular capitalist means. What position has Social Democracy to take up towards economic development in these circumstances?

We cannot and may not obstruct capitalist development, but a proletarian, socialist party has no reason to support it.

We cannot prevent labour-saving machines from being introduced, or men from being displaced as wage-labourers by women, but it is not our task to encourage the capitalists to do so, or, say, to support them in it at the expense of the state. The same holds of the expropriation of the peasants and handicraftsmen.

Social Democracy is sometimes reproached with rejoicing at the proletarianisation of these classes. Nothing is more mistaken. It regrets it; it would put an end to this method of economic progress at once if it came to the helm; it only declares it hopeless to try to prevent this process within the framework of present-day society. Its own historical task is not the expropriation of the independent producers but the expropriation of the expropriators.

Exactly the same case, though not so clearly, presents itself with regard to economic development through the extension of the world market and colonial policy. This method too is at bottom only a method of expropriation; it rests on the dispossession of the former inhabitants and owners of the colonial territory and on the ruin of their native industries. Should Chinese coolies one day come to Europe and compete with the workers of Europe, these should not forget that the coolies were first expropriated by European capital.

This process too cannot be stopped; it too is a precondition of socialist society; but here too Social Democracy may not lend a hand. It is just as reactionary a utopia as the preservation of handicraft and of the peasantry to call on Social Democracy to support the resistance of the natives of the colonial countries to their expropriation; but it would be a slap in the face of the interests of the proletariat to call on it to support the capitalists in this by putting the power of the state at their disposal for the purpose. No, this work is too dirty for the proletariat to lend itself as an accomplice to it. To perform this infamous business is one of the historical tasks of the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat must count itself fortunate that it need not soil its hands with it. It need not fear that the bourgeoisie will on that account neglect its task and bring economic development to a standstill. The bourgeoisie will not be untrue to this historical task so long as it still possesses social and political power, for this task means nothing other than the increase of profit.

So far as the proletariat intervenes in this process of capitalist development, its task cannot be to promote it, to give it its voluntary support directly or indirectly (through the power of the state), nor yet to prevent it, but only to mitigate its ruinous, degrading consequences for the strata of the people affected by it as far as is possible and attainable without injury to the development. Thus not the prohibition of machines and of women’s labour, but laws for the protection of labour. Not the obstruction of exports, but the refusal of the various kinds of state support for them (protective tariffs, bounties, colonial acquisitions), and, where this remains ineffective in practice, at least the greatest possible protection of those affected by this policy, for example of the native population of the colonies.

We shall see further how this principle is also to be applied to some methods of expropriating the peasantry.

It is clear that promoting the economic development of agriculture in the capitalist sense cannot be the task of a socialist agrarian programme. Nor has this been contemplated by anyone. No; what was in mind were measures capable of preparing the ground even today for socialist production in agriculture and of hastening painlessly its transition to it.

This idea was made possible only by the contradiction, already touched on several times, that has arisen in agriculture between landed property and the enterprise. The enterprise is far more backward than in industry, far further from socialism than there; it seems an absurdity to pass over to socialist enterprise in agriculture so long as capitalism rules in industry and therefore in society.

But what holds of production does not hold of property as well. Private property in land has come into contradiction with the conditions of production of agriculture, and become an intolerable fetter on it, much sooner and much more than private property in the means of production in industry. At the same time property in land has already become completely independent of the enterprise. While among agricultural enterprises a tendency to centralisation is hardly noticeable, and in many cases there is even a tendency to fragmentation, in landed property the decided tendency to centralisation prevails, which comes to light most sharply in mortgage property, and this property has also already become impersonal in preponderant measure.

The nationalisation of landed property is therefore possible already in capitalist society; it is possible with the retention of commodity production and the wage system, without any change in the existing mode of production. In one form or another it is already being demanded most urgently by bourgeois parties, in many cases by farmers themselves. On the other hand, the socialist agrarian programmes of the kind in question all come down to nothing other than some method or other of the nationalisation of the land.

With our position on the nationalisation of the land in present-day society, our position on the Social Democratic agrarian programmes of the progressive kind is also given.

Besides the nationalisation of the land proper, which has become very popular especially in the countries of the tenancy system, there come into consideration here the nationalisation of mortgages and the nationalisation of the grain trade.

The master of the mortgage is in fact the master of the landed property; the mortgage debtor stands to him in a relation similar to that of the tenant to the landowner.

The monopoly of the grain trade, again, makes those farmers who grow grain for sale — that is, the great majority of them — completely dependent on the master of the monopoly. He disposes in fact, if not legally, of the whole area under grain.

It was socialists who first raised these demands. Among the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, drawn up by the committee of the Communist League (including Marx and Engels) in March 1848, the eighth ran: “Mortgages on peasant holdings shall be declared the property of the state; the interest on these mortgages shall be paid by the peasants to the state.”

The seventh paragraph demanded the conversion of the large landed estates into state property.

Thirty years later the workers’ associations of the canton of Zurich set going a movement for the introduction of a state grain trade.

Today, when the same demands are raised by farmers, the Social Democratic parties in many cases regard them with mistrust, sometimes even with direct rejection. What has changed since then? Both general insight and the social situation.

“When the February Revolution broke out,” says Engels in his memorable Introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, “we were all, as regards our notions of the conditions and the course of revolutionary movements, under the spell of previous historical experience, particularly that of France. … Under the circumstances of the time there could be no doubt for us that the great decisive struggle had broken out, that it would have to be fought out in a single long revolutionary period with shifting fortunes, but that it could end only with the final victory of the proletariat.”

In the Swiss labour movement of the seventies, on the other hand, there still prevailed the democratic superstition that disregarded class antagonisms, disregarded social conditions, and believed that only the necessary democratic forms and the necessary enlightenment were needed to clear the road for socialism.

Present-day insight speaks quite differently; but the present-day situation is also quite different from what it was then. Today it is no longer the proletarians but propertied farmers who most loudly raise the demand for the nationalisation of the grain trade and of mortgages, and the demand is intended to saddle the community not with the advantages but with the disadvantages of private property in land, while letting the advantages of private property in land remain, indeed securing and increasing them. For it is not proletarians but landowners and capitalists who have the state in their hands, and who would therefore have to carry out the nationalisation. And the position of farmers as of proletarians is a different one in 1898 from what it was in 1848 and 1878.

Until 1878 grain prices were constantly rising; the farmers prospered, but the consumers suffered. State intervention in this process could have only the purpose of coming to the aid of the consumers, that is, of counteracting the rise.

Today grain prices are falling; today it is not the consumers but the producers who lament over the prices of grain. No one thinks of an artificial lowering of these prices by the state — where the power of the state intervenes in the fixing of grain prices, it does so only to raise them. No wonder that the state grain trade now shows a completely altered face.

But the same is the case with the nationalisation of mortgages. From 1848 to 1878 ground-rent was constantly rising. So long as this continued, a nationalisation of mortgages could by no means be of advantage to landed property. It had a purpose only as a transitional measure of the revolutionary proletariat towards socialist society, as a means of bringing landed property into dependence on the power of the state and wresting a field of exploitation from the capitalist class.

Things have been otherwise since 1878, since the decline of ground-rents set in. These are falling, but not the mass of mortgage interest; indebtedness, rather, is rising. The landowners are less and less able to meet their obligations; unless an unexpected turn occurs, the mortgage banks are heading for heavy losses.

The nationalisation of mortgages now becomes a means of guaranteeing the capitalists their interest, for it is not the individual landowner but the state that confronts them as debtor. Their interest is now secure. In return the state may take upon itself the whole risk that the capitalists have borne until now. These gain — and beside them the landowners too, at least temporarily, if the nationalisation leads to a lowering of the rate of interest on their mortgages. The taxpayers have to foot the bill.

It would be no different with the nationalisation of the land against compensation while the capitalist mode of production continued, such as the bourgeois land reformers à la Henry George strive for. Had they succeeded, say, in carrying through the nationalisation of the land in England at the end of the seventies, no one would have drawn greater advantage from it than the bought-out landlords. They would then be quietly consuming the interest on the capital paid them by the state, while the state would have had to bear the whole loss in ground-rents, 30 per cent and more, that falls today on the landlords.

The nationalisation of the land, it is true, differs favourably from the nationalisation of mortgages in that it at least offers the state the possibility of counteracting the consequences of the fall of ground-rent by introducing improved forms of enterprise, whereas the latter allows it no influence at all on the conduct of the enterprise.

But one must not have too much confidence in the state as farmer, either. The state today is in the first place an institution of domination. It does not belie this character even where economic functions fall to it. There too it is the viewpoints of the jurist, the policeman and the soldier that decide, not those of the technician and the businessman. Only in the measure in which the proletariat succeeds in abolishing class distinctions and taking from the state its character as an organisation of domination will this change. Today the state as a rule manages more expensively and more clumsily than the private capitalist; an argument that is gladly played off against socialism from the bourgeois side, but that speaks not against socialism but only against the modern state. Nevertheless, even today the nationalisation of an enterprise can be of economic advantage to the community. That is true of those enterprises that are monopolies, whether through natural conditions — railways, some mines — or through social ones — cartels, trusts. Here the exploitation of the public by the private monopolies can reach such a degree that state operation appears as a rescuer in need, especially where the government is dependent on the people, so that the treasury may not continue at its pleasure the exploitation practised by the private monopoly.

But where no such emergency created by a private monopoly exists, there is no economic reason to hand over a business undertaking to the present-day state to run. On the contrary. And to the economic reasons that speak against it are added political ones, which likewise spring from the character of the state as an organisation of domination. To increase the economic means of power of the present-day state also means to increase its means of oppression against the ruled classes. Like the economic motive, this political motive too loses force in the measure in which the state comes under the influence of the proletariat. But democratic forms alone do not yet offer a guarantee against the use of the state’s means of power for holding down the proletariat. Where peasants and petty bourgeois are the great majority, they are no doubt sometimes ready to restrict the exploitation of the workers by the big capitalists, but they watch all the more jealously over the “economic freedom” of the small exploiters. The Swiss peasants and petty bourgeois let the workers go their way quietly in all political affairs, but at every strike against master craftsmen they are beside themselves and, with the assistance of the state, behave if possible still more brutally than their fellows in unfree countries; and when the working conditions of state workers and officials are to be improved, the democratic liberties, especially the referendum, are diligently used to hang the state employees’ bread-basket higher.

Where the proletariat does not play an authoritative part, Social Democracy therefore has no reason to grow enthusiastic, without necessity, for the extension of state economy and state property. Does such an emergency exist in agriculture?

Up into the seventies the possession of land did indeed constitute a monopoly that led to the increasing exploitation of the population. But the development of communications has in general broken this monopoly for agriculture, at least where the power of the state does not maintain it by artificially obstructing communications. On the other hand, the form of enterprise in agriculture is not yet such that it calls for state management. The agricultural industries — sugar manufacture, distilling, brewing and the like — will become ripe for nationalisation sooner than agriculture proper. The state itself today prefers to lease its domains to capitalist farmers rather than manage them itself. Social Democracy has no reason to increase the number of capitalist state tenants and to make the government more independent of the grants of money voted by the people’s representatives.

One important branch of rural economic life, though one that does not belong to agriculture proper, makes an exception: forestry. A rational management of the forest is incompatible with the needs of capitalist profit-making. Where capital takes possession of the forest, it ruins it, for good forestry is not in harmony with capital’s need to valorise itself. That need requires the most rapid turnover of capital; in forestry, however, the turnover is extraordinarily slow.

“The long time of production (which comprises a relatively small amount of working time), and thus the length of its periods of turnover, make forestry an unfavourable branch for private, and therefore capitalist, enterprise, which is essentially private even when the associated capitalist takes the place of the individual capitalist. The development of civilisation and of industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything it has done, conversely, for their preservation and production is a completely vanishing quantity.” (Marx, Capital, II, p. 226.)

Marx quotes at the passage cited Kirchhof’s Handbuch der landwirthschaftlichen Betriebslehre, where it is said:

“The productive process (in the forest) is bound to such long periods that it goes beyond the plans of a private economy, in some cases even beyond the span of a human life. For the capital laid out in acquiring the land” (Marx remarks on this: ‘In communal production this capital falls away, and the question is only how much land the community can withdraw from arable and pasture for the production of timber’) “bears remunerative fruit only after a long time and is turned over only partially, and completely, with some kinds of wood in forests, only after as much as a hundred and fifty years. Moreover, the steady production of timber itself requires a stock of living wood amounting to ten to forty times the annual yield. Whoever, therefore, does not have other income besides and does not possess considerable tracts of forest cannot carry on regular forestry.”

Where capitalist considerations alone decide, the last hour of the forest, which is ruthlessly felled, strikes only too easily. The distress of the peasant is no less ruinous to it. But the forest is of such great importance for the habitability and fertility of a country, for the climate, for the evenness of the level of the waters, for the mitigation of floods as well as of the silting up of rivers, for the protection of cultivated land in the mountains and on the sea-shore, etc., that its reckless devastation brings about the gravest injuries to the cultivation of the soil. In many cases, therefore, states have seen themselves obliged to protect the forest, just like the labour-power of the wage-labourer, from squandering by capital, which in its blind greed seeks to kill the hen that lays the golden eggs. Forest protection laws have been introduced, unfortunately only inadequate ones and not everywhere. In the German Empire so far only 30 per cent of the wooded area in private ownership is subject to the provisions of forest law. In Prussia, Saxony and several smaller states such provisions are entirely lacking.

On the other hand the state seeks, by extending the state forests and afforesting bare mountain ranges or sandy tracts at great cost, to make good what capitalist rage for profit has light-heartedly brought about.

This development is only imperfectly paralysed by the other, already described in another connection, which springs from the growth of capitalist revenues. If capitalist exploitation pushes the forest back further and further, capitalist luxury lets it advance further and further. But because what is in question here is luxury, wasteful whims, the extension of the forest that springs from these factors is not a rational and planned one. One can observe today, for example, in the Austrian Alpine lands that in some districts the forest is advancing at the expense of the pasture and even of the arable, while in other districts it is disappearing where it is absolutely necessary for protection against the danger of avalanches and mountain torrents, so that avalanches, floods and mud-slides ruin the cultivated land. If on the one side the cultivated land is narrowed and agriculture made impossible by an excess of forest, on the other this is done by the lack of it. That is the forestry of the capitalist period.

The one is as ruinous as the other and requires to be checked in the interest of the community. This can be done most effectively by the nationalisation of the forest, which alone is able to secure the most rational forestry, at least where the state is not financially bankrupt and where the government is not under the influence of those same noblest and best who declare the ruin of agriculture by their sport to be one of their most precious privileges. In a financially sound, democratic state Social Democracy may, even if the proletariat still has little influence there, demand the nationalisation of the forests without hesitation.

Closely related to the nationalisation of the forests is that of the waters. Not only the interests of agriculture alone — irrigation and drainage — come into consideration here, but many other highly important interests besides, especially those of communications — river, lake and canal navigation — and of industry, which needs numerous sources of water-power and will lay claim to still more the further electrical engineering develops; then interests of hygiene — the draining of marshes, the supply of drinking water, the carrying off of faeces and other waste matter — and finally those of public safety — above all protection against floods. A rational management of the waters becomes ever more necessary the further the capitalist mode of production develops, for this, more than any other, intervenes in the natural conditions of the waters through deforestation, the draining of marshes, the lowering of the levels of lakes, through aqueducts, the building of canals, river regulation, dams and so on; but more than any other before it, it has also created the means of prescribing to the water its courses. The more artificial the system of watercourses, the more ruinous the consequences that its development in a wrong direction can bring in its train. And here, less even than elsewhere, does the individual interest coincide with the general interest. One can divide a river legally into various parts and award to a single individual a right of property in one of these parts, but in fact a river, indeed a whole river basin, remains a whole, from the region of its sources to its mouth, and what is useful in one part for the master of the river there can have devastating consequences for those who live farther down. A rational management of the waters can only be one that administers the whole basin of a river according to plan and on unified principles, and it will have to go hand in hand with forestry. The master of the river must also be master of the forest. The nationalisation of the waters may be demanded all the more readily because the ground-rent that running water yields is not falling but rising, especially in consequence of the increasing capitalist exploitation of water-power for industrial purposes. A financial burden on the population is therefore not to be expected from this kind of nationalisation; rather an enrichment of the state, at least where it is skilfully carried out. Where the administration of the state is not so corrupt that every act of nationalisation leads only to the plundering of the state, and not so bureaucratically hidebound that it stands helpless before every technical task, where it is tolerably decent and subject to the control of a democratically elected representation of the people, one may without hesitation demand the nationalisation of the waters even today.

However questionable the state economy of the bourgeois state, and still more that of the police state, may be, in respect of water and forest it is already superior to private economy today.

This nationalisation of water and forest must not be put on the same level as the common ownership of water and forest in the mark community. The latter was a product of the common exploitation of water and forest, of common fishing, common hunting, common pasturing of cattle. Today pasturing of cattle in the forest has almost entirely ceased, hunting has become the private pleasure of the aristocracy, and river fishing has greatly declined in its importance for the people’s food, at least relatively. If today the nationalisation of forest and water is becoming a necessity, considerations of fishing, hunting and pasture play no part in it, but considerations do that were still completely ruled out in the time of the mark community, because all the preconditions for them were lacking.

So much for state economy in the countryside. But beside state economy — “state socialism” — municipal economy — “municipal socialism” — is also developing. Might not this form, in agriculture, the longed-for lever with whose help one could even today hasten the stagnating development of agriculture and push it in the direction of socialism? Is not village communism an age-old institution, closer to the conservative peasant than to the townsman, of which numerous remnants have survived?

In the German Empire there were counted in 1895:

Does one not need merely to extend these remnants of village communism in order to prepare the way for peasant agriculture to grow into socialism?

That sounds very tempting. In Russia, where village communism was still very strong until recently, a very powerful tendency of the socialist movement did indeed live in the conviction that through this communism Russia stood nearer to socialist society than Western Europe. In the West it was bourgeois social reformers, like Laveleye, who first warmed to the primitive communism of the village in land and saw in its revival the means of solving the social question in the countryside, and with it in the town too, which would be cut off from the constant influx of new proletarians from the country. Recently Social Democrats too, in their search for an agrarian programme, have declared themselves for strengthening and extending this primitive communism, at the very time when Russian Social Democracy, taught by experience, has broken completely with the view that the village communism handed down from the Middle Ages could become an element of modern socialism.

For communism and communism are two different things. The revolution that Social Democracy strives for is in the last resort not a juridical but an economic one, not a revolution in relations of property but in the mode of production. Its aim is not the abolition of private property but that of the capitalist mode of production; it strives for the abolition of the former only so far as this is a means to the abolition of the latter. Nor do the greatest difficulties that stand in the way of socialism lie in the juridical sphere; they lie in the economic.

From this standpoint the mere extension of communal property in land, as a preparation for the socialist mode of production, is pointless wherever it is not meant to serve the extension of communal economy and where the preconditions of a communal economy in the sense of modern socialism are lacking.

Common property in land in the mark community sprang from the needs of a mode of cultivation that is completely obsolete today. The overcoming of this mode of cultivation was possible only through the overcoming of the kind of common property corresponding to it. Where commons or other remnants of it have survived, they as a rule still form obstacles to the progress of agriculture even today. Only exceptional conditions, such as are offered for example by the Alpine pastures of Switzerland, which can be used agriculturally only for grazing, can still give them an economic justification now. To revive and extend them would be senseless unless one wanted at the same time to return to the old mode of cultivation, the three-field system with pasture farming on the common pasture and in the communal forest.

Those agronomists who today demand the creation of new commons are by no means socialists. They demand them in the interest of large landed property, in order thereby to fetter permanently to the soil the rural labourers who have been attracted by the possibility of acquiring little holdings (as rent-holdings or in free ownership). For on these little holdings they cannot keep cattle or obtain manure without a common pasture, and so cannot maintain themselves in the long run. The newly created common of the feudal era is to complete and secure the work of creating feudal bondsmen anew. (Cf. v. d. Goltz, Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse und der preußische Staat, pp. 262 ff.; Sering, Die innere Kolonisation im östlichen Deutschland, pp. 131, 271 ff.)

But if on the one side the common has become a means of holding up economic progress and prolonging feudal conditions, on the other side the right to the use of the common has itself become a feudal privilege. The hereditary peasant members of the mark become an aristocracy, which as the commune of burgesses shuts itself off from the commune of inhabitants, the mass of newcomers, and raises itself above it.

“Since these usages,” says Miaskowski, a warm admirer of the commons, “are today no longer always free of charge, and moreover often benefit only a fraction of the resident population, the commons have in the course of time become, from free goods for all who were settled in the place, a kind of collective entail, the use of which belongs at present, and not always free of charge, to the members of a corporation that is shutting itself off more and more under private law.” (Miaskowski, Die schweizerische Allmend, p. 3.)

Where the original common property in land still exists in considerable measure and is used by a considerable peasantry, it has become, as Miaskowski aptly says, an entail, which differs from other aristocratic entails only in that it belongs not to a single family alone but to a number of families in common. Like every feudal entail, Social Democracy must fight this one too.

But where the original common property in land survives only in meagre remnants, scraps of common pasture, the right to gather litter in the forest and the like, and is used by needy people, it has become a support of entails, and in general a support of the exploitation of the rural labourers, by helping to fetter them to the soil. It works here just like many of the manufacturers’ welfare institutions, for example the dwellings that they build and let to their workers. We know of no reason why Social Democracy should take an interest in the enlargement and extension of this kind of common property.

On the other hand it would of course be going too far if, where a needy population has still preserved rights of common pasture or forest, it were to demand their abolition out of hand. The abolition of these rights is a part of the great process of the expropriation of the masses of the people in favour of a few possessors. This process is inevitable, and it is the necessary precondition for the development of modern socialist production. But we have already remarked above that promoting it is not one of the historical tasks of the proletariat, and that the task of the proletariat, so far as it intervenes in this process, can only be to stand by the oppressed as far as possible, to mitigate the consequences of the development that comes about with natural necessity as far as is possible without obstructing progress, and as far as the existing relations of power and economic conditions in general permit.

Where small peasants and day-labourers have preserved rights of pasture and forest, Social Democracy therefore need not work for the removal of these rights. We have compared them in their effects with the manufacturers’ workers’ dwellings. But however much one may deplore the fettering and subjugation of the workers that such dwellings bring about, it would nevertheless be perverse to work for the eviction of the occupants of these dwellings.

Social Democracy can calmly leave it to the ruling classes to abolish the rights of pasture and forest use in question wherever they stand in the way of rational agriculture or forestry. Its task is to work for this: that where such an abolition takes place, those entitled suffer from it as little as possible and are not, as is mostly the case, cheated of their meagre rights.

But in doing so Social Democracy must never see in the road backwards the road forwards; it must not regard the revival of medieval common property in land, the enlargement and new creation of commons, common pastures and communal forests, the extension of forest uses for agricultural purposes, etc., as the creation of a transitional stage to socialism.

But if the foundation of medieval agrarian communal communism, and with it that communism itself, has gone beyond recall, the conditions of a kind of modern communal socialism are arising today already within present society; not, however, in the countryside but in the towns. It is the concentration of the population in the towns that creates new tasks for the municipal administrations and in many spheres makes the displacement of private property by communal property a necessity.

On the one side, the crowding of great masses of people on a small area brings it about that individual economic functions that in the villages everyone provides for himself, such as lighting, water supply and conveyance, fall to great centralised undertakings, which in the hands of capital become intolerable monopolies — gasworks, electricity works, waterworks, tramways and so on — so that everywhere, sooner or later, they must pass into the hands of the municipalities. On the other side, the concentration of the population creates new tasks for municipal administration, and new means of solving tasks that it is impossible for the rural commune to solve. The crowding together of great masses of people in a narrow space; the growth of ground-rent, which drives the landowners to cover every square metre of ground as high as possible with buildings and to rob the population of air and light; the masses of food that must be brought into the town day in, day out; the masses of waste matter that must be removed day in, day out; all this creates an abundance of the most difficult tasks, which the rural commune does not know, and whose solution requires a series of great communal institutions, the construction of sewerage, public squares and gardens, market halls and so on. But with the crowding of the population in the town there are created not only needs that the country does not know but also the conditions for meeting needs that the country has just as much as the town but cannot satisfy as the town can. This too requires the setting up of institutions that are unknown in the country. Secondary schools, hospitals and poorhouses would be just as necessary in the countryside as in the town, but there is a lack of the necessary mass of “material”, and still more of the necessary material and intellectual means. The country grows poor while riches pile up in the town; the country grows desolate intellectually too, while in the town intellectual life puts forth its finest blossoms.

All this brings it about that in the towns municipal economy assumes ever greater dimensions and grows far faster than the municipality itself.

But the municipality is in the first place not an institution of domination but merely one of administration, at least where it does not coincide with the state, which in the modern political system is indeed the rule. It is all the less an institution of domination the more independently it stands towards the state, the less it is subservient to the power of the state. And it is in the industrial towns that the proletariat first comes into its own. There it gathers in masses, there it acquires class-consciousness, there it organises itself, there it first comes to political maturity, there it first becomes strong enough to defend its interests openly and lastingly in opposition to the capitalist class. If it obtains universal suffrage for the municipal council, then, given sufficient independence of the municipality, it can already succeed today in many towns in shaping the municipal economy in accordance with its interests, and so with the interests of the community, in practising municipal socialism; only within the very narrow limits, to be sure, that the capitalist character of state and society as a whole draws, but within which quite considerable things can nevertheless be achieved with prudence and expert knowledge.

But the municipal economy can be conducted all the more rationally and systematically the more the municipality is master of its own territory, the more of it is communal property. In the town ground-rent is growing; where the land is the property of the municipality, the proceeds of this growth flow to the municipality and serve in its hands, given communal independence, universal suffrage and a certain height of proletarian development, not to increase the means of power of the ruling classes but to further the municipality’s policy of welfare and education. The municipalisation of the land, however, also makes it possible to reform the housing of the population thoroughly by positive action, by the building of municipal dwellings, whereas mere building regulations, prohibitions, inspections of buildings and dwellings can remove only the worst abuses but cannot strike at the root of the housing usury of the monopolists of the land.

The greatest possible extension of urban landed property is therefore one of the most important tasks of a modern, independent, democratic urban municipality. A modern town administration has everywhere the task not only of preventing every alienation of municipal property but also, where the town is offered the opportunity of acquiring land in its territory on favourable terms, of effecting the acquisition. In the state, however, the proletarian parties must work in this respect for the widest possible extension of the powers of the town administrations against the usurers in land, for their receiving the most far-reaching possible right of expropriation.

Things are otherwise in the countryside. There the proletariat has no say in the commune, not even under the rule of universal suffrage. For that it is too isolated, too backward and economically too dependent on the few employers, who can control it closely. A communal policy other than one in the interest of landed property is not to be thought of there. But not only the political foundations of a “municipal socialism” are lacking; the economic ones are too. It is out of the question that the economic functions of the modern urban municipality should be transferred to the village. The old feudal agriculture, which gave the communal economy so many objects, has gone. But modern agriculture by the commune, a co-operative large-scale agricultural enterprise run by the village commune, is not yet to be thought of today. Even in the town, producers’ co-operatives are foundations that only seldom succeed; for producers’ co-operatives on a large scale in the hands of peasants practically all the elements of success are lacking: the necessary intellectual forces, the necessary discipline, the necessary funds. We do not believe that even a single village commune would be ready and in a position to pass over at once to the working of a modern large-scale enterprise. But if this is not the case, if the former foundation of communism in land has gone, and municipal socialism after the manner of the great cities is not possible in the countryside, what sense has the demand that the rural communes should acquire landed property, or extend their landed property? They are, after all, to acquire the land not merely in order to own it but in order to use it to good purpose. Where the possibility of such use is lacking, the acquisition is worse than superfluous. As a rule they could at most lease their land, but in doing so they would probably not cover their costs in the long run, in view of the fall of ground-rent.

The creation and enlargement of communal property in land will perhaps form, in the countryside as in the towns, one of the methods of the socialisation of the means of production. But under present conditions it may be raised as a general demand only for the towns. And it is only with general demands that we have to do here. What may become necessary here and there under particular local conditions does not concern us, since we are speaking only of Social Democratic agrarian policy in general.