II.4. The Protection of the Rural Population

Even if Social Democracy cannot compete with the agrarian parties at saving the peasant, there is nevertheless a field in which it has more to offer the rural population than the most agrarian of the bourgeois parties.

To make this clear, however, we must go somewhat further back.

The whole tendency of the modern mode of production is towards the enrichment of the town at the expense of the countryside. We have already dealt with this in more detail (p. 263 ff.), and wish here only to bring out a few more points of view that come into consideration. The enrichment of the town is the naturally necessary consequence of the accumulation of capital, which centralises itself and the whole of surplus-value, including that arising from agricultural labour, more and more in the towns. This tendency will disappear only with capitalist society; the rural population therefore has a far greater interest in the coming of socialist society than the urban.

The transfer of industry to the countryside and the industrialisation of agriculture change nothing in the tendency in question. The method of exploitation is thereby changed for a part of the rural population, but the centralisation in the towns of the surplus-value wrung out of it remains.

The theme of the disadvantaging of the country by the town is very familiar to our agrarians. But if they believe they can make good this disadvantage by disadvantaging the urban population, by raising the prices of foodstuffs and raw materials, they are mistaken. We have already pointed out that by this they only raise ground-rent and improve the position of the landowners. These, however, are not identical with the rural population. The majority of the latter lives not from its landed property but from its wage-labour. But even the landowning farmers are for the overwhelming majority only apparent landowners; the real landowner is the mortgage creditor in the town. And the large landowner too likes to consume his ground-rent in the town. A rise in the prices of foodstuffs and of ground-rent raises the prices of estates, raises the mass of mortgage interest (in consequence of inheritance and sale), raises the expenditure that the large landowner or his children make in the town. On the other hand, however, it raises the exploitation not only of the urban population but also of the majority of the rural population; in the last resort, therefore, it raises the exploitation of the country by the town instead of reducing it.

So far as this tendency can be opposed within the present mode of production, Social Democracy opposes it by its endeavour to improve the conditions of labour and life of the rural proletariat.

But it is not the capitalist mode of production alone that impoverishes the country in favour of the town. The modern centralist state works in the same direction, even where it stands wholly under agrarian influence and intends the very opposite.

The modern state, like every previous state, is in the first place an institution of domination. The bearers of the modern state power, the parliaments and above all the princes, therefore saw their chief task in robbing the small, more or less sovereign communities of the Middle Ages, from whose welding together the modern state grew up, of their independence and their means of domination. The urban and the rural commune alike, the mark association, the feudal territory, lost their self-government and the means of coercion at their disposal. Justice, police, army and the administration of taxes are rigidly centralised.

On the other hand the modern state, here too like every previous state, is only to a very limited extent an institution in the service of civilisation. What it centralises in its hands are the means of domination. The tasks of civilisation it leaves to the communes and districts, or even to private persons; it has no craving to centralise them. Elementary schooling remains the affair of the commune, and even secondary schooling in part. The universities, it is true, are affairs of state — with the best will in the world it cannot load them on to the communes; but then they also serve chiefly purposes of domination, not of civilisation; they are to drill serviceable state officials, not to bring up free inquirers.

The welfare police in the widest sense — sanitary police, medical services, poor relief — remains the affair of the commune, and in part a private affair. The construction and maintenance of the routes of communication remains partly the affair of the commune, partly a private affair; the state as a rule intervenes here only so far as the promotion of military communications, measures of war, are concerned. The state roads are very significantly called army roads (Heerstraßen), and the railways have so far been nationalised only in the military states, not in Switzerland, England or America. The German Emperor has, to be sure, said that our century stands under the sign of communications, but the sign under which the Prussian state railways stand is not that of communications but that of militarism and of profit-mongering.

The scientific and artistic institutions that the modern state cultivates and maintains arose as appendages of courtly pomp, as court theatres, court galleries, court museums, and east of the Rhine they keep their courtly character to this day.

But so far as the state, besides the means of domination, creates and acquires means of civilisation, it concentrates these too in the large towns, especially the capitals. The rural population has to contribute to their maintenance just as much as the urban population, but only the latter has whatever benefit comes of them.

The opposite tendencies must take hold in the state as soon as the proletariat gains influence on its direction. The state power is the mightiest lever for the abolition of the capitalist system. The proletariat must of natural necessity strive to conquer it. But one must not imagine the dictatorship of the proletariat, say, in such a way that one fine day the mob of the great cities conquers the ministries by a coup and now makes use of the means of coercion of the state power to plunder the rich.

The proletariat cannot fight for the possession of the state power without raising itself and the state to a higher level in this struggle; it cannot make that power serve its interests before it has succeeded in this elevation. Only in this struggle does it acquire the moral and intellectual qualities that fit it to become the ruling class, and thereby also to abolish all class rule. But the struggle of the proletariat for the state power does not simply mean the struggle to conquer its means of power; it necessarily also means the endeavour to transform absolute monarchy or oligarchy into a democracy, as well as the endeavour to push back the tasks of domination of the state and to bring its tasks of civilisation to the fore, to transform the police and military state into a state of civilisation.

That is of course self-evident and needs no further elaboration.

But if this transformation of the state must be of advantage to the whole population, it must be of much greater advantage to the rural than to the urban population. The former has the most to gain by it.

A few examples may show this.

Social Democracy demands the self-government of the people in state, province and commune. The last is far more important for country people than for the urban population. The state official is in his whole nature a townsman; he has more understanding of and sympathy for urban needs than for rural ones. But the urban population also has quite different means of influencing the bureaucracy from the rural population, above all a powerful press. That does not prevent landed property, it is true, from being favoured now and then by the government and the bureaucracy at the expense of the urban branches of industry; but what kind of landed property is it that knows how to enjoy this agreeable position? Large landed property, and indeed that part of large landed property that is an urban class, that consumes its ground-rent in the town and there personally influences government and bureaucracy. But the interests of this landed property stand in opposition to those of the mass of the rural population, which it exploits, and it is precisely its influence that brings it about that the mass of the country people is put at a disadvantage in all local matters on which the state administration has influence, whenever an advantage accrues from this to large landed property, for example in the assessment of communal rates, the valuation of damage by game and the like. Here, no more than in the policy of the “protection” of agriculture by tariffs and charitable gifts, do the agrarian leanings of the state administration prove to be a means of preventing the disadvantaging of the country people; they only intensify it.

The self-government of province, district and commune must not only put a strong bolt against the tutelage and violation of the country people by uncomprehending, arrogant or even corrupt officials, and counteract the predominance of large landed property at least in so far as it rests on political factors; it must also benefit the country people economically, by making a part of the mass of urban officials quite superfluous, and bringing a part to the countryside, where they will henceforth consume their salaries, and that no longer as masters but as servants of the population.

Still more important for the country people than the restriction of the omnipotence of the centralised bureaucracy is the restriction of militarism. Heavy as are the sacrifices this imposes on the whole population, the heaviest fall on the countryside. Industry, which produces a constantly growing reserve army of the unemployed, can bear the reduction of labour-power by the standing armies more easily than agriculture, which suffers from the constant outflow of its labourers. And the young men who come from the country into the town to become soldiers only too easily lose their taste for country life and are lost to agriculture for ever. Those, however, who return to it are not always the best elements. The soldier is anxiously guarded against the civilising influences of the town; nothing could be worse than for him to take in something of its spirit! The soldiers’ tavern and the brothel are the only places of resort “befitting his station” for the defender of the fatherland in his free hours, the only ones that will not put revolutionary thoughts into his head; and the acquisitions he transplants from the town to the country are the tone of the barracks and syphilis.

But the taxes the peasant pays for the maintenance of the army — the compulsory taxes as well as the voluntary ones he imposes on himself for the maintenance of his son in uniform — wander into the town and are consumed there. Many an urban industry, many an urban stratum of the people, lives from militarism. The peasant has only disadvantages and burdens from it.

In view of all this it is hard to understand how it is precisely the peasant who proves the best prop of militarism. No one will maintain that national consciousness is more strongly developed in him than in the urban population, that ideal motives are more alive in him than in the latter. But neither can we regard monarchical consciousness, enthusiasm for “the King’s coat”, as a sufficient explanation.

The most obvious assumption seems to us to be that the rural population is more or less clearly conscious of the fact that an enemy invasion would strike it most severely, much more severely than the townsman — apart, of course, from fortresses. The horrors and devastations of war fall chiefly on the countryside; hence the peasant’s fear that the Empire might become defenceless, hence his enthusiasm for the army that keeps the enemy away from his fields.

If one wants to win the peasant for the struggle against militarism, one must above all make clear to him that it is not a matter of making the fatherland defenceless.

The struggle against militarism, however, has two sides, which are usually mixed up with each other, but which must be strictly kept apart.

On the one side we find the endeavour to establish perpetual peace. The armaments of the modern great states are taking on such insane dimensions that the best patriots grow afraid and anxious. Things cannot go on like this, everyone is convinced of that; it leads to bankruptcy or to an annihilating war, the most insane of all wars, a war unleashed because the burden of the armaments that are supposed to secure peace can no longer be borne. Only by one means does it seem possible to forestall it: by an understanding among the great states on a general disbanding of the standing armies, and by the voluntary submission of the sovereign powers to a world court of arbitration, to whose decisions they willingly bow.

No doubt the idea is very fine, but utopian in a society whose antagonisms of interest are so strong that it is not even possible within the states to do away with economic struggles, strikes for example, by courts of arbitration. Perpetual peace presupposes at the very least that our great powers first definitively settle all the points of dispute existing among them and take precautions against the emergence of new ones. But we are further from that than ever. The national questions created by the development of the bourgeois state are not yet all solved, the partition of Europe is not yet completed, and already the last struggle for the partition of the world is beginning. Capitalist society produces too deep antagonisms between the nations for it to be expected that the capitalist governments will arrive at a federation. The solution of this task is reserved for the international solidarity of the proletariat, which is already today a far stronger guarantee of peace than all the peace congresses of the bourgeoisie.

The demand for the replacement of the present standing army by a people’s defence force, by a militia army, has quite a different character. It can be carried out already in present-day society, even in the midst of the sharpest antagonisms of interest between the states. It does not want to abolish the army, not to remove its readiness for action abroad, but only to take away its readiness for action at home. Today the army is a means not only of warding off the external enemy, but also of holding down the “internal enemy”; it is the most powerful of all means of domination, the strongest prop of the ruling classes, so far as their power rests on political factors; it is the means that is held up threateningly, as the ultima ratio, against every attempt at a peaceful emancipation of the exploited classes. The demand for the introduction of the militia system is therefore an eminent demand of civilisation, a demand that must be dear to the heart of everyone who honestly wishes that social development should proceed by the most peaceful road possible, with as few acts of violence and brutalities as possible.

The idea of perpetual European peace pursues in the first place economic purposes. It wants to relieve capitalist society of a burden that is becoming unbearable for it. Only the relation of the governments to one another is affected by it; the relation between people and government remains untouched. Laying down arms abroad by no means entails laying down arms at home. On the contrary; while the modern endeavour of our great powers to outbid one another in the size of their armies gradually makes these more and more into people’s armies, which it becomes more and more risky to use against the people, the idea of disarmament by no means excludes the governments’ putting, in place of the present gigantic armies, which spring from the people and return to the people, small armies of professional soldiers, enlisted lumpenproletarians who for good pay will lend themselves even to shooting at father and mother.

The demand, or better said the wish, for disarmament is therefore the form of combating militarism for which bourgeois circles can most readily be won, in spite of the slight prospects of realising it on the ground of bourgeois society. On the other hand they cannot warm to the replacement of the standing armies by a people’s defence force, although, or perhaps better said precisely because, this is one of the preconditions of social conditions that will first permit disarmament.

The idea of the people’s defence force pursues in the first place political, not economic purposes. It is the indispensable precondition of a real democracy, of a political condition in which the government is the servant and not the master of the people. On the other hand one can hardly expect from its introduction an extraordinary direct economic relief of the population. In this respect the idea of perpetual peace is decidedly superior to it.

The idea of the people’s defence force by no means signifies a reduction in the arming of the people, rather an increase, since it wants to train every man fit for service in the use of arms as well. What costs this will cause is a matter of technical development, which cannot be foreseen, and which will celebrate its greatest and most fateful triumphs precisely in the military field so long as the antagonisms of the capitalist nations among themselves continue.

The amount of the direct economic advantages that must accrue to the whole population from the system of the people’s defence force depends on numerous circumstances of a technical and political nature, which constantly change and cannot be foreseen at all today. But however high or low one may estimate this amount, one thing is certain: most of the direct advantages of the militia system will flow to the rural population.

However the manner of training the soldier under the system of the people’s defence force may take shape — and this manner may be very different at different times and in different countries according to the differing political, technical, economic and pedagogical conditions — in any case this system must lead to the difference between the soldier and the citizen disappearing as far as possible. That is the essential mark of the system of the people’s defence force. On the one hand the citizen remains a militiaman even outside the time of his training as a soldier: in Switzerland the citizen fit for service keeps his rifle at home. On the other hand it is sought that the soldier should remain a citizen even during his training, that the time of his separation from the rest of the population, that is, the time of his training in barracks, should be restricted to the minimum indispensable for attaining fitness for war, and that as large a part of his training as possible should take place outside the barracks. The systematic training of youth in the use of arms plays a great part in every system of the people’s defence force. On the other hand only a few months are devoted to training in barracks.

But that means nothing other than that the time for which the soldier is withdrawn from his calling under the system of the people’s defence force represents at most an inconvenience, but not a serious burden, for production. If that is of importance for every branch of production, it is particularly so for agriculture, which is poor in labour-power. For agriculture the barracks mean the centralisation of the military in the town; they mean for it one of the worst forms of absenteeism, namely that of its best labour-powers, who not only turn from workers into exploiters, very involuntary ones, to be sure, but also consume the product of exploitation far from the countryside. Even someone who rates the direct economic advantages of the militia system only very low will have to admit that for agriculture in particular it removes one of the most oppressive forms of its exploitation.

But the endeavour of Social Democracy to transform the state from an institution of domination into an institution of civilisation does not benefit the rural population merely in this negative way, through the struggle against the omnipotence of the bureaucracy and of militarism. The fighting proletariat must also strive to make the state a means of spreading real civilisation and of taking over tasks of civilisation to which the individual and the commune are not equal, and whose fulfilment is an imperative need of the community as a whole.

We have already pointed out above (p. 336) that there is a series of tasks of civilisation that today, so long as they remain left to the communes, only the town can solve satisfactorily, but which are just as urgent for the country as for the town. Indeed, some of these tasks are far more urgent in the country than in the town. The former needs good elementary schools much more than the latter, since it lacks all other means of education, and agriculture is becoming an occupation that requires far more scientific insight for its conduct than most urban occupations. As with the schools, so with poor relief. In the towns, where wealth collects, there are many private persons who can effortlessly give something from their superfluity in order to keep the sight of the bitterest distress away from themselves. In the countryside private charity can do almost nothing in districts with a purely agricultural and small-peasant population, which itself does not live in superfluity. But where there is large landed property that could intervene with its superfluity to alleviate distress, absenteeism only too often has the effect that the misery around his estates does not come into the rich landowner’s consciousness at all. Those large landowners, who mostly live in the town, will, if they are really charitable, more often find themselves in a position to give something to the urban poor than to the rural.

An exception is formed by the Catholic monasteries, which mostly have large landed property, but whose inmates neither practise absenteeism nor have sons and sons-in-law in the town — at least not legitimate ones — to relieve them of their ground-rents. The monasteries are the best suited to practise charity in the countryside. Much as one may acknowledge this, one must yet admit that, regarded as pure charitable institutions, they show far too great costs of administration. To produce the thin beggars’ soups of the monastery kitchens there are at any rate cheaper methods than their ample provision, for the benefit of the brothers of the monastery, with everything that gladdens the heart.

Things are no less bad than with poor relief with the care of the sick and with sanitary matters in general in the countryside. Its intellectual desolation drives the doctors too into the town. The shortage of doctors in the country grows ever greater, while in the towns numerous young doctors look in vain for a practice. If it is bad everywhere for the proletarian to fall ill, it is far worse in the country than in the town. In the town he not infrequently finds admission to public clinics as “material” for purposes of study, or at least cheap medical advice; in the country he may search for a doctor for hours around, and he will often have to put up with the drastic cures or the sympathetic charms of a shepherd or an old woman. Of hospitals, or even of shelters for isolating the infectious sick, there is no question there.

On top of this comes the neglect of the countryside with regard to routes of communication. Nowhere are good routes of communication so necessary as in the country, in view of the dispersal of the population, the great distances of the individual places of habitation from one another, and also in view of the low specific value of agricultural products, which repay transport over a greater distance only with excellent means of transport. And while in the towns the population crowds ever more densely together, in the country it is in places even growing sparser. At the same time the means of the towns for the extension of their communications grow, and the provision of cheap means of transport (omnibuses, tramways, urban railways, parcel delivery, etc.) becomes in them so lucrative a business that capital eagerly presses into it. In the countryside nobody thinks of it, and the poor rural communes are not in a position to create the necessary conditions of communication out of their own means.

Thus the antithesis between town and country becomes ever more glaring.

Here Social Democracy intervenes by assigning to the state what the commune cannot accomplish. The state is to take over the costs of schooling, of poor relief, of the care of health, of communications.

This is not to say, say, that all these fields are henceforth to be administered according to a bureaucratic pattern. The self-government of commune, district and province is by no means to be narrowed here; in most states of continental Europe it will still have to be extended. The commune is far less an institution of domination than the state; it is far less inclined than the state to make the school an instrument of government, or to use poor relief and communications to corrupt the voters in the government’s interest — at least not where there is universal suffrage.

It must further be borne in mind that in an urban commune there are more elements of progress than in a state administration, which stands much more than the town under the influence of reactionary powers — of the backward countryside, of backward ruling classes, soldiers, priests, aristocrats. The nationalisation of the rural elementary school might in certain circumstances be an advantage; that of the urban school would decidedly be a step backwards.

With regard to the Gotha Programme of German Social Democracy, which demands “universal and equal education of the people by the state”, Marx remarked in his well-known letter:

“Education of the people by the state is altogether objectionable. To determine by a general law the funds of the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as happens in the United States, to supervise the fulfilment of these legal requirements through state inspectors, is something quite different from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. In the Prusso-German Empire, of all places, it is on the contrary the state that needs a rough education by the people.” (Neue Zeit, IX, 1, p. 574.)

There is just as little reason with poor relief, care of the sick and communications as with the school to subject them to the pattern of the state bureaucracy. In Russia, where the necessity of bringing the country people the possibility of medical help positively compelled the establishment of a system of public care of the sick, this system has attained some importance only in those provinces in which the organs of self-government, the zemstvos, took the organisation into their hands. How indispensable it is, in poor relief as in the provision of means of communication, to know the local resources and needs exactly needs no further elaboration.

But it would also be incompatible with the endeavour to make the state from an institution of domination into one of civilisation to put new means of domination into its hands without need. The church’s poor relief was one of the foundations of the church’s power; and how the government’s disposal of the great national means of communication under its control works is shown by every election: electoral districts loyal to the government have far better prospects of seeing their wishes with regard to railways, standard-gauge or light railways, roads, bridges, etc., fulfilled than opposition ones, and that helps many a supporter of the government to a seat. One can imagine what power the government would acquire if it also had to regulate the whole of local communications!

In all these fields only the role of collecting the resources can fall to the state power; these are to be raised by state taxes and to flow to the individual provinces, districts and communes according to definite norms, and to be administered by these themselves.

One more demand of Social Democracy should be named among the measures that assign to the state functions promoting civilisation in place of functions of domination, and that benefit the country people more than the urban population: the demand for free administration of justice and free legal assistance. As we understand this demand, it does not mean, say, that all legal business is from now on to be free of charge, that all lawsuits of whatever kind are to be fought out at the expense of the state, and so at the expense of the proletarians too. If two rich people come into an inheritance of millions and fly at each other’s throats over it, if two joint-stock companies brawl over a patent, etc., it cannot possibly occur to Social Democracy to demand that the proletarians should contribute to paying the costs of these lawsuits.

On the other hand, neither can one possibly demand that everyone should have the right, quite at his own discretion, to begin a lawsuit at the expense of the state for the redress of a wrong that perhaps exists only in his imagination. If the state pays the costs, it must also be enabled to judge which lawsuits are groundless from the outset and which are not. But this would lead to arrangements for civil proceedings that would bear a fateful resemblance to the present monopoly of prosecution held by the public prosecutors. The state power would get a new means of power into its hands. On the other hand, the performances of our public prosecutors and judges are by no means such that we should wish to see state officials in place of free advocates.

The demand for free administration of justice can in our opinion have only the meaning that institutions should be created that make it possible for the man without means too to seek his rights, which today is often beyond his power. To this would belong the development of arrangements such as the proletariat has here and there already either conquered or created in order to make it easier for its members to seek their rights; these arrangements would have to be generalised and their costs shifted from the individual corporations or communes that bear them now on to the state, but here again without restriction of the principle of self-government. We have in view here the industrial courts and the workers’ secretariats.

The most urgent needs for free administration of justice might well be met by the establishment of courts composed of men enjoying the confidence of the people, which, under the guidance of professional judges, would settle all petty cases quickly and free of charge without many formalities, and by the establishment of information offices in which expert men of confidence give those seeking their rights free and disinterested information on the justification and prospects of their complaints and on the best way of remedying them.

The chief advantage of such information offices we see not in their putting into the hands of individuals the means of conducting their lawsuits themselves, but in their preventing many lawsuits. In this way they would become a blessing, especially for the rural population.

The advocate lives from lawsuits just as the doctor lives from illnesses. If it is not general health but as much sickliness as possible that is in the interest of the latter, so it is as much discord as possible that is in the interest of the former. Now there are certainly enough men of honour in the one calling as in the other who do not let themselves be guided by considerations of this kind; but there are also not a few who cannot resist them, and among the advocates still more than among the doctors; for with the latter it is at once a matter of life and death, with the former only of a little money, and nature does not let itself be outwitted, whereas the formalism of a narrow-minded judge does let itself be outwitted by an advocate’s tricks. It must be a very bad case indeed that is absolutely without prospects. No wonder that there are advocates who, in disputes suitable for a settlement, even if a meagre one, advise a fat lawsuit — fat for the advocate, but emaciating for his client.

But nowhere are there so many lawsuits of this kind as in the countryside. That is not the consequence, say, of a mysterious “litigiousness” of the peasants, but a consequence of rural property relations. Most legal disputes turn on property. But nowhere is there more property than in the country, where, as we have seen, a large part of the proletarians too possess landed property; often a ridiculously insignificant property, but still a property strong enough to influence the mental life of its owner.

But if there is nowhere more property than in the country, the property peculiar to the country, landed property, is the kind of property that gives occasion to the most disputes. Land is simply a quite peculiar thing. The other things in which rights of property can be acquired are relatively quickly perishable, or, where that is not the case, as for example with the precious metals, they easily change their form and place. Land always stays on the same spot, and even in centuries does not essentially change its form; it is the conservative element in the economy, the abiding amid the flight of appearances. But the right of property in land shows this conservative character too; quite differently from property in other objects, it preserves particular rights and particular duties, to which in the course of centuries new ones are added much more easily than old ones die away. Thus property in a particular piece of land mostly comprises not only the right to use so and so many square metres of land; it also comprises a whole sum of further rights, and duties too. What would be impossible with any other property is nothing unusual with landed property: legal disputes taken over from the seventeenth century, rights and duties from the feudal era that lose themselves in grey antiquity, rights and duties that often are not even fixed in writing and that can be reconciled only with difficulty, or not at all, with modern legal concepts. What a fruitful source of legal disputes! But also what a capital means, for those who have the necessary cash and the necessary influence, of acquiring landed property by litigating down the landowners who stand in their way! In the expropriation of the peasants by the nobility the “arm of the law” helped at least as much as the fists of the mercenaries. Open breaches of the law in favour of great landlords are probably no longer to be feared today. But the superiority of their purse, which allows them to pursue a case through all the instances until the opponent runs out of breath, still exists today. Whether it is possible to abolish this advantage of private wealth in a rational way already under present social conditions seems doubtful to us. The information offices of people’s advocates that we have proposed could mitigate the evil, but hardly remove it radically. But they will already do a great deal of good if they counteract the lawsuits of the small landowners among themselves, which in any case do not serve to raise peasant farming. If the peasants carry their money less into the town to advocates and courts and use it more to raise their standard of living and their enterprises, that can only have a beneficial effect.

All the reforms proposed here benefit the rural population much more than the urban, but they mean no privileging of the former, and still less a privileging of landed property; rather, their effect is eminently democratic and levelling. Nor do they mean the protection of backward methods of production and the hampering of economic progress; rather, they promote it in the most decided way and develop out of themselves driving forces towards newer, higher social formations. And they are not pious wishes, but lie on the path of necessary social development.

The nationalisation of the burden of schools, for example, is already today a general need, and every civilised state contributes to the costs of the elementary school: France over 100 million francs a year (1893), Great Britain twice as much (in 1893, 160 million marks), Prussia 53 million (1896).

With the nationalisation of the care of the sick very promising beginnings have been made, in Russia at least, as already mentioned above, and as regards the state’s provision for rural means of communication, greater attention is now at least beginning everywhere to be paid to the building of light railways. But all that is only meagre patchwork, which indeed shows the direction in which development is pressing, but is quite incapable of satisfying its needs.

It is not good will that the governments lack; there is no stratum of the population whom they meet so far as the rural population. What they lack is the means, the money.

There is no question that the programme of reform sketched here, if carried out generally and adequately, would require enormous sums of money.

Let us take only the nationalisation of the burden of schools. It is of course impossible to calculate exactly what the costs would be that a general raising of the elementary school throughout the country to the level of the needs of modern civilisation might entail. But we shall gain some points of reference for a rough estimate if we see what the costs of the elementary school in a modern great city are, and what the costs of the higher schools are. If the rural schools of Prussia were raised merely to the level of the Berlin communal schools, the following costs would result:

The cost per elementary-school pupil in Prussia in 1896 was:

Raising them to the Berlin level would double the costs of elementary schooling. In 1896, 186 million marks were spent on elementary schools, of which 53 million marks came from state funds. The number of elementary-school pupils was 5,237,000, that of the schoolchildren of all the lower schools 5,520,000.

Measured by the Berlin standard, their school costs would require 376 million marks.

But the Berlin communal schools are still far from being ideal schools. In the elementary schools there were on average:

If one wanted to achieve that there were only 30 pupils to each class, the additional costs arising from this alone would bring the elementary school budget pretty well to half a milliard.

But with this we have not yet reached the minimum of the demands that are to be made today on a rational system of elementary schooling. We have neither free provision of school materials nor the feeding and clothing of at least the needy schoolchildren; we have not the equipment of the school with workshops and gardens, with teachers of industry and agriculture, with teachers and means for the organisation and training of youth military service, with general continuation schools up to the age of seventeen or eighteen. That would mean a considerable increase in the number of those obliged to attend school on the one hand, and in the school costs for the individual pupil on the other.

Today the pupil of a secondary school in Prussia requires over 200 marks in school costs, the university student over 800 marks. Thus it is no exaggeration if we reckon the school costs of the ideal elementary-school pupil at 150 marks a head. Even if compulsory schooling were left at the age of fourteen, that is, apart from its extension to the age of seventeen, this would bring the Prussian elementary school budget to about 800 million; with the lengthening of compulsory schooling it would probably make up the full milliard. Reckoned for the Empire, there would result an elementary school budget of 1½ milliards.

Beside this even the figures of the military budget pale.

We shall not enter into calculating the costs of nationalising other burdens, poor relief, care of health, communications, administration of justice, etc. We lack the necessary data for that. But they will not be insignificant.

In face of these enormous demands, which would double, perhaps treble, the budget of expenditure of our present states, the savings that the programme of reform just developed would make possible are only of an insignificant nature.

The displacement of the centralised rule of the bureaucrats by self-government in state, province and commune does not mean the abolition of the administration of public affairs by paid officials. These affairs are today far too complicated, too manifold and extensive to be dealt with as a sideline by amateur after-hours work. They require trained experts, paid officials, who devote themselves exclusively to them. The idea of a government of the people by the people in the sense that public affairs are to be attended to, instead of by paid officials, by men from the people unpaid in their free hours, is a utopia, and moreover a reactionary, undemocratic utopia, however democratic and revolutionary its advocates may feel. This kind of self-government presupposes, in every community that has got beyond the most primitive forms, an aristocracy — large peasants, feudal lords, rentiers of every kind — who, living from the labour of others, have the leisure and the means to devote themselves exclusively to public affairs. The much-praised English self-government too was only an aristocratic privilege. The more democratic the modern great states become, the more they must, where they have self-government, transform its offices from unpaid honorary posts into salaried functions. Modern self-government, modern democracy, means, as against the centralised rule of the bureaucrats, hardly a reduction in the number of officials, but rather their more even distribution over the country, their subjection to the will of the population and, in connection with this, also, at least in part, a change in the manner of their recruitment and promotion.

But if the advance of democracy does not lead to any considerable reduction in the number of salaried officials, it does lead to a progressive equalisation of their salaries. In monarchical-aristocratic states the highest offices are a privilege of the aristocracy and are often extravagantly highly endowed in accordance with its standard of living — all the more highly the more they represent mere sinecures for the provision of money-hungry or needy, but lazy and ignorant aristocrats. The real work is done by workers of the bourgeois intelligentsia and of the proletariat and is paid accordingly. The advance of democracy leads to the reduction of the salaries of the highest offices, but it also leads to the raising of the wretched salaries of the lower ranks, whose pay today is in many cases below the standard of living of the proletarians working in private service, for which they are compensated by prospects of an allegedly carefree old age, but above all by the stimulation of their vanity and their arrogance, and often too by unclean secondary earnings arising from their official position — bribery. A democratic state, in which the official is not the master but the servant of the people, in which the laws exist not merely for the population but also, and in the first place, for the public officials, in which the uniform means no special right but a special obligation, such a state will find it hard to find capable officials unless it assures them a salary corresponding to the standard of living of the classes from which they are recruited. This consideration alone, besides many others that it would lead us too far afield to set out here, must lead to the salaries of the lower classes of officials being considerably raised as the state is progressively democratised.

But since the position of these is wretched today and their number large, whereas that of the excessively paid officials is small, the progressive equalisation of salaries leads not to a reduction but to a growing increase in the expenditure on the salaries of public officials.

In this field there is nothing to be saved.

Things are better in the military field. A general disarmament would set free gigantic sums, which would probably not suffice to carry out the programme of reform in question, but which would yet permit something considerable to be accomplished, compared with today, for raising the general level of civilisation. The 700 to 800 million marks that the German Empire spends year in, year out, on army and navy are no trifle. With them one could already create a system of elementary schooling that would arouse the admiration of the world and place the German people at the head of the civilised nations.

Meanwhile the prospects of general disarmament are unfortunately very poor. But one can hardly want to postpone every serious reform requiring greater costs until the time after disarmament has taken place, the preconditions for which are perhaps given only in a socialist commonwealth. The transition from the system of standing armies to the people’s defence force can, but need not necessarily, bring about a considerable absolute reduction in military expenditure. In no case will this expenditure fall by such an amount that even a larger fraction of the costs of the modern state of civilisation could be covered from the sum set free. And do we not already today declare the lower strata of the population to be overburdened? Would not any savings from the reform of the army have to be used to relieve them?

But where, then, is the money to come from for the transformation of the state into a state of civilisation?

Bourgeois fiscal policy here faces a problem on whose solution it must come to grief.

To make this clear, we must take a look at the principles of this fiscal policy.

Any fiscal policy that does not want to be a mere plundering of the population will have to start from the question: from what sources of social wealth do the state taxes flow, and from what sources should they flow? The question how far and in what way the individual persons are to be called on to pay taxes is a secondary question, which can be answered adequately only when the answer to the first has been found.

If we consider the total product that a given society supplies year in, year out, it can be divided into two parts: one part serves for the maintenance and reproduction of the producing labour-powers; it must fall to the producing workers if society is to be able to go on existing. The surplus over and above this forms the surplus-product; from it the non-producing classes are maintained. In a capitalist society the surplus-product takes the form of surplus-value, which falls to the capitalist.

If we consider economic relations in this simplified form, it is clear that the state taxes should and may spring from only one source: from the surplus-product, or the surplus-value. This comes clearly to light in the feudal era. The functions of the state were there exercised by the king, the church and the lord of the manor; they all drew their income not from taxes in our sense but from their landed property, that is, from the labour of the farmers. It was the surplus-product of these farmers that they received, wholly or in part, in the form of dues in kind and services in kind, and in return for which they took upon themselves the functions now exercised by the state power — justice, police, defence of the country, intercourse with the outside world, etc.

These dues and services did not as a rule go beyond the amount of the surplus-product; first, because natural economy, as Marx has already remarked, does not have inherent in it the boundless greed of money economy; then, because with the low state of the technique of arms the peasantry was not completely defenceless against the feudal lords; finally, because the peasant who was too badly oppressed could flee, and, with the shortage of labour-power, was gladly taken in everywhere, by another lord as well as in the town.

It was in the town that commodity production first arose, that money economy arose. The product became a commodity with a definite value and price, the surplus-product too took on the form of value, and the part of the surplus-product that had to serve for the maintenance of the state became a part of the value of commodities realised in money. Money taxes took the place of the feudal dues and services.

We have already described at the beginning of our work the situation that arose from this. The state power newly arising with the bourgeoisie and resting on money taxes had first to throw down the previous masters of the community, the church and the feudal nobility. The end of the struggle with them was not their annihilation but a compromise, which secured their existence anew on a new basis. From masters of the state they became its servants, but in return the state power protected their material interests. The state taxes that now arose did not take the place of the feudal services and dues but came beside them. And the centralised state, with the new technique of arms, the muskets and cannon of the professional armies, and with the boundless greed of money economy, knew how to extort from the peasants, who could not hide from the state police so easily as from the lord of a small manor, quite other sums than the former lords. Under the protection of the new state power the feudal services and dues were increased rather than reduced, and at the same time the new money taxes rose beyond all measure. The princes scraped money together wherever they found it, without the least regard for the progress of production and the prosperity of the population. At the same time, however, the state’s protection of feudal landed property, already economically bankrupt, led not to an advance but rather to a decline of production.

In these circumstances the surplus-product sufficed less and less to satisfy the demands of the state; a part, and indeed a growing part, of what was necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of the working classes had, at least in the countryside, to be sacrificed to the rapacity of the state power and its tax farmers. The peasantry, still so prosperous in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, grew visibly poorer in the seventeenth and eighteenth; its farming declined, it began slowly to starve. In part this is to be ascribed to the feudal pressure, which did not permit rational agriculture, in part to the demands of money economy, which grew rapidly while the peasant’s natural economy only slowly took on the character of commodity production, but in part, and in no small part, directly to the insane extortion of taxes.

This came to light most glaringly in France, whose great Revolution also formed the most violent reaction against these frightful conditions. In France, too, the theorists of the rising bourgeoisie were the first to seek a rational fiscal policy.

The Physiocrats were the first to make fiscal policy clearly and decidedly dependent on the economy of the nation and to declare that it had to serve it. The natural consequence of this was the principle: Taxes may be paid only out of the surplus-product. But the only labour that in their view created a surplus-product was agricultural labour. They therefore demanded the abolition of all other taxes and their replacement by a single tax (impôt unique) on the agricultural surplus (produit net). But even this tax, which would essentially have become a taxation of the large landowners, they did not imagine as too oppressive, since they reduced the functions of the state to a minimum. For the state allied with the feudal nobility had become a useless bloodsucker, which tied up economic activity everywhere, so that the removal of this state was the first condition of economic prosperity. It was the Physiocrats who put into the world the winged word “laisser faire, laisser aller”.

What the Physiocrats had begun was continued later by the radical free-traders, who in our century led the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the remnants of the feudal state. Their theoretical ground was, to be sure, a different one, that of classical English political economy. But like the Physiocrats they too paid homage to the principle of laisser aller, laisser faire, they too demanded the reduction of the functions of the state to a minimum, and like them they too had to strive for a fiscal policy in harmony with the needs of production. Thus their fiscal policy was closely akin to that of their predecessors. It did not occur to them, of course, that taxes should be reduced to a single one, a taxation of surplus-value. The question of surplus-value did not exist for them at all. But they did reject indirect taxes, at least on necessary means of subsistence, and demanded an income tax with exemption of the smaller incomes, a tax that does not, of course, coincide with a taxation of surplus-value, but comes very close to it.

But Manchesterism has nowhere broken through completely. The bourgeois state proved just as warlike as the feudal. The French Revolution, borne by the ideas of the Physiocrats, unleashed a series of horrible world wars, which for over two decades laid waste the whole of Europe and made fearful demands on the goods and blood of the peoples. The revolution of 1848, the same that paved the way to power for radical free-tradism, threatened to unleash a second era of wars. The decline of the revolution postponed these wars, which the executors of the revolution’s will, the three autocrats Louis Napoleon, Bismarck and Alexander II, then waged. The twenty-year era of wars, which began with an Eastern war and ended with an Eastern war, was followed by the era of armed peace, which weighs hardly less heavily on the peoples than a war once did. All this brought about in all civilised states a constant growth of the burden of taxes and of the national debts, whose interest required further taxes. At the same time, however, the claims on the state as a factor of civilisation grew too, however much the governments might apply themselves to the strictest “economy” in this direction. Higher education, communications and much else made growing demands that could not be evaded.

In place of the state of peace that the Manchester men had dreamed of, there came in reality a permanent armed camp; in place of laisser faire, a constant growth of the sphere of state intervention in the workings of society.

But from where were the growing needs of the state to be covered? From surplus-value, that is, from income, property and inheritance taxes, or from the taxation of the people’s necessities, that is, from indirect taxes? That was the question. But the bourgeoisie is the ruling class, and a ruling class has always known how to shift the chief burdens of the state off itself. There are states, like France, that still have no income tax at all, thanks to the sole rule of the bourgeoisie, which in France succeeded in finishing with the nobility completely as long as a hundred years ago, and which has always known how to set a strong dam against the proletariat in the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. In return, the taxation of the people’s means of subsistence is very developed in France; corn duties and indirect taxes, among them the taxes on salt, sugar and drink, and the tobacco monopoly, supply the chief revenues.

According to the budget of 1897 there were supplied by:

The total revenue of the state came to 3,386 million. The stock exchange tax yielded 8,700,000, the tax on income from movable property 65,800,000 francs. The other taxes (stamp duties, etc.) are far from serving as a substitute for an income tax.

The bourgeoisie is least in sole command among modern states in England, where, it is true, the capitalist mode of production has developed earliest and most purely, but where, precisely in consequence of this, a strong proletariat, not hemmed in by any petty bourgeoisie or peasantry, confronted the bourgeoisie at a time when it still faced a strong nobility.

In England, therefore, we find practically no indirect taxes at all on the necessary means of subsistence. But surplus-value too is spared as far as possible. English fiscal policy rests on a compromise: it has introduced an income tax (incomes under 160 pounds sterling = 3,200 marks are exempt), but not a progressive one (for incomes of 160–500 pounds sterling a certain degression takes place under the act of 1894); the mass of large incomes is thus not called on for taxation to any higher degree than the middle ones. The death duties work in the same sense as the income tax. Besides these, however, we have high indirect taxes and revenue duties on the luxuries of the mass of the people, in particular tobacco and spirits. In 1896 these indirect taxes yielded 48,714,000 pounds sterling, roughly a milliard marks; income tax and stamp duties, of which the death duties form the lion’s share, 34,830,000 pounds sterling, 700 million marks. The total revenue came to more than 100 million pounds, over two milliard marks.

The fiscal policy of the other civilised states keeps the mean between that of England and that of France. But everywhere on the Continent (with the exception of democratic Switzerland) we find surplus-value far less burdened than the necessary elements of the population’s life. And in general the latter kind of taxation, the indirect taxes, tends to grow, not merely absolutely but also relatively. They are, to be sure, highly irrational, for they often strike the poor families rich in heads — the salt tax, for example — more heavily than the well-to-do, not only relatively but absolutely. They are irrational also because their collection, in the case of customs duties for example, swallows up a large part of their yield. But they are convenient: the people feel their pressure less than that of direct taxes, and — this is the decisive point — the mass of the people does not oppose to them the resistance that the bourgeoisie opposes to every direct tax that considerably burdens its income. And the bourgeoisie is, after all, still the decisive class today. The sinking classes, artisans and peasants, however, promote the development of indirect taxes still further by their tariff policy. The export industry is, of course, almost exclusively large-scale industry. Artisans and peasants need only the home market. That they want to secure for themselves. So they favour protective tariffs, which, to be sure, do not protect them, but only become new indirect taxes, which they themselves have for the most part to bear.

The bourgeois parties do not get beyond the two kinds of fiscal policy sketched here, the Manchester and the protectionist, not even bourgeois democracy, which is not a capitalist party, but not an anti-capitalist one either, but the party of the reconciliation of class interests, the party of those interests that capitalists and proletarians, petty bourgeois and peasants have in common. It lacks decisiveness towards the capitalists. It does not dare to load the whole burden of taxation on them. At the same time, however, it wants to relieve the lower classes, and so its whole fiscal policy comes down to the endeavour: as few taxes as possible, an ideal incompatible with the growing tasks of the modern state. On the ground of bourgeois democracy the transformation of the state into a state of civilisation is therefore impossible, however well meant its intentions in this respect may be.

Quite different is the fiscal policy of proletarian democracy, of Social Democracy. Its watchword is not the reduction of taxes but the shifting of taxes on to the shoulders that can bear them. It takes up again the old physiocratic demand that taxes should be paid only out of surplus-value. In the developed capitalist mode of production, to be sure, surplus-value is not so easy to grasp as the produit net of the Physiocrats, which, with the predominantly natural economy of the peasant of the last century, who produced almost everything he needed himself, appeared as a material surplus of products that he produced over and above his own requirements and delivered to the lord. Surplus-value comes to the surface only after manifold divisions and transformations of form, so that it is impossible to grasp it completely and directly. The taxation of particular sources or parts of surplus-value easily leads to inequalities, sometimes also to the shifting of taxes. Thus the urban landowners use their monopoly position to shift the taxation of their ground-rent on to the tenants.

We shall not go more closely here into the question which kind of taxation of surplus-value is the most rational; that would lead us too far. It is enough to refer to the programme of German Social Democracy, which, to defray all public expenditure so far as it is to be covered by taxes, demands a graduated income and property tax and an inheritance tax graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. This combination seems to us in fact to strike surplus-value most surely.

Bourgeois democracy too demands taxes of this kind and has in part secured their adoption; but it does not possess the ruthlessness to squeeze considerable sums out of capital in this way. Only Social Democracy knows no considerations towards capital; only it can demand social reforms that entail considerable state expenditure and at the same time contemplate the replacement of the other taxes by income, property and inheritance taxes.

The bourgeois state too finds itself compelled from time to time, by the growing claims on its finances, to draw on surplus-value to an extraordinary extent to cover the needs of the state; but for this it chooses not the form of the tax but that of the state loan. Sometimes this happens for economic purposes, for example the building of railways or canals; as a rule for quite unproductive use, the purchase of cannon and armoured ships, the covering of the costs of war and the like.

It is remarkable that in monarchical states everything belonging to the state is imperial or royal, etc., except the debts. The soldier’s coat is the King’s coat, but the King would protest energetically if one wanted to call the debts that were raised to pay for the royal coat royal debts. They are most graciously left to the state or the nation. In this even Russian absolutism shows itself highly republican.

These loans can be put on a level with the voluntary contributions to which the ruling classes, nobility and clergy, were now and then called in the feudal era when the fatherland was in danger. There is, to be sure, one small difference: the feudal lords demanded no interest on what they laid on the altar of the fatherland; for the capitalist the interest is the main thing. Perhaps one might equate the perpetual privileges that rich territorial lords, bishops, monasteries and towns bargained for in return for their contributions with the perpetual interest on our national debts.

Next to military expenditure, the interest on the national debt forms the largest item in the budget of expenditure in all modern states. In England, out of a total budget of 2,000 million marks, army and navy require about 800 million marks, the interest on the national debt 500 million. In France army and navy require about 700 million marks, the interest on the national debt 1,000 million!

In the German Empire, it is true, the interest on the imperial debt requires only 74 million marks, army and navy on the other hand 700 million marks. But the German Empire is still young; the war from which it arose brought it the French milliards, and it has not had to wage a great war since. In the same period in which the German Empire, which began to keep house with a war indemnity of 4,000 million marks, arrived at a debt of 2,261 million, the English national debt went down from 15,600 million marks to 12,400 million, that is, by 3,200 million — without corn, meat, petroleum and similar duties! But if one wants to draw a comparison, one must add to the debts of the German Empire those of the federal states as well! In Prussia alone the state debt amounts to 6,500 million marks, the interest on it to 229 million (1898); the debt of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg together to 2,500 million. With regard to the German state debts in their totality we arrive at figures similar to those in England — with the difference, however, that with us they are moving in a rapidly rising line, there in a falling one.

Besides military expenditure, the interest on the national debts is the item in the budget of a modern state by whose removal it would gain the most means, either for relieving the population or for carrying out great social reforms. A general disarmament and a general suspension of the payment of interest on government securities would make well over a milliard marks a year available for these purposes in every modern great state. With that something could be achieved!

State bankruptcy is nothing unusual; nevertheless we should not like to put it forward as certain that a regime such as that presupposed here, which stands under proletarian influence but is not yet in a position to overcome the capitalist mode of production, would proceed without need to suspend the payment of interest. It would grossly violate the principle of equal right for all to pick out at random only a few capitalists and confiscate their property, and it would be all the less justified in substance since no small part of the government securities is owned precisely by the smallest capitalists. The confiscation of the savings of little people can least of all correspond to the intentions of a democratic government.

But a regime like the one in question would certainly have to refrain once and for all from raising new loans and seek to repay the existing ones as quickly as possible. A new loan would be equivalent to a renewed subjection of the state power to the yoke of capital. The state loan is one of the means by which the bourgeois state directs surplus-value appropriated by capitalists to the purposes of the state. A proletarian democracy knows only the means of taxation for this purpose.

But of course, however little consideration proletarian democracy may show for capital, it will not be able to tax surplus-value quite as it pleases. Such an increase of the taxes mentioned above as would confiscate surplus-value is not to be thought of. Let it be remembered that we are dealing here not with a socialist commonwealth — for that our exposition would be pointless, since a community that is master of the means of production needs no taxes to come into possession of the surplus-product — but with a condition in which the proletariat already possesses sufficient political power to influence fiscal policy in its own sense, but in which the capitalist mode of production still prevails. So long as this is the case, so long as society for one reason or another is not in a position to take the functions of capital completely into its own hands, surplus-value plays an important economic role. The capitalist may not, as the feudal lord or the Roman aristocrat did before him, consume the whole surplus-product that his workers supply him. He must “abstain”, must “save”. Only a part of the surplus-value is consumed; another is accumulated, that is, made into new capital. But this accumulation of capital forms, besides the advance of the natural sciences, the great force of economic progress in our century. If this progress went forward infinitely faster in this period than in any century before, if it has created enormous productive forces beside which all the previous wonders of the world appear dwarfish, if for the first time in the history of the world it has created the possibility of a socialist society on the basis of a higher civilisation, we owe this, besides the natural sciences, to the accumulation of capital. And so long as society does not itself own the productive forces and regulate their development, it would mean hampering progress and stunting the preconditions of socialism to make the accumulation of capital impossible.

Fortunately for progress, the urge of capital to accumulate is so mighty that it can be handled very roughly without disturbing it. Laws for the protection of labour and workers’ organisations have so far proved to be means of promoting, not of hampering, economic progress; they have not done the least damage to the accumulation of capital. This has today assumed such dimensions that it is beginning to become an embarrassment for the capitalists. The mass of surplus-value that flows to them year in, year out, is so enormous that in spite of the most insane luxury they still lay by more money than can easily be placed so as to breed surplus-value. A series of bankruptcies of states — Argentina, Portugal, Greece, etc. — and of giant private undertakings — the Panama crash at their head — could take place in recent years without calling forth any too sensitive disturbances in economic life, without narrowing the capacity of capital to invest new hundreds of millions in completely unproductive state loans and at the same time to push forward the development of new industries and new means of communication more vigorously than ever.

In view of this, it will be possible to go for surplus-value quite differently from today without having to fear any danger to economic development.

It would be quite idle to want to calculate even approximately how far it will be possible to go in this.

But however large one may put the sums that can be raised in this way for the state finances, one must reckon with the possibility that they will not suffice to cover the costs of the state of civilisation, if it is to meet all the demands required for raising the whole population to the level of modern civilisation. A second method of acquiring surplus-value will have to come in as a supplement: the state — or the commune, for which what has been set out applies too, mutatis mutandis — will itself have to have surplus-value produced.

Economic and political development is pressing in this direction in any case. There is a series of natural private monopolies — mines, the great means of communication, lighting works, etc. — whose operation, in view of the absence of competition, leads to the exploitation not only of the workers but also of the consumers. Besides these, however, the concentration of capital produces artificial private monopolies through cartels, etc., which have a similar effect. Not only the proletariat, the whole mass of the population rises against these monopolies. But their regulation by law always remains meagre patchwork; there is only one means of thoroughly ending the exploitation of the community that they practise: their acquisition by the community, the continuation of their operation by the commonwealth. So long as the big capitalists have the state in their pocket as they do today, however, this is neither a simple matter nor always a desirable one. On the one hand the proletariat cannot ask that the state power hostile to it should extend its domain of power; on the other hand the capitalists are powerful enough to frustrate a nationalisation that is inconvenient to them, and to have a nationalisation that succeeds take place on conditions by which only they gain. In the nationalisation of the railways in Prussia and Austria it was precisely not the shareholders who had to foot the bill.

All these misgivings fall away in a state in which the proletariat is in a position to lend the state power the proper ruthlessness towards capital, and in which the mass of the people has no cause to fear an increase in the spheres of power of the state, since the state is completely in its power. There the nationalisation of the private monopolies can take on a rapid pace — other things being equal, all the more rapid the greater the needs of the state and the narrower the limits within which the taxation of surplus-value must move. And this nationalisation will in any case take place there on conditions that, even if they do not represent a confiscation, will yet assure the state rich revenues, which it can use partly to improve the position of its workers, partly in the interest of the consumers, but partly also to promote the work of civilisation on a grand scale.

The operation of these state monopolies is not yet socialist; under the given presuppositions it serves commodity production, not direct production for the use of society. But it is already different in principle from the monopoly operation of the bourgeois state. The former, as part of proletarian fiscal policy, is a means of directing surplus-value to the state; the latter, as part of bourgeois fiscal policy, is the most effective means of indirect taxation, of making necessary means of subsistence dearer for the benefit of the state power.

The criterion of the suitability of a branch of production for the proletarian state monopoly is the height of its form of production; best suited to it are enterprises organised bureaucratically, which have passed from personal property into the anonymous property of a joint-stock company or a syndicate, and which in fact already stand outside all competition.

The criterion of the suitability of a branch of production for the bourgeois state monopoly, on the other hand, is the importance of its products as means of subsistence or enjoyment for the mass of the consumers (tobacco, spirits, salt). The level of development of production does not come into consideration here at all; this monopoly also seizes on backward branches of production in which small-scale enterprise predominates (tobacco); it must exclude competition artificially and obtains its revenues by exploiting the consumers, and often the workers too, beyond the degree to which they would be subjected with free competition among private enterprises.

If one may not confuse state monopoly with socialism, neither may one confuse proletarian state monopoly with bourgeois.

The nationalisation and municipalisation of the private monopolies in state and commune, the replacement of indirect taxes by progressive income, property and inheritance taxes, the ending of the economy of state loans — these are the salient points of proletarian fiscal policy. That it means an enormous relief not only for the proletariat but for the whole mass of the working population is obvious and needs no proof. Indeed, it may be said that it is still far more important for small artisans, small traders and small peasants than for the wage proletariat. The latter, at least in many of its strata, is rising; the classes first named are going to ruin. For the rising strata of the proletariat the present bourgeois fiscal policy means an obstacle to their rise; for the classes going to ruin it means an acceleration of their ruin. Taxes weigh still more heavily on the petty bourgeois and the small peasant than on the wage-labourer; they therefore have a still far greater interest in proletarian fiscal policy than the latter.

But this fiscal policy would not merely relieve the working strata; at the same time, where capitalist production is highly developed and the mass of surplus-value therefore large, it would put the state in a position to pursue an energetic policy of welfare and civilisation, in quite a different way from that which the bourgeois tax system enables it to. The taxation of the people’s necessities has narrow limits if it is not to lead to the ruin of the mass of the people and so of the commonwealth altogether. The taxation of surplus-value will always be insufficient under bourgeois fiscal policy.

Only a proletarian fiscal policy can go for surplus-value ruthlessly, can take from the capitalist class by means of taxation all the sums it invests today in internal and external state loans, and far more besides, without impairing the development of industry, or even the consuming power of the bourgeoisie; and the means of producing surplus-value through the nationalisation of the great monopolies puts the most important productive forces of the nation at the service of the community and allows the state power to make numerous labour-powers lying idle today useful for the work of civilisation. The material means of state and commune are thereby enormously extended. The growing concentration of capital brings ever more fields within reach of operation by the state; the opening up of new sources of revenue for the state by the increase of its enterprises, without any burden on the people, therefore has no limits.

Whether the proletariat will ever really come to develop a fiscal policy of its own is questionable. This presupposes a condition that has also been assumed as the basis of our present exposition, but which will perhaps never come about: a great political power of the proletariat together with an undisturbed continuance of the capitalist mode of production. The two exclude each other almost completely; at any rate they could exist side by side only for a short time.

Nevertheless the investigation of the fiscal policy that the proletariat would pursue today if it came to political power seemed to us necessary. The significance of a social goal lies less in whether it is reached than in whether it faithfully indicates the direction of a social movement. In the significance of this movement, and in the exactness with which it indicates its necessary direction, lies the significance of the goal. One can become clear about a movement only when one has recognised its goal.

The social conditions at the time when the proletariat comes to political power may be such as to make a special fiscal policy in the framework sketched here superfluous; in any case it forms today a goal of proletarian democracy, and the measure of the political influence of the proletariat is marked, among other things, by the measure in which its fiscal policy is realised. The stronger Social Democracy, the more the indirect taxes will decrease, the greater the importance income, property and inheritance taxes will obtain, the more the state debts and their interest will be reduced, the sooner and the more cheaply the great monopolies of the capitalists will be nationalised and municipalised.

If we sum up the demands that have resulted from our investigations, we find:

I. Measures in Favour of the Rural Proletariat

II. Measures for the Protection of Agriculture

III. Measures in the Interest of the Agricultural Population

Endeavour to abolish the exploitation of the countryside by the town and to abolish the cultural antithesis between town and country by

If one likes, one can describe these demands as a Social Democratic agrarian programme. We do not believe, however, that this description would fit. The points summed up under 1 are in essence already contained in the present demands of Social Democracy for the protection of labour, and those summed up under 3 likewise among its immediate political demands. And of the points of heading 2, the only one of far-reaching importance, the nationalisation of the management of forest and water, is likewise not a purely agrarian one, lying not merely in the interest of agriculture but in the interest of industry, of public hygiene, etc., as well. The remaining demands, for all their importance, are relatively too petty to be able to form the basis of a great party programme. These “small means” have in many cases already been carried out in advanced countries, and with regard to them Social Democracy differs from the other parties only by the degree of its ruthlessness towards the rights of private property where these come into conflict with the general interests of a rational agriculture. And it must itself declare that these “small means” are indeed necessary in the interest of the forward development of agriculture, but insufficient in face of the great burdens that private property in land and capitalist commodity production lay on agriculture in increasing measure.

Nor, as already mentioned above, did we at all intend to work out an exhaustive programme. Agrarian programmes of action for particular occasions and districts seemed to us quite appropriate; but they cannot be worked out by theorists alone; the practical men must help there.

Our only concern was to mark, by concrete examples, the general direction that Social Democratic agrarian policy has to pursue if the course of development of agriculture that we have traced is correct. The practical applications for each individual case follow easily from it.

We have, we hope, succeeded in showing that one is by no means condemned to nihilism in social policy if one declares it impossible, and contrary to our principles, to want to save peasant farming or even to raise it. One can take up the same standpoint towards it that Social Democracy takes up towards handicraft and domestic industry, and can at the same time develop a rich and fruitful activity in favour not only of the rural proletariat but also of agriculture and the rural population in general.

Whether it will be possible to bind the peasantry to Social Democracy by setting out this agrarian policy may well be doubted. Social Democracy will always remain at its core a proletarian, urban party, always a party of economic progress; with the conservative peasant, who is averse to urban ways and stands on the ground of the patriarchal family, with complete subordination of maid and man, of wife and child, to his will — with this peasant it will always have to struggle against deep-rooted prejudices, and it will never be able to offer him as much as the agrarian parties, which not only stand closer to his nature but can also promise him far more, since they do not believe in the necessity and irresistibility of economic progress, and since they have no scruple about reversing the former relation and having the rural population maintained by the urban, agriculture by industry and commerce.

The peasant who still farms in the old way Social Democracy will hardly ever win. But it is not out of the question that it may bring him to a neutral position. That too would be a considerable gain. Certainly, economic development is passing over him, and Social Democracy too will deal with him where he opposes it. But he still forms in many places a force not to be underestimated, and if it is possible to cancel its obstructive effect, it would be foolish to forgo doing so.

But what makes the peasant most an enemy of Social Democracy is not its practical policy. He certainly cannot become enthusiastic about a party that will not sacrifice the consumers to him, that resists every attempt to raise ground-rent by an artificial increase of the prices of foodstuffs, that will have nothing to do with the single-heir law, with servants’ ordinances, with restrictions on freedom of movement. But it also fights against the heavy pressure of taxation that weighs on the peasant, against the encroachments of the bureaucrats and the large landowners, etc., and that he is glad enough to accept. What makes him indignant, however, is the thought of the expropriation of landed property that the victory of Social Democracy is supposed to bring with it; in his eyes that means being driven from house and farm, from his property, which the have-nothings will share among themselves.

An investigation of Social Democratic agrarian policy that did not create clarity on this point would be incomplete. The attempt to do so shall conclude our work.