Socialism As It Is Part 35

Two widely different policies are for these reasons adopted by all reformers when dealing with large agricultural estates and small self-employing farmers. On this point there is little room for difference of opinion. But small farmers are not a sharply defined cla.s.s. They are constantly recruited from agricultural laborers and tenants on the one hand, and are constantly becoming employing farmers on the other--or the process may take the opposite course, large farms may break up and small farmers may become laborers--for all or a part of their time. All agricultural reforms may be viewed not only in their relation to existing small farmers, but as to their effect on the increase or decrease of the relative proportions of small self-employing farmers, of employing farmers, and of agricultural laborers.

And here appears the fundamental distinction between the Socialist program and that of collectivist capitalism as far as the small farmers are concerned. Socialists agree in wanting to aid those small farmers who are neither capitalists nor employers on a sufficient scale to cla.s.sify them with those elements, but they neither wish to perpetuate the system of small farms nor to obstruct the development of the more productive large-scale farming and the normal increase of an agricultural working cla.s.s ready for cooperative or governmental employment. They point to the universal law that large-scale production is more economical, and show that this applies to agriculture. Small farming strictly limits the point to which the income of the agricultural population can rise, prevents the cheapening of the production of food, and furnishes a constant stream of cheap labor composed of discontented agricultural laborers who prefer the more steady income, limited hours, and better conditions of wage earners.

"Even the most energetic champions of small farming," says Kautsky, "do not make the least attempt to show its superiority, as this would be a hopeless task. What they maintain is only the superiority of labor on one's own property to wage labor for a strange exploiter.... But if the large farm offers the greater possibility of lessening the work of the agricultural laborers, then it would be a betrayal of the latter to set before them as a goal, not the capture and technical development of large forms, but their break up into numerous small farms. That would mean nothing less than a willingness to perpetuate the drudgery under which the agricultural laborers and small farmers now suffer."[229]

But how shall Socialists aid small farmers without increasing the number of small farms? It might be thought that the nationalization of the land would solve the problem. The government, once become the general landlord, could use the rent fund to improve the condition of all cla.s.ses of agriculturists, without unduly favoring any, agricultural evolution could take its natural course, and the most economical method of production, _i.e._ large farms or large cooperative a.s.sociations, would gradually come to predominate. But the capitalist collectivists who now control or will soon control governments, far from feeling any anxiety about the persistence of small-scale farming, believe that the small farmers can be made into the most reliable props of capitalism.

Accordingly collectivist reformers either promote schemes of division of large estates and favor the creation of large ma.s.ses of small owners by this and every other available means, such as irrigation or reclamation projects, or if they indorse nationalization of the land in order to get the unearned increment for their governments, they still make the leases on as small a scale and revaluations at as long intervals as possible, and so do almost as much artificially to perpetuate the small farm under this system as they could by furthering private ownership.

Although there is no necessary and immediate conflict of interest between wage earners and small farmers, it is evident that it is impossible for Socialists to offer the small farmers as much as the capitalist collectivists do,--for the latter are willing in this instance to promote, for political purposes, an uneconomic mode of production which is a burden on all society.

Here, however, appears an economic tendency that relieves the situation for the Socialist. Under private ownership or land nationalization with long leases and small-scale farms, it is only once in a generation or even less frequently that farms are subdivided. But the amount of capital and labor that can be profitably applied to a given area of land, the intensity of farming, increases very rapidly. The former self-employing farmer, everywhere encouraged by governments, soon comes to employ steadily one or more laborers. And it is notable that in every country of the world these middle-sized or moderate-sized farms are growing more rapidly than either the large-scale or the one-family farms. This has an economic and a political explanation. Though large farms have more economic advantages than small, the latter have nothing to expend for superintendence and get much more work from each person occupied. The middle-sized farms preserve these advantages and gradually come also to employ much of the most profitable machinery, that is out of reach of the small farmer. Politically their position is still stronger. They are neither rich nor few like the large landholders.

Their employees are one, two, or three on each farm, and isolated.

Here, then, is the outcome of the agricultural situation that chiefly concerns the Socialist. The middle-sized farmer is a small capitalist and employer who, like the rest of his kind, will in every profound labor crisis be found with the large capitalist. His employees will outnumber him as voters and will have little hope that the government will intervene some day to make them either proprietors or possessors of long-term leases. The capital, moreover, to run this kind of farm or to compete with it, will be greater and greater and more and more out of their agricultural laborer's reach. These employees will be Socialists.

We are now in a position to understand the divisions among the Socialists on the agricultural question. The Socialist policy as to agriculture may be divided into three periods. During the ascendency of capitalistic collectivism it will be powerless to do more than to support the collectivist reforms, including partial nationalization of the land, partial appropriation of unearned increment by national or local governments, munic.i.p.al and cooperative production, and the numerous reforms already mentioned. In the second period, the approach of Socialism will hasten all these changes automatically through the rapid rise in wages, and in the third period, when the Socialists are in power, special measures will be taken still further to hasten the process until all land is gradually nationalized and all agricultural production carried on by governmental bodies or cooperative societies of actual workers.

If the Socialists gain control of any government, or if they come near enough to doing this to be able to force concessions at the cost of capital, a double effect will be produced on agriculture. The general rise in wages will destroy the profits of many farmer employers, and it will offer to the smallest self-employing farmers the possibility of an income as wage earners so much larger, and conditions so much better, than anything they can hope for as independent producers that they will cease to prefer self-employment. The high cost of labor will favor both large scale production, either capitalistic or cooperative, and national, state, county, and munic.i.p.al farms. Without any but an automatic economic pressure, small-scale and middle-scale farming would tend rapidly to give place to these other higher forms, and these in turn would tend to become more and more highly organized as other industries have done, until social production became a possibility. Not only would there be no need of coercive legislative measures, but the automatic pressure would be, not that of misery or bankruptcy pressing the self-employing farmer from behind, but of a larger income and better conditions drawing the majority forward to more developed and social forms of production.

In France a considerable and increasing number of the Socialist members of Parliament are elected by the peasantry, and the same is true of Italy. In Herve the French have developed a world-famed ultra-revolutionary who always makes his appeal to peasants as well as workers, and in Compere-Morel, one of the most able of those economists and organizers of the international movement who give the agriculturists their chief attention. The latter has recently summed up the position of the French Party in a few incisive paragraphs--which show its similarity to that of the Americans. His main idea is to let economic evolution take its course, which, in proportion as labor is effectively organized, will inevitably lead towards collective ownership and operation and so pave the way for Socialism:--

"As to small property, it is not our mission either to hasten or to precipitate its disappearance. A product of labor, quite often being merely a tool of the one who is detaining it, not only do we respect it, we do something more yet, we relieve it from taxes, usury, scandalous charges on the part of the middlemen, whose victim it is. And this will be done in order to make possible its free evolution towards superior forms of exploitation and ownership, which become more and more inevitable.

"This means that there is no necessity at all to appeal to violence, to use constraint and power in order to inaugurate in the domain of rural production, the only mode of ownership fit to utilize the new technical agricultural tools: collective ownership.

"On the other hand, a new form of ownership cannot be imposed; it is the new form of ownership which is imposing itself.

"It is in vain that they use the most powerful, the most artificial, means to develop, to multiply, and animate the private ownership of the land; the social ownership of the land will impose itself, through the force of events, on the most stubborn, on the most obstinate, of the partisans of individual ownership of the rural domain."

The French Socialists do not propose to interfere with t.i.tles of any but very large properties, or even with inheritance. Whether they have to meet government ownership and 33-year leases now being tried on a small scale in New Zealand, or whether a capitalist collectivist government allows agricultural evolution and land t.i.tles to take their natural course, they expect to corner the labor supply, and in this way ultimately to urge agriculture along in the Socialist direction. From the moment they have done this, they expect a steady tendency on the part of agriculturists to look forward, as the workingmen have done, to the Socialist State:--

"The question arises, under a Socialist regime, will small property, the property cultivated by the owner and his family, be transmissible, allowed to be sold, or left as inheritance to the children, to the nephews, and even to very remote cousins? From the moment this property is not used as an instrument of exploitation--and in a Socialist society, _labor not being sold_, it could never become one--what do we care whether it changes hands every morning, whether it travels around through a whole family or country?"

For, since the Socialist State will furnish work for all that apply, at the best remuneration, and under the best conditions, especially as it will do this in its own agricultural enterprises, relatively few farmers will be able to pay enough to secure other workers than those of their own families.

In the United States the Party has definitely decided by a large majority, in a referendum vote, that it does not intend to try to disturb the self-employing farmer in any way in his occupation and use of the land. In a declaration adopted in 1909, when, by a referendum vote of nearly two to one, the demand for the immediate collective ownership of the land was dropped from the platform, the following paragraph was inserted:--

"There can be no absolute private t.i.tle to land. All private t.i.tles, whether called fee simple or otherwise, are and must be subordinate to the public t.i.tle. The Socialist Party strives to prevent land from being used for the purpose of exploitation and speculation. It demands the collective possession, control, or management of land to whatever extent may be necessary to attain that end. It is not opposed to the occupation and possession of land by those using it in a useful bona fide manner _without exploitation_." (My italics.)

Those American Socialists who have given most attention to the subject, like Mr. Simons, have long since made up their minds that there is no hope whatever either for the victory or even for the rapid development of Socialism in this country unless it takes some root among the agriculturists. Mr. Simons insists that the Socialists should array against the forces of conservatism, privilege, and exploitation, "all those whose labor a.s.sists in the production of wealth, for all these make up the army of exploited, and all are interested in the abolition of exploitation."

"In this struggle," he continues, "farmers and factory wage workers must make common cause. Any smaller combination, any division in the ranks of the workers, must render success impossible. In a country where fundamental changes of policy are secured at the ballot box, nothing can be accomplished without united action by all cla.s.ses of workers.... The better organization of the factory workers of the cities, due to their position in the midst of a higher developed capitalism and more concentrated industry, makes them in no way independent of their rural brothers. So long as they are not numerous enough to win, they are helpless. 'A miss is as good as a mile,' and coming close to a majority avails almost nothing."[230]

Looking at the question after this from the farmers' standpoint, Mr.

Simons argues that many of the latter are well aware that the ownership of a farm is nothing more than the ownership of a job, and that the capitalists who own the mortgages, railroads, elevators, meat-packing establishments, and factories which produce agricultural machinery and other needed supplies, control the lives and income of the agriculturists almost as rigidly as they do those of their own employees. Mr. Simons's views on this point also are probably those of a majority of the party.

Mr. Victor Berger does not consider that farmers belong to that cla.s.s by whom and for whom Socialism has come into being. "The average farmer is not a proletarian," he says, "yet he is a producer."[231] This would seem to imply that the farmer should have Socialist consideration, though perhaps not equal consideration with the workingman. Mr. Berger's main argument apparently was that the farmers must be included in the movement, not because this is demanded by principle but because "you will never get control of the United States unless you have the farming cla.s.s with you," as he said at a Socialist convention.

Thus there are three possible att.i.tudes of Socialists towards the self-employing farmer, and all three are represented in the movement.

Kautsky, Vandervelde, and many others believe that after all he is not a proletarian, and therefore should not or cannot be included in the movement. The French Socialists and many Americans believe that he is practically a proletarian and should and can be included. The "reformists" in countries where he is very numerous believe he should be included, even when (Berger) they do not consider him as a proletarian.

The Socialist movement, on the whole, now stands with Kautsky and Vandervelde, and this is undoubtedly the correct position until the Socialists are near to political supremacy. The French and American view, that the self-employing farmer is practically a wage earner, is spreading, and though this view is false and dangerous if prematurely applied (_i.e._ to-day) it will become correct in the future when collectivist capitalism has exhausted its reforms and the small farmer is becoming an employee of the highly productive government farms or a profit-sharer in cooperative a.s.sociations.

At the last American Socialist Convention (1910) Mr. Simons's resolution carefully avoided the "reformist" position of trying to prop up either private property or small-scale production, by the statement that, while "no Socialist Party proposes the immediate expropriation of the farm owner who is cultivating his own farm," that, on the other hand, "it is not for the Socialist Party to guarantee the private ownership of any productive property." He remarked in the Convention that the most prominent French Marxists, Guesde and Lafargue, had approved the action of the recent French Socialist Congress, which had "guaranteed the peasant ownership of his farm," but he would not accept this action as good Socialism. Mr. Berger offered the same criticism of the French Socialists, and added that the guarantee would not be worth anything in any case, because our grandchildren would not be ruled by it.

However, there is a minority ready to compromise everything in this question. Of all American States, Oklahoma has been the one where Socialists have given the closest attention to agricultural problems. The Socialists have obtained a considerable vote in every county of this agricultural State, and with 20,000 to 25,000 votes they include a considerable proportion of the electorate. It is true that their platform, though presented at the last national convention, has not been pa.s.sed upon, and may later be disapproved in several important clauses, but it is important as showing the farthest point the American movement has gone in this direction.

Its most important points are:--

The retention and _constant enlargement of the public domain_.

By retaining school and other public lands.

By purchasing of arid and overflow lands and the State reclamation of all such lands now held by the State or that may be acquired by the State.

By the purchase of all lands sold for the non-payment of taxes.

Separation of the department of agriculture from the political government.

Election of all members and officers of the Board of Agriculture by the direct vote of the actual farmers.

Erection by the State of grain elevators and warehouses for the storage of farm products; these elevators and warehouses to be managed by the Board of Agriculture.

Organization by the Board of Agriculture of free agricultural education and the establishment of model farms.

Encouragement by the Board of Agriculture of cooperative societies of farmers--

For the buying of seed and fertilizers.

_For the purchase and common use of implements and machinery._

For the preparing and sale of produce.

Organization by the State of loans on mortgages and warehouse certificates, the interests charges to cover cost only.

State insurance against disease of animals, diseases of plants, insect pests, hail, flood, storm, and fire.

Exemption from taxation and execution of dwellings, tools, farm animals, implements, and improvements to the amount of one thousand dollars.

_A graduated tax on the value of rented land and land held for speculation._

Absentee landlords to a.s.sess their own lands, the State reserving the right to purchase such lands at their a.s.sessed value plus 10 per cent.

Land now in the possession of the State or hereafter acquired through purchase, reclamation, or tax sales to be rented to _landless_ farmers under the supervision of the Board of Agriculture at the prevailing rate of share rent or its equivalent.