Socialism As It Is Part 34

[220] The _International Socialist Review_ (Chicago), October, 1911.

[221] H. G. Wells, "This Misery of Boots," p. 34.

[222] Karl Kautsky, "The Social Revolution," p. 51.

CHAPTER II

THE AGRICULTURAL CLa.s.sES AND THE LAND QUESTION

I have pointed out the relation of the Socialist movement to all cla.s.ses but one,--the agriculturists,--a cla.s.s numerically next in importance to the industrial wage earners.

On the one hand most agriculturists are small capitalists, who, even when they do not own their farms, are often forced to-day to invest a considerable sum in farm animals and machinery, in rent and interest and in wages at the harvest season; on the other hand, a large part of the farmers work harder and receive less for their work than skilled laborers, while the amount they own, especially when tenants, scarcely exceeds what it has cost many skilled workers to learn their trade. Are the great majority of farmers, then, rather small capitalists or laborers?

For many years Socialists paid comparatively little attention to the problem. How was it then imagined that a political program could obtain the support of the majority of the voters without presenting to the agricultural population as satisfactory a solution of their difficulties as that it offered to the people of the towns? On the other hand, how was it possible to adapt a program frankly "formulated by or for the workingmen of large-scale industry" to the conditions of agriculture?

The estimate of the rural population that has. .h.i.therto prevailed among the Socialists of most countries may be seen from the following language of Kautsky's:--

"We have already seen how the peasant's production [that of the small farmer] isolates men. The capitalists' means of production and the modern State, to be sure, have a powerful tendency to put an end to the isolation of the peasant through taxation, military service, railways, and newspapers. But the increase of the points of contact between town and country as a rule only have the effect that the peasant farmer feels his desolation and isolation less keenly. They raise him up as a peasant farmer, but awake in him a longing for the town; they drive all the most energetic and independently thinking elements from the country into the towns, and rob the former of its forces. So that the progress of modern economic life has the effect of increasing the desolation and lonesomeness of the country rather than ending it.

"The truth is that in every country the agricultural population is economically and politically the most backward. That does not imply any reflection on it; it is its misfortune, but it is a fact with which one must deal."[223]

Not only Kautsky and Vandervelde, but whole Socialist parties like those of Austria and Germany, are given to the exploitation of the supposed opposition between town and country, the producer and the consumer of agricultural products. At the German Socialist Congress of 1911, Bebel declared that to-day those who were most in need of protection were the consumers of agricultural products, the workingmen, lower middle cla.s.ses and employees. He felt the day was approaching when the increased cost of living would form the chief question before the German people, the day when the German people would raise a storm and tear down the tariffs on the necessaries of life as well as other measures that unduly favor the agriculturists--while the proposal of socialization would come up first in the field of agriculture.

While, in view of the actual level of prices in Germany, there is no doubt that even the smallest of the agriculturists are getting some share of the spoils of the tariffs and other measures Bebel mentions, there can also be little question that in such a storm of revolt as he predicts the pendulum would swing too far the other way, and they would suffer unjustly. It is true that the agriculturist produces bread, while the city worker consumes it, but so also do shoe workers produce shoes that are consumed by garment workers, and certainly no Socialist predicts any lasting struggle between producers of shoes and producers of clothing. It is true also that if the wage earner's condition is to be improved, some limit must be set to prices as wages are raised. But the flour manufacturer and the baker must be restrained as well as the grain producer. Nor do Socialists expect to accomplish much by the mere regulation of prices. And when it comes to their remedy, socialization, there is less reason, as I shall show, for beginning with land rent than with industrial capital, and the Socialist parties of France and America recognize this fact.

But it is the practical result of this supposed opposition of town and country rather than its inconsistency with Socialist principles that must hold our attention. Certainly no agricultural program and no appeal to the agricultural population, perhaps not even one addressed to agricultural laborers, can hope for success while this view of the opposition of town and country is maintained; for all agriculturists want what they consider to be reasonable prices for their products, and their whole life depends directly or indirectly on these prices. When the workmen agitate, as they so often do in Europe, for cheap bread and meat, without qualifying their agitation by any regard for the agriculturists, all hope of obtaining the support of _any_ of the agricultural cla.s.ses, even laborers, is for the time being abandoned.

The predominance of town over country is so important to Kautsky that he even opposes such a vital piece of democratic reform as direct legislation where the town-country population is the more numerous than that of the towns. "We have seen" he says, "that the modern representative system is not very favorable to the peasantry or to the small capitalists, especially of the country towns. The cla.s.ses which the representative system most favors are the large owners of capital or land, the highly educated, and under a democratic electoral system, the militant and cla.s.s-conscious part of the industrial working cla.s.s. So in general one can say parliamentarism favors the population of the large towns as against that of the country."

Far from being disturbed at this unjust and unequal system, Kautsky prefers that it should _not_ be reformed, unless the town population are in a majority. "Direct legislation by the people works against these tendencies of parliamentarism. If the latter strives to place the political balance of power in the population of the large towns, the former puts it in the ma.s.ses of the population, but these still live everywhere and for the most part in a large majority, with the exception of England, in the country and in the small country towns. Direct legislation takes away from the population of the large towns their special political influence, and subjects them to the country population."[224]

He concludes that wherever and as long as the agricultural population remains in a majority, the Socialists have no special reason to work for direct legislation.

Of course Kautsky and his school do not expect this separation or antagonism of agriculture and industry to last very far into the future.

But as long as capitalism lasts they believe agriculturists will play an entirely subordinate role in politics. "While the capitalist mode of production increases visibly the difficulties of the formation of a revolutionary cla.s.s (in the country), it favors it in the towns," he says. "It there concentrates the laboring ma.s.ses, creates conditions favorable to every organization for their mental evolution and for their cla.s.s struggle.... It debilitates the country, disperses the agricultural workers over vast areas, isolates them, robs them of all means of mental development and resistance to exploitation."[225]

Similarly Vandervelde quotes from Voltaire's essay on customs a sentence describing the European peasantry of a hundred and fifty years ago as "savages living in cabins with their females and a few animals," and asks, "who would dare to pretend that these words have lost all their reality?" He admits that "rural barbarism has decreased," but still considers the peasantry, not as a cla.s.s which must take an active part in bringing about Socialism, but as one to which "conquering Socialism will bring political liberty and social equality."[226]

Kautsky says that either the small farmer is not really independent, and pieces out his income by hiring himself out occasionally to some larger landowner or other employer, or else, if entirely occupied with his own work, that he manages to compete with large-scale cultivation only "by overwork and underconsumption, by barbarism, as Marx says."

"To-day the situation of the city proletariat," Kautsky adds, "is already so superior to the barbaric situation of the older peasants, that the younger peasants' generation is leaving the fields along with the cla.s.s of rural wage earners." There can be no question that small farms, those without permanent hired labor, survive compet.i.tion with the larger and better equipped, only by overwork and underconsumption. But the unfavorable comparison with city wage earners and the repet.i.tion to-day of Marx's term "barbarism" is no longer justified. Where these conditions still exist, they are due largely to special legal obstacles placed in the way of European peasants, and to legal privileges given to the great landlords,--in other words, to remnants of feudalism.

Kautsky's error in making this as a statement of general application would seem to be based on a confusion of the survivals of feudalism, as seen in some parts of Europe, with the necessary conditions of agricultural production, as seen in this country.

Kautsky himself has lately given full recognition to another factor in the agricultural situation--the horrors of wage slavery, which acts in the very opposite manner to these feudal conditions and _prevents_ both small agriculturists and agricultural laborers from immigrating to the towns in greater numbers than they do, and persuades them in spite of its drudgery to prefer the life of the owner of a small farm.

"Since labor in large-scale industry takes to-day the repulsive form of wage labor," he says, "many owners of small properties keep holding on to them with the greatest sacrifices, for the sole purpose of avoiding falling into the serfdom and insecurity of wage labor. Only Socialism can put an end to small production, not of course by the forceful ejection of small owners, but by giving them an opportunity to work for the perfected large establishments with a shortened working day and a larger income."[227] Surely there is little ground to lay special stress on the "barbarism" of small farms, if such a large proportion of farmers and agricultural laborers prefer it on good grounds to "the serfdom and insecurity" of labor on large farms or in manufacturing establishments.

It is doubtless chiefly because European conditions are such as to make the conversion of the majority of agriculturists difficult, that so many European Socialists claim that an existing or prospective preponderance of manufacturers makes it unnecessary. But, while in many countries of Europe the remnants of feudalism, or rather of eighteenth-century absolutism and landlord rule, to which this backward political condition is largely due, have not only survived, but have been modernized, through the protection extended to large estates, so as to become a part and parcel of modern capitalism, this condition does not promise to be at all lasting. There are already signs of change in the agricultural sections of Bohemia, Hungary, and Italy, while in France, where the political influence of the large landlord cla.s.s is rapidly on the decline, the Socialists have appealed successfully, under certain conditions, not only to agricultural laborers, but also to small independent farmers.

As Socialists come to take a world view, giving due prominence to countries like France and the United States, where agriculture has had its freest development, they grow away from the older standpoint and give more attention to the rural population. The rapid technical evolution of agriculture and the equally rapid changes in the ownership of land in a country like the United States have encouraged our Socialists to reexamine the whole question. I cannot enter into a discussion, even the most cursory, of agricultural evolution in this country, but a few indications from the census of 1910 will show the general tendencies.

Farm owners and tenants probably now have $45,000,000,000 in property (1910), fully a third of the national wealth, and with 6,340,000 farms they are just about a third of our population. This calculation does not allow for interest (where farmers have borrowed) or rent (where they are tenants); on the other hand, it does not allow for the fact that many farmers have bank accounts and outside investments. But it indicates the prosperity of a large part of the farming cla.s.s.

The value of the land of the average farm has doubled since 1900 ($2271 in 1900--$4477 in 1910) in spite of a decrease in the size of farms, while the amount spent for labor increased 80 per cent, which the statistics show was due in part to higher wages, but in larger part _to the greater amount of labor and the greater number of laborers used_.

Other expenditures increased almost proportionately, and the capital employed in land, buildings, machinery, fertilizers, and labor has almost doubled in this short period. As prices advanced less than 25 per cent during the decade, all these increases were largely _real_. The gross income of the average farm owner, measured in what it could buy, evidently rose by more than 50 per cent, and his _real_ net income nearly as fast. The average farm owner then was receiving a fair share of the increase of the national wealth.

But farmers cannot profitably be considered as a single cla.s.s. Tenants are rarely at the same time landlords. Farmers paying interest are usually not the same as those holding mortgages. A few of the debtors may be very successful men who borrow only to buy more land and hire more labor. But very few tenants are in this cla.s.s. We may safely a.s.sume that those who own without a mortgage or employ labor steadily with one are getting _more_ than an average share of the national wealth, while tenants or those who have mortgaged their land heavily and do not regularly hire labor (except at harvest) are, in the average case, getting less. Investments of borrowed money in the best machinery or farm animals by a single family working alone and on a very small scale, may give a good return above interest, but this return is strictly limited unless with most exceptional or most fortunate persons.

Now the statistics of the increase of agricultural _wages_ show that they rose in no such proportion as the increase of agricultural capital--and the possibility of a farm hand saving his wages and becoming the owner of one of these more and more costly farms is more remote than ever. But there is a third solution--the agricultural laborer may neither remain a laborer nor become an owner. If he can acc.u.mulate enough capital for machinery, horses, farm animals, and seed, he can pay for the use of the land from his annual product, he can become a tenant. On the other side, if the value of the usual 160-acre homestead rises to $20,000 or $30,000, the owner is easily able to make a few thousand dollars in addition by selling his farm animals and machinery and to retire to the country town and live on his rent.

It is evident that the position of most of these farm tenants is very close to that of laborers. Though working on their own account, it is so difficult for them to make a living that they are forced to the longest hours and to the exploitation of their wives and children under all possible and impossible circ.u.mstances. Already farm tenants are almost as numerous in this country as farm owners. The census figures indicated that the proportion of tenants had risen from 23 per cent in 1880 to 37 per cent in 1910. Not only this, but a closer inspection of the figures by States will show that, whereas in new States like Minnesota, where tenancy has not had time to develop, it embraced in 1900 less than 20 per cent of the total number of farms, in many older States the percentage had already risen high above 40. This increase of tenants proves an approach of the United States to the fundamental economic condition of older countries--the divorce of land cultivation from land ownership, and the census of 1910 shows that three eighths of the farms of the United States are already in that condition.

Land and hired labor are the chief sources of agricultural wealth, and capital is most productive only when it is invested in these as well as other means of production. That is, if the small farmer is really a small capitalist, if he is to receive a return from his capital as well as his own individual and that of his family labor, he must, as a rule, either have enough capital to provide work for others and his family, or he must get a share of the unearned increment through the ownership of his farm, or long leases without revaluation. Farm tenants who do not habitually employ labor, or those whose mortgages are so heavy as practically to place them in the position of such tenants, are, for these reasons, undoubtedly accessible to Socialist ideas--_as long as they remain farm tenants_.

But now after discarding all the European prejudices above referred to, let us look at the other side. Tenants everywhere belong to those cla.s.ses which, as Kautsky truly says, in the pa.s.sage quoted in a previous chapter, are also a recruiting ground for the capitalists. They are more likely to be the owners of the capital, now a considerable sum, needed to _operate_ a small farm (cattle, machinery, etc.) than are farm laborers, and it is for their benefit chiefly that the various governmental plans for creating new small farms through irrigation, reclamation, and the division of large estates are contrived. And it is even possible that practically all the present tenants may some day be provided for.

By maintaining or creating small farms then, or providing for a system of long leases and small-sized allotments of governmentally owned land, guaranteed against any raise in rents during the term of the lease, capitalist governments may gradually succeed in firmly attaching the larger part of the struggling small farmers and farm tenants to capitalism. While still in the individualistic form capitalism will establish, wherever it can, privately owned small farms; when it will have adopted the collectivist policy, it will inaugurate a system of national ownership and long leases.

Even the small farmer who hires no labor, and does not even own his farm, will probably be held, as a cla.s.s, by capitalism, but only by the collectivist capitalism of the future, which will probably protect him from landlordism by keeping the t.i.tle to the land, but dividing the unearned increment with him by a system of long leases, and using its share of this increment for the promotion of agriculture and for other purposes he approves.

Socialists, then, do not expect to include in their ranks in considerable numbers, either agricultural employers or such tenants, laborers, or farm owners as are becoming, or believe they will become, employers (either under present governments or under collectivist capitalism).

Only when the day finally comes when Socialism begins to exert a pressure on the government adversely to the interest of the capitalist cla.s.s will higher wages and new governmental expenditures on wage earners begin to reverse conditions automatically, making labor dearer, small farms which employ labor less profitable, and a lease of government land less desirable, for example, than the position of a skilled employee on a model government farm. All governments will then be forced by the farming population itself to lend more and more support to the Socialist policy of great national munic.i.p.al or county farms, rather than to the artificial promotion or small-scale agriculture.

For the present and the near future the only lasting support Socialists can find in the country is from _the surplus_ of agricultural laborers and perhaps _a certain part_ of the tenants, _i.e._ those who cannot be provided for even if all large estates are everywhere divided into small farms, all practicable works of reclamation and irrigation completed, and scientific methods introduced--and who will find no satisfactory opportunity in neighboring countries. It must be acknowledged that such tenants at present form no very large part of the agricultural population in the United States. On the other hand, agriculturists are even less backward here than in Europe, and there is less opposition between town and country, and both these facts favor rural Socialism.

If, however, the majority of farmers must remain inaccessible to Socialism until the great change is at hand, this is not because they are getting an undue share of the national wealth or because they are private property fanatics, or because agriculturists are economically and politically backward, or because they are hostile to labor, though all this is true of many, but because of all cla.s.ses, they are the most easily capable of being converted into (or perpetuated as) small capitalists by the reforms of the capitalist statesman in search of reliable and numerically important political support.

I have shown the att.i.tude of the Socialists towards each of the agricultural cla.s.ses--their belief that they will be able to attach to themselves the agricultural laborers and those tenants and independent farmers who are neither landlords nor steady employers, nor expect to become such. But what now is the att.i.tude of laborers, tenants, etc., towards Socialism, and what program do the Socialists offer to attract them? Let us first consider a few general reforms on which all Socialists would agree and which would be acceptable to all cla.s.ses of agriculturists. Socialists differ upon certain _fundamental_ alterations in their program which have been proposed in order to adapt it to agriculture. Aside from these, all Socialist parties wish to do everything that is possible to attract agriculturists. They favor such measures as the nationalization of forests, irrigation, state fire insurance, the nationalization of transportation, the extension of free education and especially of free agricultural education, the organization of free medical a.s.sistance, graduated income and inheritance taxes, and the decrease of military expenditures, etc. It will be seen that all these reforms are such as might be, and often are, adopted by parties which have nothing to do with Socialism. Community ownership of forests and national subsidies for roads are urged by so conservative a body as Mr. Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life. They are all typical "State Socialist" (_i.e._ State capitalist) measures, justifiable and indispensable, but not intimately related with the program of _Socialism_. The indors.e.m.e.nt of such measures might indeed a.s.sure the Socialists the friendly cooperation of political factions representing the agriculturists, but it could scarcely secure for them the same partisan support in the country as they have obtained from the workingmen of the towns.

Besides such legislative reforms as the above, the Socialists generally favor legislative encouragement for every form of agricultural cooperation. Kautsky says that cooperative a.s.sociations limited to purchase or sale, or for financing purposes, have no special connection with Socialism, but favors _productive_ cooperation, and in France this is one of the chief measures advocated by the most ardent of the Socialist agriculturist agitators, Compere-Morel, who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from an agricultural district. Compere-Morel notes that the above-mentioned governmental measures of the State Socialistic variety are likely to be introduced by reformers who have no sympathy either with Socialism or with labor unions, and _as a counterweight_ he lays a great emphasis on cooperative organizations for production, which could work with the labor unions and their cooperative stores and also with Socialist munic.i.p.alities. In France and elsewhere there is already a strong movement to munic.i.p.alize the milk supply, the munic.i.p.alization of slaughterhouses is far advanced, and munic.i.p.al bakeries are a probability of the near future. Such cooperative organizations, however, like the legislative proposals above mentioned, are already so widely in actual operation and are so generally supported by powerful non-Socialist organizations that Socialist support can be of comparatively little value.

There is no reason why a collectivist but capitalist democracy should not favor both a.s.sociations for productive cooperation and friendly relations between these and collectivist munic.i.p.alities; nor why they should fail to favor an enlightened labor policy in such cases, at least as far as the resulting increase of efficiency in the laborer justified it, _i.e._ as long as his product rises, as a result of such reforms, faster than what it costs to introduce them.

Socialists also favor the nationalization of the land, but without the expropriation of self-employing farmers, as these are felt to be more sinned against than sinning. "With the present conservative nature of our farmers, it is highly probable that a number of them would [under Socialism] continue to work in the present manner," Kautsky says. "The proletarian governmental power would have absolutely no inclination to take over such little businesses. As yet no Socialist who is to be taken seriously has ever demanded that the farmers should be expropriated, or that their goods should be confiscated. It is much more probable that each little farmer would be permitted to work on as he has previously done. The farmer has nothing to fear from a Socialist regime. Indeed, it is highly probable," he adds, "that these agricultural industries would receive considerable strengthening through the new regime."

Socialists generally agree with Mr. A. M. Simons's resolution at the last American Socialist Convention (1910): "So long as tools are used merely by individual handicraftsmen, they present no problem of ownership which the Socialist is compelled to solve. The same is true of land. Collective ownership is urged by the Socialist, not as an end in itself, not as a part of a Utopian scheme, but as the means of preventing exploitation, and wherever individual ownership is an agency of exploitation, then such ownership is opposed by Socialism."[228]

Exploitation here refers to the employment of laborers, and this is the central point of the Socialist policy. To the Socialists the land question and the labor question are one. Every agricultural policy must deal with both. If we were confronted to-day exclusively by large agricultural estates, the Socialist policy would be the same as in other industries. All agricultural capital would be nationalized or munic.i.p.alized as fast as it became sufficiently highly organized to make this practicable. And as the ground rent can be taken separately, and with the least difficulty, this would be the first to go. Agricultural labor, in the meanwhile, would be organized and as the day approached when the Socialists were about to gain control of the government, and the wages of government employees began rapidly to rise, those of agricultural and all other privately employed labor would rise also, until private profits were destroyed and the process of socialization brought rapidly to completion.

But where the scale of production is so small that the farmer and his family do the work and do not habitually hire outside labor, the whole case is different. The chief exploitation here is self-exploitation. The capital owned is so small that it may be compared in value with the skilled worker's trade education, especially when we consider the small return it brings in, allowing for wages for the farmer and his family.

Even though, as owner, he receives that part of the rise in the value of his land due to the general increase of population and wealth and not to his own labor (the unearned increment), his income is less than that of many skilled laborers.