V. I.

Lenin

Book Review: Karl Kautsky. Die Agrarfrage

Karl Kautsky .
Die Agrarfrage .

Eine Uebersicht über die Tendenzen der modernen Landwirtschalt und die Agrarpolitik u.s.w. [1] Stuttgart, Dietz, 1899 .

Kautsky’s book is the most important event in present-day economic
literature since the third volume of Capital. Until now Marxism
has lacked a systematic study of capitalism in agriculture. Kautsky has
filled this gap with “The Development of Agriculture in Capitalist
Society,” the first part (pp. 1-300) of his voluminous (450-page) book. He
justly remarks in his preface that an “overwhelming” mass of
statistical and descriptive economic material on the question of
agricultural capitalism has been accumulated and that there is an urgent
need to reveal the “basic tendencies   of economic evolution in this
branch of the economy in order to demonstrate the varied phenomena of
agricultural capitalism as “partial manifestations of one common
[integral] process” (eines Gesammtprozesses). It is true
that agricultural forms and the relations among the agricultural
population in contemporary society are marked by such tremendous variety
that there is nothing easier than to seize upon a whole mass of facts and
pointers taken from any inquiry that will “confirm” the views
of the given writer. This is precisely the method used in a large number
of arguments by our Narodnik press which tries to prove the viability of
petty peasant economy or even its superiority over large-scale production in agriculture. A distinguishing feature of all these arguments is that
they isolate individual phenomena, cite individual cases, and do not even
make an attempt to connect them with the general picture of the whole
agrarian structure of capitalist countries in general and with the basic
tendencies of the entire present-day evolution of capitalist
farming. Kautsky does not make this usual mistake. He has been studying
the problem of capitalism in agriculture for over twenty years and is in
possession of very extensive material; in particular, Kautsky bases his
inquiry on the data of the latest agricultural censuses and questionnaires
in England, America, France (1892), and Germany (1895). He never loses his
way amidst piles of facts and never loses sight of the connection between
the tiniest phenomenon and the general structure of capitalist farming and
the general evolution of capitalism.

Kautsky does not confine himself to anyone particular question, e.g., the
relations between large-scale and small-scale production in agriculture,
but deals with the general question of whether or not capital is bringing
agriculture under its domination, whether it is changing forms of
production and forms of ownership in agriculture and how this process is
taking place. Kautsky gives every recognition to the important role played
by pre-capitalist and non-capitalist forms of agriculture in modern
society and to the necessity of examining the relationship of these forms
to the purely capitalist forms; he begins his investigation with an
extremely brilliant and precise characterisation of the patriarchal
peasant economy and of agriculture in the feudal epoch. Having thus
established the starting-points for the development of capitalism in
agriculture, he proceeds to characterise “modern agriculture.” The
description is given first of all from the technical standpoint (the crop
rotation system, division of labour, machinery, fertilisers,
bacteriology), and the reader is given a splendid picture of the great
revolution capitalism has wrought in the course of a few decades by making
agriculture a science instead of a routine craft. Further comes
the investigation of “the capitalist character of modern
agriculture"—a brief and popularly written, but extremely precise
and talented, exposition of Marx’s theory of profit and rent. Kautsky
shows that the tenant farmer system and the mortgage system are merely two sides of one and the same process,
noted by Marx, of separating the agricultural producers from the
landowners. The relations between large- scale and small-scale production
are then examined and it is shown that the technical superiority of the
former over the latter is beyond doubt. Kautsky effectively demonstrates
this thesis and explains in detail how the stability of petty production
in agriculture does not depend in any way on its technical rationality but
on the fact that the small peasants work far harder than hired labourers
and reduce their vital necessities to a level lower than that of the
latter. The supporting data which Kautsky cites are in the highest degree
interesting and clear-cut. An analysis of the question of associations in
agriculture leads Kautsky to the conclusion that associations are
undoubtedly indicative of progress but that they are a transition to
capitalism and not to communal production; associations do not decrease
but increase the superiority of large-scale over small-scale agricultural
production. It is absurd to think that the peasant in modern society can
go over to communal production. Reference is usually made to statistical
data which do not show that the small producer is ousted by the big
producer, but which merely serve to show that the development of
capitalism in agriculture is much more complicated than in industry. In
industry, too, such manifestations as the spread of capitalist work in the
home, etc., are not infrequently interconnected with the basic tendency
development. But in agriculture the ousting of the small producer is
hampered, primarily, by the limited size of the land area; the buying-up
of small holdings to form a big holding is a very difficult matter; with
intensified farming an increase in the quantity of products obtained is
sometimes compatible with a reduction in the area of the land (for which
reason statistics operating exclusively with data on the size of the farm
have little evidential significance). The concentration of production
takes place through the buying-up of many holdings by one proprietor; the
latifundia thus formed serve as a basis for one of the higher forms of
large-scale capitalist farming. Lastly, it would not even be advantageous
for the big land owners to force out the small proprietors completely: the
latter provide them with hand! For this reason the landowners and capitalists frequently pass laws that artificially maintain the small
peasantry. Petty farming becomes stable when it ceases to compete with
large-scale farming, when it is turned into a supplier of labour-power for
the latter. The relations between large and small landowners come still
closer to those of capitalists and proletarians. Kautsky devotes a special
chapter to the “proletarisation of the peasantry,” one that is rich
in data, especially on the question of the “auxiliary employments” of the peasants, i.e., the various forms of hired
labour.

After elucidating the basic features of the development of capitalism in
agriculture, Kautsky proceeds to demonstrate the historically transitory
character of this system of social economy. The more capitalism develops,
the greater the difficulties that commercial (commodity) farming
encounters. The monopoly in land ownership (ground rent), the right of
inheritance, and entailed estates [4] hamper the rationalisation of farming. The towns exploit the countryside
to an ever greater extent, taking the best labour forces away from the
farmers and absorbing an ever greater portion of the wealth produced by
the rural population, whereby the rural population is no longer able to
return to the soil that which is taken from it. Kautsky deals in
particularly great detail with the depopulating of the countryside and
acknowledges to the full that it is the middle stratum of farmers which
suffers least of all from a shortage of labour-power, and he adds that
“good citizens” (we may also add: and the Russian Narodniks)
are mistaken in rejoicing at this fact, in thinking that they can see in
it the beginnings of a rebirth of the peasantry which refutes the
applicability of Marx’s theory to agriculture. The peasantry may suffer
less than other agricultural classes from a shortage of hired labour, but
it suffers much more from usury, tax oppression, the irrationality of its
economy, soil exhaustion, excessive toil, and under consumption. The fact
that not only agricultural labourers, but even the children of the
peasants, flee to the towns is a clear refutation of the views of
optimistically-minded petty- bourgeois economists! But the biggest changes
in the condition of European agriculture have been brought about by the
competition of cheap grain imported from America, the Argentine, India,
Russia, and other countries. Kautsky made a detailed study of the significance of this fact that arose out of the
development of industry in quest for markets. He describes the decline in
European grain production under the impact of this competition, as well as
the lowering of rent, and makes a particularly detailed study of the
“industrialisation of agriculture” which is manifested, on the
one hand, in the industrial wage-labour of the small peasants and,on the
other, in the development of agricultural technical production
(distilling, sugar refining, etc.), and even in the elimination of some
branches of agriculture by manufacturing industries. Optimistic
economists, says Kautsky, are mistaken in believing that such changes in
European agriculture can save it from crisis; the crisis is spreading and
can only end in a general crisis of capitalism as a whole. This, of
course, does not give one the least right to speak of the ruin of
agriculture, but its conservative character is gone for ever; it has
entered a state of uninterrupted transformation, a state that is typical
of the capitalist mode of production in general. “A large area of
land under large-scale agricultural production, the capitalist nature of
which is becoming more and more pronounced; the growth of leasing and
mortgaging, the industrialisation of agriculture—these are the
elements that are preparing the ground for the socialisation of
agricultural production....” It would be absurd to think, says Kautsky in
conclusion, that one part of society develops in one direction and another
in the opposite direction. In actual fact “social development in
agriculture is taking the same direction as in industry.”

Applying the results of his theoretical analysis to questions of agrarian
policy, Kautsky naturally opposes all attempts to support or
“save” peasant economy. There is no reason even to think that
the village commune, says Kautsky, could go over to large-scale communal
farming (p. 338, section, “ Der Dorfkommunismus ” [2]

;

cf. p. 339). “The protection of the peasantry (der Bauernschutz ) does not mean protection of the person of the
peasant (no one, of course, would object to such protection), but
protection of the peasant’s property. Incidentally, it is
precisely the peasant’s property that is the main cause of his
impoverishment and his degradation. Hired agricultural labourers are now quite frequently in
a better position than the small peasants. The protection of the peasantry
is not protection from poverty but the protection of the fetters that
chain the peasant to his poverty” (p. 320). The radical
transformation of agriculture by capitalism is a process that is only just
beginning, but it is one that is advancing rapidly, bringing about the
transformation of the peasant into a hired labourer and increasing the
flight of the population from the countryside. Attempts to check this
process would be reactionary and harmful: no matter how burdensome the
consequences of this process may be in present-day society, the
consequences of checking the process would be still worse and would place
the working population in a still more helpless and hopeless
position. Progressive action in present-day society can only strive to
lessen the harmful effects which capitalist advance exerts on the
population, to increase the consciousness of the people and their capacity
for collective self-defence. Kautsky, therefore, insists on the guarantee
of freedom of movement, etc., on the abolition of all the remnants of
feudalism in agriculture (e.g., die Gesindeordnungen , [3] which place farm workers in a personally dependent, semi- serf position),
on the prohibition of child labour under the age of fourteen, the
establishment of an eight-hour working day, strict sanitary police to
exercise supervision over workers’ dwellings, etc., etc.

It is to be hoped that Kautsky’s book will appear in a Russian translation. [5]

---
Notes:
[1]
Karl Kautsky. The Agrarian Question. A Review of the Tendencies in Modern Agriculture and Agrarian Policy, etc.—
Ed .

[2]
Village communism.— Ed .

[3]
Legislation defining relations between landowners and serfs.– Ed .
— Lenin

[4]
Entailed estates —a system of Inheritance that has been
preserved in some capitalist countries from feudal times. Under this
system estates are inherited undivided by the eldest in the family or by
the eldest son of the holder.

[5]
A translation of one of the chapters of Karl Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question was published in Nauchnoye Obozrentye , No. 8, for
1899, under the title “Modern Agriculture.”