II.5. The Social Revolution and the Expropriation of the Landowners

We have already pointed out at the end of the first part that the transition from capitalist to socialist agriculture is possible without expropriating the peasant landowners. What was said there would be enough to dispel all the fears of the peasantry in this direction.

But we have still more arguments at our command in this respect.

Not only the small peasants, but the owners of small-scale enterprises in general, handicraft ones too, have nothing to fear from a victory of the proletariat. On the contrary.

We have already seen that the transformation of the state from an institution of domination into an institution of culture, and the shifting of the public burdens on to surplus-value, or the surplus-product, would benefit precisely them in the first place.

Their attitude towards the beginnings of socialist society will, however, differ according to whether their enterprises are parasitic or not. Those small-scale enterprises are to be called parasitic that are long since outdated technically and entirely superfluous economically, to which their owners cling only because a purely proletarian existence seems to them still more insecure and miserable than their own, but sometimes also because they can find no possibility of existence among the wage-proletariat. How many of the small-scale enterprises, especially in retail trade, are founded by wage-labourers who have been victimised or have become unemployed for some other reason, and who set up an independent dwarf enterprise with the help of credit so as not to sink entirely into the lumpenproletariat!

The statistician counts among the unemployed only those devoid of any occupation. According to the last census these are only a few hundred thousand. But if it came about that the state granted all the unemployed a decent livelihood, one would be astonished how much the number of those would swell who, as unemployed, demanded work and a livelihood from the state. On the other hand, the number of dwarf enterprises would then melt away considerably.

The better the position of the worker in large-scale enterprise, the shorter his working time, the higher his wage, the more secure his income, the sooner will the owners of parasitic small-scale enterprises give up eking out a wretched existence any longer by reactionary experiments at the expense of the community. The sooner will they make up their minds to abandon their outdated and superfluous enterprises and become workers in modern enterprises. The quantity of productive forces at the nation’s disposal must thereby undergo a considerable increase, while at the same time an abundant source of misery and want is stopped up.

Besides the parasitic, however, there are also necessary small-scale enterprises, in fields not yet conquered by the machine, that do not serve mass production. Which enterprises belong in this category may be disputed; moreover technical conditions change from day to day. In the art crafts, hitherto considered the secure stronghold of small-scale enterprise, the machine has penetrated just as it has into baking or shoemaking. All the same, it may be assumed that a part of handicraft will save itself over into the beginnings of socialist society; indeed, the growth in the prosperity of the masses may revive some branches of handicraft, by reducing the demand for cheap mass-produced articles and raising that for dearer handicraft products better suited to individuality. At the same time the burdens resting on the craftsman diminish as a result of proletarian tax policy (so far as there is still any question of taxes). His general education improves, and the opportunities for higher technical and artistic training increase for him. In this sense one can even say that socialist society not only is not based on the complete destruction of handicraft, but can bring about a new flowering of some of its branches. But this flowering handicraft will bear quite a different social character from that of today. It will form only an exception to the general type of production.

The great mass of the means of production, and precisely that which is economically decisive, will become social property, and production will be social. The small craftsman, even if he remains independent in his workshop, will now become entirely dependent on society, which alone supplies him with raw materials and tools, and which will as a rule also be the sole purchaser of his products. He must adapt himself to the organism of social production and fit into it, and, in spite of his isolation in the workshop, become a social worker.

Peasant development will proceed in the same way. The countless owners of parasitic dwarf enterprises will gladly renounce the semblance of their independence and their property when socialist large-scale enterprise holds out tangible advantages to them.

But the peasant small-scale enterprises that are not parasitic, those that still fulfil important functions in economic life, will become members of social production just like the handicraft enterprises, even if they remain in their apparent isolation. Society obtains still greater power over them than over the handicraft enterprises through the nationalisation of mortgages and the nationalisation of the agricultural industries on which the farmers depend.

The peasants need not fear, however, that they will be harmed by this dependence. To depend on the state is, under a democratic regime, certainly more agreeable than to be exploited by, say, a couple of sugar magnates. But the state will not only take nothing from the peasants; it will give them a great deal. In the transition from capitalist to socialist society peasants and agricultural labourers must become particularly prized labour-powers.

The enormous expansion of industry for the world market and the simultaneous flooding of the market with foreign corn — two phenomena that stand in the closest interaction with each other — drive the rural population into the towns, and especially its most able-bodied elements. As soon as the home market comes into the foreground of the national economy again, this must show itself above all in the growing importance of agriculture. The higher consuming power of the masses calls for more foodstuffs; the reduction of exports reduces supplies from abroad. An all-round rational conduct of agriculture that brings in the highest possible yields then becomes unavoidable. The best means of production and the best labour-power must be brought to agriculture. The latter, however, is not so simple. Every agricultural labourer is fit for one or another kind of industrial work; on the other hand, only a few industrial workers today can be used in agriculture. It is indeed to be expected that a suitable education will enable the young to do agricultural work alongside industrial and purely intellectual work, but this prospect does not help over the difficulties of the first beginnings.

The agricultural labourer and the small peasant, both of whom are today probably the most stepmotherly treated in society, must in such a situation become much sought after, and thus attain a most favourable social position. How can one suppose, then, that a socialist regime would drive the peasants from their fields! That would be a madness going far beyond even the measure of what the most unscrupulous and silly of our opponents declare us to be afflicted with.

A socialist regime will have to try to make the position of the farmers as advantageous as possible, if only in the interest of feeding the people. The displacement of commodity production by mere production of use-values further offers the possibility of converting the peasant’s mortgage interest and other dues, so far as any still have to be paid, from payments in money into deliveries in kind, which would be an immense relief for the peasant. But a proletarian regime also has every interest in making the peasant’s labour as productive as possible, and so in providing him with the best technical aids. Instead of expropriating the countryman, Social Democracy will put at his disposal the most perfect means of production, which are entirely inaccessible to him in the capitalist era.

He can, it is true, use the most perfect means of production only in large-scale enterprise, and a socialist regime too will have to work for its rapid extension. But to induce the peasants to put their fields together so as to go over to co-operative or communal large-scale enterprise, the method of expropriation will not be required. If co-operative large-scale enterprise proves advantageous for the co-operative workers, then the example of the nationalised large-scale enterprises will suffice to induce the peasants to imitate them. The great obstacles that stand in the way of the development of co-operative agriculture today — the lack of models, the risk, the lack of capital — then fall away, and the obstacle of unrestricted private property in land, so powerfully effective today, will have been reduced to a minimum by the nationalisation of mortgages, by the growing dependence of the peasants on the nationalised agricultural industries, and by the increasing right of the state to supervise and intervene in matters of land improvement and of human and animal hygiene.

In view of all this, in view of the interest that a socialist regime must have in the undisturbed progress of agricultural production, in view of the great social importance that the peasant population will then acquire, it is positively unthinkable that the method of forcible expropriation would be chosen in order to bring the advantages of more perfect methods of farming home to the peasantry.

Should there then still be branches of agriculture or regions in which small-scale enterprise is more advantageous than large-scale, there is not the slightest reason to bring them over to large-scale enterprise for the sake of a rigid pattern. They will be neither branches of farming nor regions of great importance for national production, for in the decisive branches of agriculture large-scale enterprise is already the superior today. But the shifting of the economic centre of gravity from the world market to the home market must then bring precisely these branches, above all grain production, more into the foreground again.

Isolated small-scale enterprises are as compatible with socialist society in agriculture as in handicraft; what holds for the latter holds for the former. Whether the land they cultivate is private or state land would be fairly immaterial. It is the thing that matters, not the name; the economic effects, not the juridical categories.

This account of ours is, it is true, only a hypothesis, not a prophecy. It does not say how things will come about, but how they could come about. But how things will really come about our opponents know as little as we do; like us, they can rely only on those factors that are already sufficiently known today; and if we prolong into the future the line along which these work, we arrive precisely at the course of development that we have sketched here.

The intentions and wishes that Social Democracy has expressed in official declarations and in the writings of its most eminent representatives are by no means in contradiction with the conclusions we have reached. Nowhere do we find there the demand for an expropriation of the peasantry.

Immediately before the March Revolution of 1848 the Central Committee of the Communist League, on which Marx and Engels sat, formulated the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany. The three points relating to agriculture run:

“7. The princely and other feudal estates, all mines, pits, etc., are to be converted into state property. On these estates agriculture is to be conducted on a large scale and with the most modern aids of science, for the benefit of the whole of society.

“8. The mortgages on the peasant holdings are declared state property; the interest on these mortgages is paid by the peasants to the state.

“9. In the regions where the leasing system is developed, the ground-rent or the farm rent is paid to the state as a tax.”

Not a word of touching the property rights of the peasants. Only the mortgages on the peasant holdings, not the holdings themselves, are to be nationalised.

When the wounds dealt by the defeats of 1848 had healed and the labour movement began to stir anew, the land question too came on to the agenda. It was dealt with at various congresses of the “International”. The best known and most important were the debates on it at the Basle Congress (1869), which resolved:

“1. The congress declares that society has the right to abolish private property in land and to convert it into common property.

“2. The congress declares that it is necessary in the interest of society to carry out this conversion.”

On the “how” of this conversion the congress did not express itself. It declared: “In recognising the principle of common property in land, the congress recommends all sections to study the practical means of carrying it out.”

Liebknecht gave lectures on these resolutions in Saxony in March 1870, the most comprehensive of which was then worked up into a pamphlet that appeared under the title Zur Grund- und Bodenfrage in 1873, and in a second edition in 1876. It says there, among other things:

“The question is not so simple (as in England) in France, or still less in Germany. The agricultural labourers are of course either already won for a rational transformation of the relations of landed property or very easily won for it. But the small peasants, although in fact proletarians or drifting irresistibly towards the proletariat, still cling for the most part very firmly to their ‘property’, even if in most cases it is only nominal, imaginary property. A decree of expropriation would undoubtedly provoke the majority of the small peasants to the most violent resistance, perhaps to open rebellion.”

The state must therefore, he says, avoid everything that could really or even only apparently harm the interest of the peasants. Hand in hand with enlightenment about the advantages of socialism there must go practical measures for the immediate relief of the heavily burdened peasant population. In the first place the mortgage debts should be nationalised and the rate of interest lowered, and this, as well as further loans, made conditional on the peasants’ obligation to farm rationally. With the support of the state the individual enterprises should then gradually be led over into co-operative large-scale enterprise (pp. 172–175).

Liebknecht describes the expropriation of the country people by a revolutionary government as obvious madness.

The rapid growth of industry and of the proletarian movement in the industrial centres pushed the land question into the background after the events of 1870. The agrarian crisis brought it back on to the agenda, not only of the bourgeois parties but also of the proletarian. In the discussions that arose from this Engels too spoke. What he had declared in 1848 he declared in 1894 too. He asked: “What, then, is our attitude to the small peasantry? And how shall we have to deal with it on the day when state power falls to us?” And he answered:

“In the first place, the statement of the French programme is absolutely correct: that we foresee the inevitable ruin of the small peasant, but are by no means called upon to hasten it by any interference on our part.

“And secondly, it is just as obvious that when we are in possession of state power we shall not think of expropriating the small peasants by force (whether with or without compensation is all the same), as we shall be compelled to do with the large landowners. Our task with regard to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in transforming his private production and private ownership into co-operative ones, not by force, but by example and by offering co-operative aid for this purpose. And here we have, to be sure, means enough to hold out to the small peasant advantages that must be plain to him even now.”

Even of the big peasants Engels says:

“Here too we shall probably refrain from forcible expropriation, and for the rest can count on economic development making these harder heads also accessible to reason.” (Die Bauernfrage in Frankreich und Deutschland, Neue Zeit, XIII, 1, pp. 301, 305.)

The utterances quoted here are in complete harmony with the considerations we have adduced. If the latter show that the expropriation of the peasantry is by no means in the interest of socialism, the former prove unambiguously that such an expropriation is not the intention of the socialists either.

The peasants have nothing to fear from Social Democracy; they have everything to hope from it. In present-day society, it is true, it can by no means fulfil all their wishes, not because it lacks good will, but because many of these wishes must remain pious wishes that no other party is able to fulfil either. In promises Social Democracy cannot compete with the agrarian parties; but what can be done for the rural population in present-day society, it does, and it alone can do it in full measure, because it can confront capital more ruthlessly than any of the bourgeois parties.

But the peasants have far more still to expect from the transition to socialist society than from social reform within the framework of present-day society. Expropriation is the capitalist method of accomplishing the transition from lower to higher forms of enterprise. In present-day society the peasant always remains faced with the dilemma either of resisting every advance tooth and nail, which means going to ruin in every direction, or of being swept away by expropriating capital. Only socialism offers him the possibility of taking part in social progress without falling victim to expropriation. Socialism not only does not bring him expropriation; it brings him the surest protection against it, which in present-day society always hangs over his head.

Even if we expect that for the great majority of branches of agriculture large-scale enterprise will prove superior, so that economic development, once the victorious proletariat has removed its obstacles, will lead to the displacement of small-scale enterprise by co-operative or communal large-scale enterprise, and thus to the putting together of the fields, this by no means requires giving up one’s own home. The connection of the home with the business of farming, still peculiar to agriculture today, will in that case cease; the house will be separated from the farmyard; but nothing presses for the peasant’s dwelling-house to be converted into common property. Modern socialism rests on common property in the means of production, not in the means of enjoyment. For these it does not exclude private property. But among the means of enjoying human life and taking pleasure in it, one of the most important, perhaps the most important, is one’s own home. Common property in land is by no means incompatible with this.

We should be venturing on to too uncertain ground if we wanted to discuss the housing of the future here. Whether the people of the future prefer to live in palatial phalansteries à la Fourier or in separate cottages à la Bellamy, whether one form is found here and the other there, whether both develop side by side and together, this much is certain: if they set store on every family owning its own house, the principles on which socialist society rests will not prevent it.

It is true, to be sure, that technical development is already tending today to reduce the work of the individual household and to extend the occupational work of women. If the former still proceeds very slowly, that is a consequence of the cheapness of female labour-power. The woman’s work in the household is not paid in money, and so apparently costs nothing, and the woman is the most willing and enduring beast of burden; therefore the proletarian can cling to the individual household, technically so backward. For the well-to-do classes, however, running a household of their own means the convenience of having slaves of their own, the maidservants, always ready for the exclusive service of their precious selves.

The more the proletariat grows in strength, the scarcer maidservants become, the higher their demands, the less comfortable the running of the households of the well-to-do. Those virtuous housewives who today most zealously defend the sanctity of one’s own hearth — so long as they know a maidservant to be employed at it — will call most energetically for measures that reduce the work of the private household or assign it to special trades, once they are compelled to do this work themselves: to cook, to wash, to bring up children and — most terrible of terrors — to clean boots.

Another current in the same direction must be called forth among the working women themselves by the victory, indeed by the mere growth in strength, of the proletariat. It is misery and want that today compel them to do even the most unproductive work at home in an inadequate way rather than have it done outside the home by well-equipped establishments. The rising prosperity of the working-class family will express itself not in the burdening of another domestic slave, but only in the unburdening of the housewife. The reduction of household work, which today proceeds much more slowly than technical progress allows, will then take on a rapid tempo. The economic foundation of the family will thereby disappear. But not the family itself. For in the meantime another, higher foundation has arisen for it: individuality.

Man is by nature a social being, a “herd animal”, and it takes a long time before he begins to feel and regard his personality as something separate from society. So long as man could survive in the struggle for existence only by the closest attachment to society, and so long as social development proceeded so slowly that tradition, that is, the sum of the handed-down views of the community, entirely dominated the intellectual life of the individual, there was no room for the development of the individual. Only when the growth of the productivity of labour and the division into classes created classes whose members were not entirely absorbed in the common struggle for existence — physical labour and war — who had the leisure to unfold a particular intellectual life, and who were enabled by their riches and their slaves to live independently of society, indeed in opposition to it, was the foundation laid, at least for the aristocracy, for the free unfolding of personality, particularly when great catastrophes suddenly set society on a new basis and so interrupted the working of tradition. That was the case, for example, in Greece as a result of the Persian Wars, in Italy after the Crusades, in western Europe in the age of the discoveries and the Reformation. Personality was born; beside impersonal folk art there appeared personal art, beside impersonal religion personal philosophy.

But it was the capitalist mode of production that first succeeded in stripping wider circles of the population of their herd nature, in transforming the individual, the “superman”, from an aristocratic into a more democratic phenomenon. It succeeded in this by dissolving all the inherited organisations that had previously held the masses of the people together in the struggle for existence; by declaring the economic revolution permanent, whereby tradition becomes entirely void as a guide in life and everyone is compelled to build up a view of life of his own on his own observations; and finally by the fact that the modern mode of production, not least thanks to the masses of surplus-product that it generates, gives the number of “brain-workers” in society an extension such as has never been before, while at the same time giving them a far more insecure and less satisfying position than they have ever had.

But individualism, the striving for the free living out of personality, must become far stronger and more general in socialist society than in capitalist, in the measure that intellectual culture, well-being and leisure become general.

The possibility of free activity of the individual in a very important sphere, that of economic life, will, it is true, be restricted in many ways by socialism; but on the other hand the possibility, very slight today, of exercising one’s personality outside economic life will be greatly extended by the reduction of the working time.

Through this, above all, the family, the home, must gain a new significance. Nowhere can personality live itself out so fully, without any hindrance from the hostile or at least constricting wills of others, as in a home of one’s own, which it can freely adorn and shape, constrained only by material and not by personal considerations, and in which it can live freely for its loved ones, its friends, its books, its thoughts and dreams, its scientific and artistic creations.

But with individualism there grows up individual sexual love too, which finds its satisfaction only in union and life together with a single, particular individual of the other sex. Marriage resting on this individual sexual love likewise needs a home of its own for its continuance.

The more the economic element disappears from marriage and the individualistic comes to the fore, the more the relation of the parents, particularly of the father, to the children changes too. Marriage as an economic institution has on the one hand the task of creating the necessary economic foundations for the household, in the dowry or the labour-power of the housewife and the earnings of the husband, and on the other the task of supplying heirs to the father’s fortune, sometimes to the father’s calling too. In individualistic marriage not only is the economic motive for entering into marriage displaced by that of the personal attraction of the spouses; the relation between parents and children too becomes individualistic. The children become dear to their parents not as heirs but as individuals; they are not drilled to be continuers of their caste, without regard to their capacities and inclinations, but are developed into free personalities.

The germs of this individualistic marriage and family are already very strong today; but they are still stunted by the fact that the individual household still continues alongside as the foundation of the family, and that want and misery here, wealth there, only too often give economic considerations the upper hand over personal ones. A socialist society, which knows nothing of these extremes and lets the individual household recede more and more, must for that very reason let the personal character of marriage and the family come fully to the fore. But it is this personal character that already today, in the general consciousness, furnishes the moral standard for judging family and marriage. Already today only that marriage counts as a moral one in the contracting of which the personalities of the spouses alone, and not their economic circumstances, were decisive; moral family ties are the personal, not the material, bonds that bind the members of the family to one another. The son who sees in his father only the future testator, the father who forces his son into a calling or a marriage so that he may enlarge or preserve the family estate, certainly do not act morally by modern views. The disappearance of the private household therefore does not mean the abolition of marriage and the family. One’s own home need by no means disappear with one’s own hearth. Modern culture knows other family ties than the kitchen range and the wash-house. The disappearance of the individual household means merely the transformation of the family from an economic into a purely ethical unity; it means the realisation of a moral demand that the development of individualism springing from the modern productive forces has already brought to maturity today.

Thus socialism will not stifle but make general the desire of every fully developed personality for a home of its own, while at the same time it is socialism that first creates the means of satisfying that desire generally.

The peasant need therefore have no fear for his house. The socialist regime will not pass it by without leaving traces, but the changes it brings, hygienic and aesthetic, will not turn out to the disadvantage of the peasant home.

Perhaps nowhere does the decline of the peasantry show itself so clearly as in its houses. We have referred to the dens in which the agricultural labourers live, but the dwellings of the peasants are often no better, wretched, dirty stables. And yet the peasant too has a sense of cleanliness and beauty; wherever he lives in prosperity, this comes to light. The peasant house of earlier times — that of the Swiss or of the Russian peasant, for example — is the delight of the architect; but today it is in urban villas that the art of the peasant lives on; the originals decay and find no more successors on the peasant farms. Yet it needs only prosperity and leisure to make the peasant an artist again. The victorious proletariat will bring them to him; it will not only free the wage-slaves of industry, it will also transform the open country, whose glorious natural beauties stand today in such sad contrast to the torpor, misery and filth of its inhabitants, into a flourishing garden, inhabited by a free, joyful and proud race.